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Why did Europe, and not China, become the dominant power of the modern world? It is a question that has kept historians arguing for decades, and for good reason. Around 1000 AD, China was arguably the more advanced civilization, with better engineering, a more sophisticated bureaucracy, and larger cities than anything Europe had to offer. And it was not just China. Japan and Korea also had relatively high levels of human capital during the pre-industrial era, and, by several modern measures, East Asians score higher on IQ tests than Europeans do. So if raw brain power explained who ends up on top, the map of scientific and industrial achievement today would look quite different.
Peter Frost recently argued in Aporia that Europe pulled ahead because it built independent institutions that curbed state excesses and fostered impersonal trust, while several East Asian states cut themselves off from the wider world during the very centuries that mattered most. Frost does touch on individualism himself, but it serves as a supporting detail in his argument rather than its fulcrum. There is real truth in what he says. But underneath both of those things, the rise of fair institutions and the willingness to engage with outsiders, sits something more basic and more psychological: individualism. Joseph Henrich makes this case at length in his book WEIRD, showing how the medieval church, by breaking up extended family and clan networks across Europe, nudged people toward seeing themselves as independent individuals rather than as extensions of a family line. That shift, he argues, rewired how people thought, felt guilt, and made decisions. Individualism predicts how well a country does just as reliably as IQ does. Yet somehow it barely comes up when people discuss why nations succeed or fail. Institutions get discussed. Intelligence gets discussed. Yet the cultural trait sitting underneath both rarely does.
The gap between Europe and the East opened up long before steam engines or factories existed. A related line of scholarship on political order makes a point worth pausing on here. Western European society had already grown considerably more individualistic than any society history had yet produced, and it had done so well before the rise of the centralized nation-state, centuries before the Reformation, the Enlightenment, or the Industrial Revolution ever appeared on the horizon. Individualism, on this reading, was not something modernity produced as a byproduct. It came first, and modern institutions grew out of it.
One large historical study tracked culture, institutions, and income across twelve countries in the West, the Middle East, and Asia over a thousand years, and the pattern it finds is striking. Starting around the twelfth century, Western Europe becomes steadily more secular and more inclined toward independent thought, while China and India barely move for most of the millennium. Partly because the church’s authority over everyday life in Europe took a real hit in the eleventh century, when internal splits weakened the Pope’s grip and ideas once forbidden began to spread more freely. The Renaissance then pushed this further, encouraging people to test ideas methodically rather than simply accept inherited authority, and the researchers treat this scientific habit of mind as inseparable from the broader loosening of religious control.
Here is the interesting part. In that same study, the rise of secular, individualistic culture and the rise of education move almost in lockstep, so closely that, once culture is accounted for, education on its own adds little to the explanation, since the two are correlated at 92 percent. Essentially, societies that valued independent thought over conformity were the same societies that built schools and sent people to them. It was not a coincidence. Good institutions, the study’s other big explanatory factor, mattered too, but they worked mainly by fueling scientific and technical progress rather than by directly building up education. Once that scientific and technical progress is accounted for, institutions on their own stop adding much to the picture, while culture’s effect on income barely budges. Institutions, in other words, built the tools. Culture built the kind of people who wanted to use them.
The institutional side of the story is worth telling on its own terms too. England’s property rights improved through two defining political moments: the Civil War of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, both of which placed real limits on what the king could do. China had nothing comparable. Its ruling elites faced essentially no checks on their power for the entire thousand years the study covers. The rules governing trade and contracts followed a similar path. In Europe, they strengthened first through trade sparked by the Crusades and the rise of merchant guilds, then further through financial breakthroughs such as the founding of the Bank of St. George in Genoa and the legalization of interest-bearing loans in Florence. China moved the other way. Its contract-enforcing institutions actually worsened between 1250 and 1450 under closed-door trade policies, and Japan’s own decision to seal itself off from the world in 1636 produced a similar setback lasting over two centuries. And since the real income gap between East and West dates back to around 1250, centuries before any factories or steam engines existed, culture and institutions did almost all the early work, not technology.
