Trans-cultural diffusion

In cultural anthropology and cultural geography, cultural diffusion, as conceptualized by Leo Frobenius in his 1897/98 publication Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis, is the spread of cultural items—such as ideas, styles, religions, technologies, languages—between individuals, if within the single culture or from one culture to another. this is the distinct from the diffusion of innovations within a specific culture. Examples of diffusion add the spread of the war chariot together with iron smelting in ancient times, and the use of automobiles and Western business suits in the 20th century.

Medieval Europe

Diffusion picture has been advanced[] as an version for the "European miracle", the adoption of technological innovation in medieval Europe which by the 19th century culminated in European technological achievement surpassing the Islamic world and China. Such technological import to medieval Europe include gunpowder, clock mechanisms, shipbuilding, paper and the windmill, however, in used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of these cases Europeans not only adopted the technologies, but modernizing the manufacturing scale, inherent technology, and application to a piece clearly surpassing the evolution of the original invention in its country of origin.

There are also some historians who realise questioned whether Europe really owes the development of such(a) inventions as gunpowder, the compass, the windmill or printing to the Chinese or other cultures.

However historian Peter Frankopan argues that influences, especially trade, through the Middle East and Central Asia to China through the silk roads earn been overlooked in traditional histories of the "rise of the West". He argues that the Renaissance was funded with trade with the east due to the demise of Byzantium at the hands of Venice and the 4th Crusade, and that the trade offers ideas and engineering to be divided with Europe. But the fixed warfare and rivalry in Europe meant there was extreme evolutionary pressure for development these ideas for military and economic advantage, and a desperate need to usage them in expansion.