The last two hundred years has shown much sustained growth in the West¹ to an extent unprecedented in the past. While substantial growth has occurred at various historical points, our current cycle of economic and more importantly² technological growth has shown signs of being inherently self-sustaining ³ in ways unsurpassed throughout history⁴. This brings us a few important questions, all of which can be summed up as a general “why?”

A look at the legal revolution and associated structural and philosophical changes which occurred around the 12th century suggests that the new framework to emerge in the West at this point⁵ created the transitory structure required to shift dominance to the West. In this period we see a complete re-establishment of the political and legal institutions — a transfer of power — and a completely new philosophical view of the world, all these changes leading and supporting a scientific revolution.

To properly analyze this, two perspectives are taken: a comparative approach assessing the Western countries and the Asian and Arabic-Islamic Eastern Countries⁶, in an effort to answer the question “Why not elsewhere?,” and to help understand how such changes significant to technological growth and sustainable economic cycles; and the second approach, a strict, legal-analysis perspective⁷ where, the actual changes are analyzed for their direct affects and the supporting structures they form to sustain technological advancement from an economic perspective.

This is a formal paper which has been refactored for publication on this website. During the transition, certain elements of formatting and structure may have been lost.

A Look At Technological Growth

Before we can adequately analyze the growth of the West as a technological phenomenon, an understanding of what technological change is, and how it directly affects the political, economic and social weathering of a country (and even, of the world) is required. Technological is inherently self-sustaining, holding all other factors constant, as the complexity and pervasiveness of economic⁸ and technological growth is such that each change causes, to borrow from the book Economic Transformations, a “concatenation of linked causes and events.”

How, then, do we define technology? Clearly, without a definition of what technology is, we can’t make any decisions about what has affected technology. Dictionaries and other “authoritative” sources for meaning tend to have trouble agreeing upon a definition for technology, though, it seems, from an economic perspective, our definition of technology (and therefore, technological growth) must stem from either the ability to “produce” economic value of sorts or the ability to improve “well-being”⁹. Again borrowing from “Economic Transformations,” the definition of technology utilized here is as follows:

“[Technology] is the set of ideas specifying all activities that create economic value. It [is] knowledge about product [specifications], [knowledge] about [processes used to produce], [and] knowledge about [how] productive activity is organized.”

Such a definition is all-encompassing for anything that creates new economic value-providing ideas, and therefore, provides an optimal working set for analyzing the self-serving production of well-being. Technologies, then, tend to exist explicitly to solve problems. This does not, however, imply a challenge-response-type model of innovation, nor does it suggest that technologies are only developed to handle problems; often technologies are developed academically or otherwise with little-to-no clear challenge to overcome (and often, such as the case of lasers and other high-tech revolutions of the last 200 years, have no clear application whatsoever). This effect is more expressed in much more detail in the Economic Transformations book discussed at the end of this article.

Historically, technological growth¹⁰ in the West has varied. For much of the early section of the 2nd millennium, the East had holistic dominance with respect to technological and academic growth, progress in technologies that the future scientific revolution was dependent on, such as mathematics¹¹, was achieved almost entirely in the East, with a (relatively) small amount of assistance from Western countries¹².

Comparative Differences: Eastern Arab-Islam and the West

To continue on that metric, it’s important to realize that the transition between Arabic-Islamic technological dominance of the 100 AD-1450 AD period¹³, and the dominance of the West from 1450 AD-present¹⁴ happened evolutionarily, and occurred both as a case of the West’s technological development increasing in speed¹⁵ and the East providing fewer and fewer scholars over the two and a half centuries or so transitory periods of dominance.

We see such essential (and, path-dependent) innovations of today’s technology such as paper, use of almost all¹⁶ natural resources and literally hundreds of other technological advancements which were pioneered entirely during the pre-Western periods of dominance out of China, Islam, and the rest of the East. During this period, we still see limited technological advancement from the West, the important realization of this, is that significantly more technological development of this period came from Eastern society.

An analysis of the key legal differences between the East and the West which caused the transition of economic hegemony and technological dominance leads us to a duality of major points; philosophy of law and religion and the evolutionary structure of law. We find, simply, that a particular shift in legal belief away from that of strictly divinity toward an understanding of “natural” law, “human” law and “divine” law as separate entities¹⁷¹⁸ and the creation of an evolutionary structure of legal authoring.

