Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris (PDF)

Description

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West’s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last?Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules—for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines—from ancient history to neuroscience—not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.

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⭐In this fascinating book of world history Ian Morris tries to explain why the West rules – for now. He considers various theories of what he calls “locked in” views – for example, that Western dominance was destined because of race or culture or some combination of those factors. He notes the negative assessment of Asian development by Karl Marx, who concluded that it had stagnated and simply fossilized. Morris is probably closest to Jared Diamond, who contends that geography and the luck of having domesticable animals and vegetation in a given area explain the advances in one locale over another. Morris readily concedes that the West presently dominates, and since the Victorian era, “the West has maintained a global dominance without parallel in history.”(11) For his study Morris also creates a scale of social development (hereafter SD) to assess the growth in the West and the East and observe who is ahead, and by how much. As he fills in the 18,000 years covered by his scale, Morris refutes the locked-in theories of the inevitability of Western dominance. As he surveys his scale, the East has already led the West in SD for over a millennium. Because some areas of the globe were so inhospitable to domesticable animals and vegetation, or because of their geographical isolation, Morris does not even consider them in his calculations. Thus arctic regions, sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, and the Americas are ignored until some become part of the West. On the other hand, Morris includes very little on India, which had a very early core civilization; yet he fails to explore why India was not in the running for dominance. Moreover, there is a striking difference between this volume and several books by Rodney Stark, who raises some of the same questions and covers some of the same territory surveyed by Morris. Indeed, the title of one of Stark’s books is How the West Won. Consider the Roman Empire: by the 1st century AD, according to Morris’s view expressed in his SD scale, Rome’s population exceeded that of Alexandria and was probably double that of the largest contemporary Chinese city. Rome had higher literacy than ever before in human history, there was increased trade, prosperity, and less violence. Though there was decline after a few centuries, the barbarian invaders finally overran Rome, thereby precipitating a dramatic loss in SD . By AD 541, the East (mainly China) overtook the West and was more advanced than the West until AD 1773.(Morris, pp. 435, 565) Stark’s view is a stark contrast. To him, “The fall of Rome was, , .the most beneficial event in the rise of Western civilization.”(Stark, West, 69) Rome’s fall “unleashed so many substantial and progressive changes. . .most of the early innovations and inventions came in agriculture. Soon most medieval Europeans ate better than had any common people in history, and consequently they grew larger and stronger then people elsewhere.”(Stark, West, 69-70) How does one reconcile this assertion with the more popular view, maintained by Morris, that Western Europe had plunged into what has commonly been referred to as “the Dark Ages”? Furthermore, Morris sees the decline in Western Europe as so overwhelming, that when he compares the highest SD scores of East and West, the West is no longer represented by Rome, but by Constantinople, Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, etc. And even with the movement of the Western core eastward, the West had still fallen behind the Eastern core (China) on the Morris SD scale. A recurring refrain of Morris’s book is that – all large groups of people are basically the same, each age and core civilization gets the thought and culture it needs.(Morris, 568, 570) Moreover, the thought reflects the times and similar times in China or in Europe, all produce similar thoughts, similar literatures, similar philosophies. Stark rejects this notion of similarities and instead stresses the differences in ideas; indeed asserting that it is the different ideas of the West that prompted the West to invent, develop, and dominate. Morris writes, “Given enough time, Easterners would probably have made the same discoveries, and had their own industrial revolution, but geography made it much easier for Westerners – which meant that because people [in large groups] are much the same, Westerners had their industrial revolution first. It was geography that took…”[the West to the top](Morris, 565) Morris partly explains Asian stagnation, “This hard ceiling sets a rigid limit on what agricultural empires can do. The only way to break it is to tap into the stored energy of fossil fuels, as Westerners did after 1750.”(Morris, 560) Morris concludes, “Why the West rules…geography explains the differences.”(557) There were Western core civilizations and Eastern ones too, and they moved over time mirrored in the Morris SD scale, which reflected climate changes, wars, and invasions. In the West the core began in rough, hilly regions of the Middle East, expanded to include the Fertile Crescent from Mesopotamia, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, Later it spread to Persia, Crete, Greece, and later still to Carthage and Rome. By the first century AD when it reached its peak in the early Roman Empire, it included all of the Mediterranean and beyond. The Eastern core moved from northern China to include southern China, and later Japan and Southeast Asia. The Han Empire in China was contemporary with the early Roman Empire and there was trade between them. With the fall of the western Roman empire, the weakening of Byzantium, and soon thereafter the rise of Islam, Morris asserts that the Western core moved eastward, to Constantinople, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad. Why? Those areas had higher SD scores on his scale then Paris or London of that time. And it is at that time, 541 AD, that the Eastern SD rose higher than any SD of the West. The East began to dominate. The East would retain dominance until 1773 when the invention, improvement and development of the steam engine created the Industrial Revolution in the West. Consequently, there were great strides in Western methods of warfare, in everyday wages, and living standards. By 1800 the West