Martin Wolf

I wrote one column on this, which I'm particularly proud of it, so I will repeat some of the argument.

It was essentially that Europe transformed the world.

It's absolutely unambiguously the case.

This peripheral, you can call it the continent, really just a promontory of Eurasia,

six or seven hundred years ago was pretty irrelevant and It ended up conquering most of the world and completely transforming the world intellectually culturally scientifically and politically by creating these vast empires and one product of which was the United States and How did this happen?

Well

There are many arguments about this.

There was a shared civilization and profound political rivalry.

The one core element of European history since the fall of the Roman Empire is that it was Christian and divided.

And so the European states evolved in conflict.

And they became very, very, very good at it, extraordinarily good at it, so good at it that once they really got going, they ended up by conquering so much of the world.

It's still very shocking that they did.

I still think...

Think of how few thousands of English people succeeded in conquering India in the middle of the 18th century.

It's completely freakish.

So this fragmentation was a core of it.

And the cultural development, the scientific was also the core of that.

Because when there was a problem with one state trying to suppress certain sorts of thinking, people moved everywhere somewhere else.

Or the ideas moved somewhere else.

So there is this idea, which I think is right, that the division of Europe actually made it.