Emerging from the West, particularly Italy, was a view from medieval Scholastics that suggested the universe was “an ordered machine” where law was dictated from a nature-oriented look at things. That is, the basic idea of natural law, or natural philosophy, exists a postulate for a set of rules or laws which is set out by nature, and is therefore axiomatic in it’s acceptance everywhere, making it inherently valid¹⁹²⁰. An Italian monk, Franciscus Gratianus, with a significant interest in the idea of natural law, placed natural law below divine law, but above human law, creating a clear hierarchy of laws that profoundly affected the evolution of Western law; however, he went as far as claiming that natural law may be more involving than can be expressed through a simple hierarchy, suggesting that natural law is found both in “divine revelations” and in “human reason and conscience.” Gratianus’, and the evolving Western understanding of natural law took a very, very different look at law than the Islamic view - Eastern countries were still, at this point, heavily dominated by divine law, suggesting that prophets could only speak law once, from which point it was taken explicitly as the word of God²¹ leaving the only way to amend law through correcting misunderstandings or misinterpretations²²

The important result from Gratianus’ philosophical publications²³ (which, alone, would be unlikely to cause a revolution in law) is a complete change in how many philosophical thinkers approached legal and natural law theory, a lot of which didn’t come to maturity until the 15th and 16th centuries²⁴ This stands to show an important theme in the changes, while most of them did in fact occur at first in the 11th and 12th centuries, the effects weren’t fully felt until many years later; recommitting the point that structural and philosophical changes in this period were only a framework for changes which did not fully occur for hundreds of years (particularly, the First Industrial Revolution) — this was a transitory period of sorts²⁵

Islam and China had different issues in with regard to legal establishments. Islam tended towards a lack of progression due to divine law being seen as un-evolutionary, and therefore not progress-seeking. Islamic holy writings were, indeed, accepted as an “accurate record of God’s commands”, which could axiomatically not be amended. However, China, had little in terms of divine dominance. China showed a similar problem in legal progress though, showing very little in terms of divergence from the path of law and ethics being one in the same; such an analysis of legal behaviour not differing from that which was considered ethical prevented any rule of law from ever being formed, inherently eliminating the Western-type push for impartial and equal treatment under law²⁶

Importantly to emphasize, Islam did have exposure to European and Western codified law at this point. The Roman Justinian Code and other legal principles and concepts at this point affected Muslims and Easterners who traded with the European West at this point however, the Quran and sunna were still considered complete records of God’s commands, and therefore axiomatically recognized as records of prophetic accuracy. The situation in the West, was modified from that, with little record of the Bible as the accurate source of all that should be, even with the high saturation (near absolute saturation) of Christians, Kings tended to hold their ground as leaders and the source of all law, holding an almost God-like control over their respective societies. It wasn’t until the Investiture Incident of the 12th century that this tradition started to break down and lead way to a more social understanding of modern institutions and of law. This simple social and cultural difference between the East and the West may be all it takes to understand how the West’s legal situation seriously differed from that of the East during and after this period. See the Toby Huff book mentioned in the Further Reading section of this article for more information and answers regarding this point.

It’s important, at this point, to address that this is not likely to be an Occident bias. It’s often the case, that anti-Eastern feelings and thoughts, and in particular, pro-Christian ideals are pushed through economic and social science type analysis through incorrect explanations²⁷ to big questions. An answer, that is found in many papers regarding this topic, seems to be that the Eastern religions, particularly Islam, had a tendency to simply kill those who rebelled against the church (which, in this context, is really a synonym for “innovation”) and therefore, stifled innovation entirely. The fact is, both Christian and Islamic churches had a tendency to treat scientific progress negatively in a lot of contexts, while supporting it in many others; there was little to no difference between how the East and West treated their scientific scholars until well after the necessary foundation had been laid. It’s not fair to suggest that the creation of natural law, etc., which occurred in the West (and, importantly, not in the East) is something inherently better about the West or that Westerners are inherently smarter, rather, it’s likely an opportune set of historical accidents²⁸ that caused different developmental paths between the East and West.

Western Legal Revolution: Changes and Shifts

The legal revolution spawned by this intellectual shift is one with many traits that are unique to the West even to this day. Globalization and industrialization of the entire world hasn’t been strong enough to overcome the association with the formalized methodology of the rule of law and exclusively Western legal associations, structures, functions and intellectualisms. A huge set of concepts, entities and procedures that came out of the West’s 12th century creation of a legal system will likely remain exclusive to the West for as long as the West continues to exist as a concept²⁹.

