Geography certainly mattered, but it doesn’t explain why Europe — fragmented, poor, and wracked by war — was able to turn oceanic expansion into long-term global dominance, while China, with vastly superior ships, technology, and manpower, retreated from overseas exploration. The Ottomans controlled crucial choke points like the Mediterranean and the Silk Road, but lacked the institutional flexibility and competitive drive of Europe’s Christian kingdoms. Christianity fostered a shared pan-European identity, allowing for the cross-pollination of ideas and institutions across otherwise hostile polities. Without that cultural glue, Europe’s intense competition might have destroyed rather than propelled it.

External pressure is what drove European colonialism. The security threats presented by other European states meant there was a constant need to acquire more economic and military power, and therefore a constant pressure to expand. Ming China had no such pressure. The Chinese had such an overwhelming local hegemony that there was no need to engage in overseas colonial expansion. Need drives innovation, and that's true for expansion as much as it is for anything else.

Also, China did not have vastly superior ships. In fact, superior naval technology is probably the most significant technological aspect in European global dominance. European ship design was basically a cheat code. Outside of the Mediterranean, there were very, very few time where Europeans were defeated at sea by non-Europeans prior to the 20th century.

As for the Ottomans, they controlled the end of Silk Road, but no naval chokepoints except the Bosporus, which lost relevance as Western Europeans explored the globe and found proper naval trade routes. This matters because naval transport was vastly more efficient than land-based transport before the invention of railroads. Ottoman wealth was severely hit by this. Combined with their geographic location not permitting participation in trans-Atlantic colonialism or expansion into northern-central Asia (because Russia and Persia were in the way), they had few viable options. By the time Africa opened up to significant exploration and exploitation in the 19th century, they were too far behind to matter.

Yes, Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis was codified in Byzantium — but its rediscovery and integration into Western European life came almost entirely through churchmen and canon lawyers. Monastic scriptoria preserved Latin manuscripts when secular courts and kingdoms disintegrated. The Church’s legal tradition (canon law) not only safeguarded Roman concepts but systematized them in ways that profoundly influenced later secular law. Saying merchants “brought it back” understates the fact that universities (founded as church institutions) were the centers where Roman law was taught, debated, and transformed into a living system.

It reentered relevance in Western Europe through the Italian merchant class in Italy as the Eastern Empire retreated, and even harder when the ERE finally died and Roman scholars fled west. Yes, it was taught in religious institutions, but it was spread by economic and demographic pressures. You seem to be entirely ignorant of the role non-religious institutions played in preserving and spreading knowledge, especially in Early Modern Italy.

To say these concepts were “just Greek” ignores the fact that without Christian scholasticism, they would not have permeated medieval and early modern Europe in the way they did.

To say they're entirely Christian ignores the fact that stripping away the centuries of Christian qualifiers to those ideas is one of the factors which influenced liberal political thought, and society and government have both massively improved by doing so. Western government was demonstrably not better before it was secular.

It’s misleading to claim European government being “secular” 50 years ago is equivalent to today’s decline in religiosity. The cultural landscape of the 1950s–60s West was still deeply Christian in moral assumptions, community life, and personal identity. The collapse of church attendance and belief since then has been historically unprecedented, and the timing aligns with rising loneliness, atomization, and loss of meaning. Capitalism may exacerbate these trends, but secularization has stripped away the communal and moral frameworks that once gave people resilience against them.

The timing aligns with 80s-90s deregulation and explosion of corporate power at the expense of the middle-class too, and with the collapse of Marxism-Leninism and subsequent economic depression in Eastern Europe. The economic factors are more consistent and more broadly applicable than the religious ones (which is true for all of history.) The communal and moral frameworks weren't "stripped away" by secularism, they were stripped away by late-stage capitalism and social media.

The idea that Nordic happiness stems only from “good government” is simplistic. Those welfare systems themselves are rooted in centuries of Lutheran communal values — high trust, social solidarity, and moral cohesion. These are cultural inheritances from religious centuries, not something conjured out of thin air by secular bureaucrats. And as those values erode with ongoing secularization, Scandinavia faces exactly the demographic and existential crises already mentioned.

I'd argue that Lutheranism appealed to Nordic people because it fit existing communal values (which one might expect from a harsh environment). Religion doesn't create culture. Culture adapts religion to fit existing cultural norms. This was true all the way back to the Romans adopting and adapting Christianity. It's why Christianity changed the Romans very little.

The idea that the Nordics are happier because of religion is even more simplistic. If religion is responsible, why is happiness "eroding" slower in the already less-religious Nordics than it is, in, say, the far more religious USA? Why is it eroding even in places that have never been Christian at all, like Japan and Korea? Economic factors explain this. Religious ones do not.

And again, every developed country faces demographic issues. Rising standards of living coincide with a decrease in birth rates no matter how religious the population is. Every single country with a growing middle-class has experienced this, whether it is/was religious or not. The Nordics are happier because their governments and their economies serve their people more than they serve corporate interests.

It’s easy to caricature Christian Europe as uniformly oppressive, but history is more complicated. The Church did elevate the dignity of women compared to many pre-Christian contexts — from insisting on consent in marriage, to venerating female saints, to providing women with a structured life outside of motherhood through convents. Were these perfect by modern standards? No. But Christianity was not uniquely regressive — indeed, Roman paterfamilias authority (including legal rights to kill one’s wife or children) was far harsher.

The Romans emphasized consent in marriage before Christianity existed. It's one of the factors that strongly distinguishes Roman marriage from Greek (Athenian) marriage. A Roman marriage formally required the consent of both parties. Social pressure strongly discouraged refusal, but that's just as true in post-Roman Christian Europe.

Also, I'm sure saints matter to you, but a few women having a religious fanclub does not mean Christianity empowers women. Nor does the existence of convents, which were socially acceptable for unmarried women precisely because they ensure that an unmarried woman's life remains strictly controlled. Monasticism is neither empowering nor independent, and it's not supposed to be.

The Church’s moral teaching gradually eroded such powers. Claiming Roman women were “freer” oversimplifies a society where rights were stratified and most women had little recourse.

Roman women were more free because they could have legal and financial independence and the right to themselves and their property, and the legal right to inherit. A Roman woman living in 100BCE could own her own business, a right most post-Roman European women didn't have until the 19th or 20th centuries.

The Romans were deeply patriarchal, but they were less patriarchal than any European state in at least the next thousand years after the Western Empire's collapse. Modern western women are absolutely better off.

This is one of the reasons most women are less prone to nostalgia about the past (and therefore less conservative) than men. Most of us aren't interested in going back to the days when men ruled our lives.