Tonio Andrade > Quotes

“to a historian specializing in the non-European world there is something puzzling about the excitement with which European historians hail the arrival of cities, trade, regular taxation, standing armies, legal codes, bureaucracies, absolutist kings and other commonplace appurtenances of civilized societies, as if they were unique and self evident stepping stones to modernity:”
― Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History

“As a Persian scholar wrote, around 1115, “The people of China are the most skilfull of men in handicrafts. No other nation approaches them in this. The people of Rum (the Eastern Roman Empire) are highly proficient (in technology) too, but they do not reach the standards of the Chinese. The latter say that all men are blind in craftsmanship, except the men of Rum, who however are one-eyed, that is, they know only half the business.”
― Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History