Prior to the 11th century, there was no concept of a unified legal system with a structure of autonomous function and jurisdictionality. The intellectual revolution created as a result of the philosophical and social changes mentioned before and otherwise of the period, created new “legal concepts, entities, procedures, powers and agencies” - to quote “The Rise of Early Modern Science” by Toby Huff - and created a “model by which secular states [organized] their affairs, establish[ed] courts, elect[ed] officials and enact[ed] their own laws, in order to govern their political, economic and social domains.” These new found secular legal structures marked the inherent rise of codified law, which formulates a consistent and repeatable process of how things exist and function within the state. But alas, all this did not come to be overnight - the point shortly prior to this century, the King reigned over his territory with absolute dictatorship, legal structures, etc., were all irrelevant, as there was no structure of law - the King, and his small selection of decision makers decided, effectively on a whim, how things were, and how they should be³⁰

The marked loss of the King’s power to assert control over all decisions, and thus, probably a formative factor in the development of modern codified law, is seen in the Investiture Controversy (1073-85). The Controversy, which occurred mostly through the never formalized Pope Gregory the VII claiming that the Roman church was the source of universal power, as it was founded by God, effectively eliminating investiture, by which the monarchy appointed new popes. King Henry IV responded by sending a letter directly to Pope Hildebrand Gregory, which has been documented by numerous sources to have started with: “Henry, king not through usurpation but through the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk.”

Effectively, this letter started an internal war between the King and the Pope, which, eventually, forced the King to back down, until which point the new King, Henry the V, renounced the right to the crownship’s decision in investiture, thereby marking a symbolic end to the King’s ability to rule over all decision making, and sparking a social ability for protest and responsibility of governing powers.

The next essential development of this century with regard to legal powers is that of taxation. With the rise of codified law, brings the fall of ad-hoc taxation, arguably the most essential point to make from this entire era. The clearly divided powers of taxation with a set of strong, irrevocable checks and balances in modern legal tradition is a mark of the historical revolution coming out of this period, and unquestionably a significant one; the draw of ad-hoc taxation is unpredictability, and therefore, lack of confidence in business risk. This inherently and entirely stops even the lowest of risk business ventures, on grounds that the government has infinite power of absolutely demolishing taxation. Taxes are powerful, control of taxes is control of an economy, but, restricted, developed tax policy eliminates all fear with regard to the tax man from the business community. Of course, taxation policy doesn’t rise directly with the rise of codified law, and it took roughly 200 further years for tax policy to solidify in the West to the point where it was indeed business friendly.

Another major construction of the rise of real codified law is the development of the philosophical and social (and, obviously, legal) idea of the “corporation” — a unified group of people working together as one legal (and, social) entity. Such a rise of new “social actors” could, as Peter Drucker suggested, have been the “most potent social innovation since the middle ages,” and furthermore “created new social and economic dynamics that must be accounted for by revised social, economic and political theories,” to again borrow from the great Toby Huff book. It’s easy enough to see the first aspect, as to how corporations form an economic revolution, however, the new social dynamic created by having collective human entities acting as though they’re individuals in a marketplace or legal institution is an obvious direct cause for legal revolution.

Long-run Economies and the Results of Revolution

What does all this mean for the economy, and more importantly the establishment of Western technological hegemony? We clearly see the West in modern day analysis to be hugely dominant in scientific progress, with very little (especially in the two and a half centuries or so prior) research and scholarship occurring outside of Western society³¹ and it should become more clear how the legal revolution discussed prior has seriously aided in the development of this dominance; one could go as far as saying that without this legal revolution³² it would have been impossible to create this self-sustaining set of knowledge-driven technological growth.

Why? The answer to that question is effectively “confidence.” The rise of codified law, and in turn the rise of structured taxation, delated social and criminal³³ responsibility (through the formation of corporations) and a strong framework for establishment of constitution-like human rights in terms of organization and deliberation makes for a workably strong financial, economic and therefore academic environment.

Structured and repeatable taxation is quite possibly the most important economic change as a result of this revolution; we see, with the rise of codified taxes (which particularly refers to the entire elimination of ad-hoc taxation, but also discusses the checks and balances type system where even the codified tax law cannot be made in to semi-ad-hoc taxation on the fly), a dramatic increase in capital investments³⁴. During a system of ad-hoc taxation, investment in capital structures such as factories for production and research institutions could not occur without clear government (in this case, mostly monarch) support, as a bad year of overclaiming ad-hoc taxation could make management and use of the structures impossible.