If culture mattered mainly by shaping who got educated, a separate line of research helps explain why China and Europe built such different kinds of societies in the first place, and why that difference comes back to individualism again and again. One recent model looks at the split between two basic ways people can organize themselves: the clan, a tight-knit group bound by family ties where people work collectively, and the town, a looser gathering of individuals who work independently and rely on shared rules rather than family loyalty to get along
In China, clans built around ancestor worship and the Confucian duty of filial piety did most of the jobs that formal institutions handle in the West. Clan elders settled disputes, enforced agreements, and punished wrongdoers, but they did it through local custom rather than written law. The catch is that this only worked within the clan. Two people from different clans had no shared authority to fall back on, so trade between strangers stayed underdeveloped. The imperial state, meanwhile, stayed remarkably small. Across a population of tens of millions, there were only around 1,300 county magistrates to handle civil disputes for the whole empire, and none of them had any specialized legal training.
Europe took a different road, and the reason traces back to the church. Starting in late antiquity, the Catholic Church spent centuries dismantling the practices that had kept extended families and clans strong: cousin marriage, adoption, polygamy, and concubinage, eventually forbidding marriage between relatives as distant as sixth cousins. Once clans broke apart, people could no longer rely on family networks to ensure a stranger would honor a deal. So other tools stepped in: the Law Merchant, a shared commercial code; the Community Responsibility System, which held whole communities accountable for a member’s broken promises; and merchant guilds, which enforced fair dealing across town lines. This is really the heart of the matter. Individualism in Europe did not simply happen to exist alongside strong, impersonal institutions. It made them necessary. Once family ties no longer automatically guaranteed trust, only shared, impersonal rules could fill the gap.
The model also explains why, once this split begins, it tends to widen rather than narrow over time. A larger town population leads to better institutions, and better institutions make the next generation even more individualistic, which in turn further grows the town. It is a self-feeding loop that pushes a society toward one of two endpoints: either everybody ends up in the town, individualistic and well-governed, or everybody ends up in the clan, collectivist and informally governed. Two societies that start out only slightly different can end up worlds apart, because small early differences get magnified generation after generation as culture and institutions reinforce each other. The study backs this up with real-world data too. Countries whose ancestors lived in places well suited to growing rice, a crop that demands the kind of shared irrigation labor that favors clan life, tend to have weaker institutions today, even after accounting for geography and history. And countries whose ancestral folklore leaned more toward individualism, as judged by the actual stories people told, tend to have stronger property rights and contract enforcement today. Individualism is not just something that happens to show up alongside good institutions. It is one of the things that makes them possible in the first place.
Even if individualism explains how good institutions got built, one might still expect the smartest countries to dominate cutting-edge science today. Northeast Asian countries report average IQ scores around 105, well above the European average, and they consistently beat Europe on international student tests. And yet Europeans have won roughly 20 times as many Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals per capita as Northeast Asians, a gap so large that it cannot be explained away by population size or recent history alone.
The proposed explanation is that making an original scientific breakthrough takes more than raw intelligence. It takes a certain kind of personality, one comfortable chasing novel ideas, unbothered by social disapproval, and willing to stand apart from the group, and these traits appear to have identifiable genetic roots. One is a variant of the DRD4 gene, which affects the brain’s dopamine system and is tied to curiosity and a taste for novelty. It shows up in roughly 20 to 30 percent of Europeans but is almost completely absent in China, Korea, and Taiwan, likely because societies there selected against it for disrupting social harmony. Another is a version of the serotonin transporter gene, linked to lower social anxiety, which about 60 percent of Europeans carry compared with roughly 20 percent of Northeast Asians. A third, a variant of the OPRM1 gene tied to how painfully a person feels social rejection, is far more common in Asian populations than in European ones, and tracks closely with collectivist values. This lines up with Hofstede’s well-known individualism index, based on a worldwide survey of workplace attitudes, which places European countries nearly two full standard deviations above Northeast Asian countries.
