Pre-modern cultural influence spread so slowly it could arrive centuries out of date

Evidence

Braudel, On History, p. 14: “.… cultural influence came in small doses, delayed by the length and slowness of the journeys they had to make. If historians are to be believed, the Chinese fashions of the T’ang period [618–907] travelled so slowly that they did not reach the island of Cyprus and the brilliant court of Lusignan until the fifteenth century. From there they spread, at the quicker speed of Mediterranean trade, to France and the eccentric court of Charles VI, where hennins and shoes with long pointed toes became immensely popular, the heritage of a long vanished world—much as light still reaches us from stars already extinct.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 943

Categorization

• CANDY: The T’ang dynasty fashions reaching France in the 1400s — hennins and pointed shoes as ‘light from extinct stars’ — is a great cocktail-party fact and a vivid image of cultural lag.
• DEEPTHINKING: Braudel’s image of cultural lag — influence arriving centuries late, as ‘heritage of a long vanished world’ — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting way to think about cultural diffusion and its temporal asymmetry.
• XREF: connects to: Distant ancient Eastern history clarifies repeated modern trends; Fashion-cycle timing is set by how fast a culture consumes and forgets — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 682; Cultural mediation once worked through latency and obscurity, now through speed. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 841