"When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519, he found monarchs, cities, roads, markets, schools, astronomers, law courts and much else that also existed in his native Spain. Put another way, two cultural experiments had been running in parallel for 15,000 years, and when they came into contact, each recognized the other's institutions. It wasn't just the civilizations of the Americas and Europe that resembled each other by that time."
"This might not seem like a radical statement, but to some scholars it is. They argue that each society's history is unique and that no meaningful comparison is possible. Others think it is possible in theory, but are uncomfortable with the translation of historical knowledge into binary categories or numbers, saying that it glosses over the inherent difficulty of interpreting the past from the ever-shifting vantage point of the present."
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more than half of the world's population lived in five or six large societies with politically similar structures. Parallel cultural development produced comparable institutions across distant regions, including monarchs, cities, roads, markets, schools, astronomers and law courts. Some scholars insist on the uniqueness of each society and resist direct comparison, while others accept the possibility of meaningful comparison through quantification. Interdisciplinary teams of archaeologists, economists and social scientists pursue translation of historical phenomena into data, arguing that large databases, computational tools and artificial intelligence can reveal patterns and enable predictive insights.
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