History. Bear with me people. This question concerns the different rates of ‘progress’ between?

Europe and the rest of the world. What was it that influenced or sparked Europeans to build vast ships to sail around the world to find new worlds. The culture and technology of Europeans hundreds and hundreds … of years ago was vastly different from the rest of the world. Why were Europeans so different ? I haven’t explained myself to well but I hope you folks get the gist. I would like a definitive answer. I have asked this question dozens of times and no one has been able to help me, nor any books. I know Europeans were looking for new food and timber sources etc. But what made them so different from everyone else ?

Ditto the previous answer. “Guns Germs and Steel” offers multiple explanations based on geography and its influence on culture.

Other scholarly explanations can be found in the following books that discuss the influence of cultural differences on history (which Jared Diamond would attribute to geography).

“Carnage and Courage” discusses and tries to explain why Western cultures have almost universally exhibited military superiority over non-western cultures going back to the ancient Greeks. It also explains why wars between Western powers (e.g. World Wars I and II) tend to be so thoroughly destructive.

“What Went Wrong” discusses and proposes a theory to explain why Islamic civilization went from its dominant position in science in learning during the middle ages to falling far behind western culture and Islam’s current internal conflict with modernity.

Sorry – I do not have the authors of the above two books, but they should be easy to find.

Interesting thought; the religious fundamentalism that is sweeping the US with its simplistic positions on topics such as stem cell research, global warming, evolution, cosmology, and science in general sounds an awful lot like the superstition that swept Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire, and the fundamentalism that spelled the end of Islam’s cultural dominance.

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