It’s been asserted [source] that having Latin as a lingua franca was important for Europe integrated market for ideas. Makes sense if scholars who otherwise speak different languages are going to be able to communicate.
But the Muslim world was much better off in this regard, with Arabic, and while China has major linguistic variation I think it also had a ‘shared language’ in basically the same way Latin was a shared language for Europe.
It seems to me like the thing that’s important is not so much that the market is integrated, but that there are many buyers and sellers. The best works of Chinese philosophy, as far as I can tell, come from the period when there was major intellectual and military competition between competing factions; the contention between the Hundred Schools of Thought. And then after unification the primary work available for scholars was the unified bureaucracy, which was interested in the Confucian-Legalist blend that won the unification war, and nothing else.
But the Muslim world was much better off in this regard, with Arabic, and while China has major linguistic variation I think it also had a ‘shared language’ in basically the same way Latin was a shared language for Europe.
It seems to me like the thing that’s important is not so much that the market is integrated, but that there are many buyers and sellers. The best works of Chinese philosophy, as far as I can tell, come from the period when there was major intellectual and military competition between competing factions; the contention between the Hundred Schools of Thought. And then after unification the primary work available for scholars was the unified bureaucracy, which was interested in the Confucian-Legalist blend that won the unification war, and nothing else.