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This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchu, a Peter Frank, a pan of Oxford University, WUS2 College, a professor of global history.

The new book is the Earth transformed, looking at climate, ecology, pandemic, volcanoes, all of that and how humankind,

especially the civilizations that reach back the last 5,000 years, have responded.

Now we come to a debate that is ongoing, whether or not there is a way of explaining why Europe seems to accelerate in terms of science and technology.

Over Asia, where much of the innovation of the earlier thousand or 2,000 years took place, I know that having visited Central Asia,

the city-states of Tashkant, of Kabul, of Samaritan, all of those city-states were well established with science and learning and education.

Thousands of years before that came to Europe, I date European universities that remembering 1222 Paraba.

That is the period of time when universities in guilds are mixing with what is known as the feudal revolution and the professor teaches me that that is too shorthand.

There's a lot of complication that went on in the 13th century in Europe, but in any event Europe is said to accelerate.

Professor, the great divergence, is there an explanation or are we too close to it?

There are so many fantastic scholars to work on this question, most notably Ken Bomerun at University of Chicago.

The question really is, how was it that Europe, as you say, are relative backwatering?

Lots of pearls and individual moments of highlights before 1500, but how was it that Europe managed to take over the world?

In the case of Africa, every single part of Africa was colonized by our European power, pop from Ethiopia and Liberia by the First World War.

How was it that so many European states had empires? Belgium had an empire, the Netherlands, Denmark had territories in the Caribbean.

How did that happen? In a bubble, how did they take over great empires like India, the Mogul Empire and China?

There are lots of different ways in which one can try to answer that question.

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