Quantification in Western Europe
* Book: Crosby, A. W. (1996). The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250–1600. Cambridge University Press.
URL = Wikipedia
"about the role of quantification in Western civilization."
Description
From the Wikipedia:
"The Measure of Reality examines the origins and effects of quantitative thinking in post-medieval European history', suggesting it as a major factor in the ensuing European colonial domination of much of the rest of the world.[2] For Crosby, this was made possible by a shift in mindset and worldview that the author collectively calls mentalité ... toward quantitative and visual thinking fostering a superior understanding of science and technology.
...
The book is divided into three sections, where the first introduces a new view of time and space as a continuum that could be subdivided and segmented, assisted by the application of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. The second part follows the evolution of quantification in music, painting, and bookkeeping. The third part presents the maturation of what Crosby describes as the new model of European reality, established on visualization and quantification as well as a linear and analytical but unbounded view of history driven by "progress", versus what he terms the venerable model, a more qualitative, experiential, and boundedly cyclical worldview inherited from classical antiquity.
Crosby adopts the metaphor of the striking match to illustrate how this revolution took place, with the influx of the Aristotelian corpus into the Latin West. This took place via the Arab world starting in the thirteen century, and provided the "oxygen and combustibles" that were then "made into fire" by composers, painters, and bookkeepers in what Crosby describes as a "shift to the visual" taken by composers, painters, and bookkeepers.
The ingredients of this revolution in visualization and quantification were, in Crosby's analysis, the birth of polyphonic music at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the development of perspective in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance, and the adoption of double-entry bookkeeping among 14th-century Italian accountants."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_Reality)
Review
From the Wikipedia:
"In a 2001 literature review of then-recent macrohistory works, in The American Historical Review historian Gale Stokes examines The Measure of Reality along with thematically similar works, including Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) by Jared Diamond, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) by David Landes, ReOrient (1998) by Andre Gunder Frank, and The Great Divergence (2000) by Kenneth Pomeranz, among others. Another book to which Crosy’s is compared is Michael Adas' work Machines as a Measure of Man on the role of technology in European imperialism – the difference being that Adas’ machine and technologies are, in Crosby’s reading, all descending from the quantifying spirit of the age. While conceding that scholars are split when it comes to the methodological value of macrohistorical approaches at all, he divides these works into two general schools of thought on the rise of Europe since the Renaissance: that there was something intrinsically or situationally special about European society, versus that Europe simply "lucked into" a period of dominance through resource acquisition and exploitation at a greater rate than in Asia. Stokes classified Crosby in the first camp, and pointed out that anthropologist Jack Goody, in East in the West (1996) has held that quantification technologies were not uniquely European, but developments from China through India to the Mediterranean since the Bronze Age. Crosby's model stands out in holding European quantification to have become a progressively accelerating cultural habit."