When these three genetic markers are combined into a single measure of curiosity and independent-mindedness, that measure predicts a country’s Nobel and Fields Medal output even after IQ is already accounted for. IQ alone explains only a small sliver of the differences between countries, but adding this measure of individualistic temperament roughly quadruples the share of the picture explained, and both factors matter in a way unlikely to be due to chance. Japan makes the point well. Its standard of living caught up with that of Western Europe by around 1970, and it has never been short on talent, yet its output of Nobel laureates since 1980 still trails far behind that of Britain or France. Chinese Nobel laureates, meanwhile, have almost all done their prize-winning work at Western universities rather than at home, which the researchers link to a culture that has traditionally been wary of the kind of individual who stands out from the group, precisely the kind of person scientific breakthroughs tend to require. The same pattern shows up even within the West. For example, if genetic variants associated with novelty-seeking traits in Poland were raised to US levels, per capita scientific and technical publication output would be expected to rise by about 25.16%.
Yet a specific kind of knowledge underpins all of this and deserves to be named directly, because it is arguably where individualism does its most important work. Economic historians of science distinguish propositional knowledge, understanding why something works, from prescriptive knowledge, knowing how to make it work without necessarily understanding why. Prescriptive know-how pays for itself quickly, so societies have an obvious incentive to accumulate it, and most have, through generations of trial, error, and imitation. Propositional knowledge is a different matter. It is closer to a pure public good: unpatentable and often unprofitable in the near term, so very little of it gets produced unless people are willing to pursue it for reasons beyond an immediate payoff. And crucially, prescriptive know-how on its own, without sustained interaction with this deeper, harder-won propositional layer, could never have generated the kind of self-sustaining economic growth the modern world eventually produced. It took centuries of propositional knowledge slowly accumulating and feeding back into practical technique before the two merged into a single engine of innovation by the middle of the nineteenth century, and that merger is arguably the real birth of the modern economy.
What actually drove that long accumulation of propositional knowledge, in turn, looks less like an economic story and more like a cultural one. The decisive shift was a change in disposition, a growing conviction that the human condition could be continuously improved through a better understanding of nature’s underlying regularities, a belief credited as the single cultural innovation that made the modern economy possible in the first place. That disposition is itself downstream of individualism. Asking why the water boils, rather than simply noting that it does, requires treating one’s own curiosity as reason enough to keep digging, whether or not the group finds the question useful or the answer comfortable. Individualism supplies exactly that permission. It stimulates heterodox intellectuals willing to work with unconventional ideas rather than defer to inherited consensus, which is another way of saying that a culture organized around independent judgment is simply better suited to abstract, causal reasoning than one organized around preserving group harmony. Prescriptive knowledge spreads through imitation and can permeate almost any culture. Propositional knowledge needs a culture willing to tolerate, or better yet reward, the person thinking alone.
None of this means IQ, geography, or historical accident stop mattering. But individualism keeps surfacing as the thread that ties institutions, education, and scientific temperament together, and it deserves a far larger place in the conversation about why some nations built the modern world and others, despite no shortage of talent, did not.
Thank you for providing an interesting, informative and thought provoking essay and analysis. Keep up the good work.
Europeans came up with better navigation techniques and thus built the first true Blue Water navies on planet Earth. Theubcould accurately sail to any point on any Ocean on planet Earth East Asians like the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese etc...had advanced naval technology but were at the end of the day coast huggers, so were the navies of other civilizations like the Muslims. Europeans have traditionally been good in naval technology from ancient Greeks to Vikings. For a while this naval supremacy went to the Islamic World. Ibn Khaldun writes about the earlier superiority of Christian navies but Arabs learnt those naval skills from captured European slaves. Soon they commanded the seas for a while. But Europe came back. And since most of the World is Ocean, superior European naval navigation techniques means Europe would rule the World.
Also, inter European rivalry played a major part in European colonial conquests and constant upgradation of naval military technology. Europeans often conquered territory out of fear that some other European power would conquer it first.
You should check out the voyage of Captain Cook to observe Venus, which could be observed for a limited period every century. For that expedition, not only had to find the part of the World, where these observations would be best made from planet Earth (that century it was the Pacific Ocean) and to have a expedition to observe Venus. No other civilization could do that other than the West/ Europe. Also, the North Sea even today is one of the most treacherous water body on planet Earth, so the Europeans living on that region (British, Dutch, Northern French, etc...) were naturally good tale nted sea-men.