Furthermore, what we see in structured taxation³⁵ is an increased willingness for parties to work together. When ad-hoc taxation is not decreasing the implicit rating of everyone’s debts, social parties are more likely to be willing to take the lowered risk of selling capital goods, forming the clear foundation for proper social investment and monetary interaction.

An important part of the rise of codified law is the associated rise of equality and impartiality. No longer are you at the whim of whether the monarch is friends with your competitor, or any other lack of objectivity, as legal structures are unlikely to impose such arbitrary regulations in written form³⁶.

These changes, and the entire restructuring of society resulting from legal revolution and the fall of the absolute reignship of the monarchy, clearly established a set of precursors for formulation of the Industrial Revolution - the period in which one can safely say the West was absolutely dominant in technological and economic growth, and furthermore, a period of massive amounts of technological growth³⁷. There’s still some entirely open ended questions about this revolution, however — namely, how sustainable (or, how inherently self-sustaining) is this “knowledge-based technological revolution,” and will technological growth sustain in the West (or, globally) indefinitely, or will it crash³⁸ eventually like it has so many times in the past?

Further Reading

A number of books discuss the topics of the Industrial Revolution, and particularly the topic of technological change as a driver of economic growth. The following are effectively the citations for the details and facts within the article.

• Crosby, Alfred W. 1997. The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe
• Huff, Toby E. 2003. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, Second Edition
• An-Nabhani, Taqiuddin. 1953 (republished in 2002). The Economic System in Islam
• Nelson, Richard R. 1982. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
• Lipsey, Richard G; Carlaw, Kenneth I.; Bekar, Clifford T. 2005. Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth

A number of these books have been mentioned within the article as useful resources or additional reading, the papers published in formal article databases and economics or social history journals by the same authors are quite interesting and additional resources on the subject.

