Andrea Komlosy’s Foresight study based on Big History
Andrea Komlosy (2022) provides a foresight study on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemics based on models of Big History (Leonid and Anton Grinin, Korotayev 2022). Kondratieff waves and Grinin’s conception of production principles are global history’s chief trajectories. The agricultural-craft, industrial and cybernetic production principles are established by the neolithic, industrial and cybernetic revolution. The original data of each production principle’s life cycle (Grinin 2012:39) indicate that the lion’s share of their life span is spent reaching their hegemonic position, resembling Godelier (1974): The respective revolutionists need cultural hegemony over all other existing modes to establish their socio-economic configuration with its specific legal and normative framework.
Since no one can see into the future, calibrating a model means running it backwards into history checking whether the algorithm’s data are matching reasonably well with known data. I suggested the 14th-century Black Death and its impact as a reference pandemic due to the subsequent “scientific revolution” in astronomy by renaissance humanists (Plachetka 2020a). Leonid Grinin (pers. com.) insists on each principle’s direct impact on manufacturing. The military revolution, dated back may be a substitute for the industrial revolution to meet the model rationale.
James Belich (2022) does exactly that, holding the Black Death responsible for the “Great Divergence”. The end of the Pax Mongolica during the Plague disconnected Europe from the Silk Roads. Belich (2022: 232-33) considers the seven expeditions by Ming Admiral Zheng He (1405-1433) as a reboot of the Maritime Silk Road as a World-System network. This makes plausible Fra Mauro’s citing Asian experts in his map made in Venice (Plachetka 2019) on his map. Novel Asian information generated circa 1420 C.E. made him reject Ptolemy’s portraying the Indian Ocean as landlocked. Anyway, Europeans had to make their own way: In contrast to the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic has no Monsoon winds providing “sea highways” to India. Since sea highways are one-way, the maneuver “volta do mar” required astronomic navigation for spotting sea highways suitable for sailing back home. Early Renaissance humanism developed scientific astronomy for mathematical geography. Between 1482-86, Diego Cão reached latitudes at the African West coast, where the pole-star is not visible. He put the then novel humanist solar astronomy to the test (Hunter 2012). Martellius turned that into cartography: The Yale Martelius map (ca. 1491) also allows us to understand the impact of a geographical symposium during the ecclesiastical council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-45) (Van Duzer 2019) contained in Fra Mauro’s map as a “knowledge aggregator” (Nanetti et.al. 2015). Dating the map depends on the entry of the latest information, because the conventional date 1457 refers to Portugal’s payment for the map after the expeditions of Cadamosto and Usodimare to Senegal (1455-56). After China’s official inward turn since 1433, the maritime Silk Road was run by private traders of Hokkian origin left alone, with the apotheosis of Zhèng Hé among them exclusively (Tan 2009). The 16th-century Sino-Portuguese alliance to run the maritime Silk Road furnished Hokkians with some protection by state-craft i.e., superior battleships as results of the European military revolution. Without that scientific-epistemological revolution, the Portuguese would not have been able to establish anything around the Indian Ocean.
As a preliminary conclusion:
1. The complexity of Belich’s evidence for the impact of the Black Death requires a model to reduce it to manageable concepts for calibrating the discussed model.
2. The term “Fitness region” as analytical category: Vavilov’s law of homologous series means to Peruvian Quechua farmers the use of spots of specific microclimatic conditions as selection criteria for cross-breeding of wind pollinators, e.g., potatoes: Random mutations that don’t fit in won’t blossom there. Thereby they adapt seeds to their local environmental conditions (Plachetka 2020b). In models of system evolution, such a selecting spot is a “fitness region”.
3. Grinin’s phases of a production principle’s life cycle indicate that a new production principle in its infancy requires its adequate fitness region, such as the Mediterranean at the end of the Silk Roads for capitalism. Relevant changes in the system context allows the new system to transgress the boundaries of its pristine fitness region, heading towards its maturity and eventually its hegemonic position.
Based on these modeling considerations, trajectories from suitable historical showcases, considering their scale, can enable a calibration of the discussed model, but it’s still a long way to identify the relevant proxy data from history, so Komlosy (2022) can only rely on narratives on the effects of Covid-related lockdowns to draw her conclusions.
References
Belich, J. (2022) The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe: Princeton University Press.
Grinin, L (2012) Macrohistory and Globalization, Volgograd: Utchitel
Grinin, L., Grinin, A., & Korotayev, A. (2022) “COVID-19 pandemic as a trigger for the acceleration of the cybernetic revolution, transition from e-government to e-state, and change in social relations.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 175: 121348.
Godelier, M. (1974) "On the Definition of a Social Formation: The Example of the Incas." Critique of Anthropology 1.1: 63-73.
Hunter, D. (2012). Race to the New World: Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, and a Lost History of Discovery: D & M Publishers.
Komlosy A. (2020) Zeitenwende, Vienna: Promedia
Nanetti, A., Cattaneo, A., Cheong, S. A. & Lin, C. (2015). “Maps as Knowledge Aggregators: from Renaissance Italy Fra Mauro to Web Search Engines” The Cartographical Journal 52 (2):159‐167.
Tan Ta Sen (2009) Cheng Ho and Islam in Southeast Asia, Singapore: SEAS
Plachetka, U.C (2019) "Der Admiral in seinem Labyrinth: Zhèng Hé, Indonesien und die maritime Seidenstraße." Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte 20.2: 491-522.
Plachetka, U.C. (2020a) "The COVID-19 Revolution?" ISA RC02 Newsletter. Quarter 4 (Aug.4, 2020) online.
Plachetka U.C. (2020b): "Vavilov Centers or Vavilov Cultures? Evidence for the Law of Homologous Series in World System Evolution." Social Evolution & History 19.2 (2020): 145-183
Van Duzer, C: 2019 Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence: Springer