1. Europe and the former English-speaking British colonies, as compared to the Asian and Arabic-Islamic east, which we use to refer explicitly and exclusively to China and the Islamic nations - though, much can be applied to the entire non-West world. [↩]
2. Quite arguably, economic growth is technological growth. [↩]
3. The signs themselves, are expressed in the way that growth has not been interrupted since the point where Western technological dominance took place. Growth has been consistent rather than sporadic, and we have created a “kind of perpetual motion knowledge creation machine,” (Professor of Economics at UBC, Dr. Carlaw, November 22nd, 2008) where knowledge inherently begets more knowledge through our modern academic and scientific structures. [↩]
4. It’s important to note, as does Economic Transformations that there have been periods of historical technological growth centuries longer than the current one, all of which ended with a colossal crash. Furthermore, a strong set of poor government fiscal or monetary policy could quite easily bring an end to such evolutionary growth. [↩]
5. Which, importantly, did not emerge in the eastern societies examined. [↩]
6. This is the third section of this, “Comparative Differences: Eastern Arab-Islam and the West [↩]
7. The fourth section, “Western Legal Revolution: Changes and Shifts” [↩]
8. Note, the use of “economic growth” refers to growth that isn’t manifested entirely in the gross domestic product; GDP is a simplification and an easy number to perform calculations and plots with, but, in discussing the legal revolution of the West, it’s found to be easier to analyze the functional, commodity-type changes themselves to understand how growth has manifested. [↩]
9. It’s intentional that producing economic value and improving well-being are likely the same thing. [↩]
10. Even, economic hegemony — which, may actually be correlatively linked to technological growth. [↩]
11. Particularly, Islamic and Indian developments in calculus during the 10th and 11th centuries. The following time period showed significant Persian and further Indian developments. [↩]
12. This may be in part caused by the relative instability of Western societies at this time, as there was seemingly little-to-no philosophical or scientific revolution to spawn such growth dominance of the East [↩]
13. Saying that it ended in 1450 may be a bit optimistic for the East, many sources seem to suggest the number of contributory scholars declined rapidly at the end of the 13th century, while holding almost equal to Western scholars in the 12th century. [↩]
14. Of course, these dates are open to interpretation. When exactly the East stopped being clearly dominant and when the West began is unclear. What is clear, however, is that the transition was smooth, not abrupt as we imply with hard dates here. [↩]
15. Algorithmically, in fact, it’s difficult to claim that it’s explicitly exponential, but it certainly grows faster than linear growth over certain periods. [↩]
16. Not all, but a huge sample of natural resources that weren’t used in early hunter-gatherer and band-type societies. Oil is a good example of a natural resource that was seen as mostly valueless by early Eastern dominant societies. [↩]
17. Note, this has shifted again the 21st century, pushing for an entire disconnect between “human” law and “divine” law, with an aim towards an absolute disconnect between church and state. [↩]
18. Another important legal and philosophical revolution of the West, that did not occur in the East (at this point, if at all) is that of the pillared approach to legal decision making. Impartiality, coercion and equality is the structure of all Western law, where Eastern law at this point was absolute, impartiality and equality were not considered significant with respect to religious traditions of law beyond the extent of the religion itself. [↩]
19. To elaborate on this, one would be best to look directly to the source, reading Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, and the works of Thomas Aquinas. The effects on law by the rise of natural law and natural rights is profound. [↩]
20. One finds the effects and axiomatic beliefs of natural law and natural rights as the basis for most modern day constitutions. [↩]
21. And therefore, irrefutable. [↩]
22. And thus, inherently inhibiting the entire progression of the evolutionary legal structure, unlike the West’s new evolutionary structure of the period, the East showed a forced inhibition of legal progress. [↩]
23. It’s important here, to note that Gratianus did not pioneer natural law. In fact, it’s arguable that Aristotle did, as far back as late 300 BC. Gratianus (along with Aquinas) brought it to the attention of Western society and further progressed the value of such a look at legal thought. [↩]
24. Particularly with Hobbes political philosophy in 1651’s Leviathan. [↩]
25. Note, that there was an Muslim “natural law” movement, pioneered mostly by Abu Rayhan Biruni, with his “law of the jungle” movement. It did not grow in the same way Gratianus’ philosophy grew in the Western society, and was in a number of ways mostly left behind in favour of more divine thinkers. [↩]
26. It might not be clear at this point why impartiality and equality are so important, or even, why rule of law is so important to the economic and technological progression discussed previously. The final section of this article, Long-Run Economies and The Results of Revolution, heavily analyzes the relevant details of this point. [↩]
27. Particularly, things, such as the following explanation, which seem to logically follow due to an Occident bias in those from the West, and even, with increased globalization and Western hegemony weathering the challenge, we start to see entirely unintentional Occidental biases in Eastern publications. [↩]
28. Effectively, evolutionary chaos. [↩]
29. If you examine the rise of the West as a central power, you’ll see that every century or so, the “West” nearly doubles in size, and no longer represents anything West with the inclusion of Australia, Japan, and some parts of civilized Africa in modern West analysis. It’s conceivable, that one day, the traits we call the West will be globalized. [↩]
30. This was socially accepted at the time, as the way things were supposed to be; as such, the people did not revolt, or rarely revolted, against even the most absurd of the crownship’s policies. [↩]
31. This certainly isn’t to say there is none. I simply suggest that there’s significantly more occurring within Western society. Again, to reaffirm, this is not an Occident bias, many members of Eastern societies come to Western society to contribute scholarly and technologically. [↩]
32. And, a set of other things - particularly the rise of the university corporation - which set up the West perfectly to undergo the Industrial Revolution [↩]
33. Not to mention the rise of clearly defined criminal law, and a deliverance of written and structured social expectations. [↩]
34. Arguably, the increase is so large that it might as well be considered the creation of investment in capital structures. [↩]
35. As well as the other creations of codified law, particularly that of contract law and similar agreement-type law. [↩]
36. Not to say this hasn’t happened. Racism, subjectivity and other bias is quite common in legal systems, but, rather, to say that it’s less likely than without a structured legal system. [↩]
37. Resulting almost entirely from the rise of science. Revolutions in physics and physical laws drastically shifted the technological centers of the West to newer and more efficient means of production. [↩]
38. Carlaw, Bekar and Lipsey’s book, “Economic Transformations” covers a few scenarios where certain “macroeconomic levers” could be used to halt progress. Obviously social revolution away from our current technology-oriented supporting infrastructure could tear down any such progress, but, can this happen, or is the growth of technology itself halting it? [↩]

1. An Introduction
2. A Look at Technological Growth
3. Comparative Differences: Eastern Arab-Islam and the West
4. Western Legal Revolution: Changes and Shifts
5. Long-run Economies and the Results of Revolution
6. Further Reading
7. View all pages.

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