was on the path to dominate most of the world. So argues Morris in his book filled with details to support his thesis. And the axioms underlying his thesis can be stated – All people in large groups are basically the same; all eras and places get the thoughts they require; all respond to various climatic changes in the same way. We are all alike except for our geography, and the geography explains the differences and why the West rules for now. These are the underlying hypotheses upon which Morris constructs his theory. Stark presents a different view – that different ideas produce different results. He maintains that the Christian view of a monotheistic creator of the universe in which God is rational and wants men to discover the natural, rational world provided a framework for science. While in some Eastern and Greek religions polytheism might provide numerous and contradictory explanations as to why something occurred – the gods were fighting with each other with lightening or storms, or astrology was seeking to forecast our lives, or some religions urged avoidance of this world, meditation, reaching for Nirvana, or simply do what was always done to satisfy one’s ancestors. This often led to superstition. Some centuries after Islam conquered Egypt, Saladin quoted Caliph Omar, who allegedly had burnt the remains of what had been the great Library of Alexandria, the repository of much of the knowledge of the ancient world. Omar had said that if the works in the Library supported the Koran, then they were not needed; and if they did not support the Koran, they should be destroyed. Furthermore, Saladin used this as justification for his own purge of heretical literature. Though Christians had a current of narrow-minded thought similar to this, – indeed, some of them had previously burnt part of the Library, – overall Christianity was generally more-open minded and willing to objectively evaluate the wisdom of the past. Also important, Christianity was more willing to ponder, reflect, innovate, and incorporate discoveries, even those that might challenge ancient pagan texts or Christian orthodoxy. Stark certainly does NOT deny that invention can happen anywhere, among any people. The Chinese invented gun powder, the printing press, and paper. Indians developed the zero and what we in the West call Arabic numerals. (Meso Americans invented the zero independently). Inventions occurred everywhere. But Stark posits a difference between technique, mere invention, and a general scientific approach. Stark asserts that the scientific approach developed in the West in the Dark Ages and this approach was refined at another unique European invention, the university. Morris maintains that the West did not retake the lead from the Eastern core until 1773 AD. But Stark, in an earlier work, The Victory of Reason and the Rise of Christianity, writes: “When Europeans first began to explore the globe, their greatest surprise was not the existence of the Western Hemisphere but the extent of their own technical superiority over the rest of the world. Not only were the proud Mayan, Aztec, and Inca nations helpless in the face of the European intruders; so were the fabled civilizations of the East: China, India, and even Islam were backward by comparison with 16th century Europe. How had this happened?”(ix) Stark answers on the next page. “While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary aid to religious truth…,Greek religions. These remained typical mystery cults, in which ambiguity and logical contradictions were taken as hallmarks of sacred origins. Similar assumptions concerning the fundamental inexplicability of the gods and the intellectual superiority of introspection dominated all the other major world religions. But from early days, the church fathers taught that reason was the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase their understanding of scripture and revelation. Consequently, Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past.”[Emphasis in original](x) If the West, with a few hundred men could conquer the empires of the Aztecs and Incas, surely that West was ahead of them militarily. But around the same time, the West was able, far from its home ports, to establish bases in India, South Africa, East Africa, the Persian Gulf, Malaysia, and made tiny inroads into China and Japan. This was occurring centuries before “the Industrial Revolution” of 1750 that Morris deems decisive in the West’s drive to dominate. My purpose here is to raise questions about the theses proposed by both Morris and Stark. The early Roman Empire was a high point for the West (and the world of SD, according to Morris, for the world would not surpass that highmark until about AD 1100, and it was achieved in the Eastern core, not in the West. By Morris’s calculation, the West would not reach the height of the early Roman Empire until 1750 AD, with the Industrial Revolution. And Morris attributes that feat to the development of the steam engine. Water wheels and wind mills had been invented in Roman times, and used spottily, but the steam engines and their applications would make the West the unchallenged rulers of the World after 1800. Water wheels had been used in Roman-era Egypt for grinding, and combined with the Greek developed gear system, the wheels were used in sequence in Roman-era Spanish mines to remove water from flooded levels so mining could resume. Elsewhere, the water wheels were also used to grind grain and prepare cloth. In the 1st century AD, Heron of Alexandria, who lectured at the Museum/Library, in addition to writing on geometry and engineering, also invented several objects. One was a wind organ, perhaps the first use of wind to power a land-based device. Another was the steam engine. In addition, Heron also devised a steam-powered contraption to open the heavy doors of a temple. But there was not general exploration or development of the use of steam power in the Roman Empire. If, as Morris often asserts, people get the thought they need, either Rome did not need the use of the steam engine (perhaps slaves could supply all the power necessary), or Rome did NOT get the ideas it needed to advance. Bottom line – Rome did not experience an Industrial Revolution. But the same example can be viewed as a problem for Stark as well. True, Christians were only a tiny minority of the Roman Empire in the 1st century when Heron invented. But after 325 they became the religion of the Emperor Constantine, and later, the religion of the Empire. If as Stark asserts, Christianity is the religion that promotes reason and science, why was there no steam-engine propelled Industrial Revolution in the Christian Roman Empire in the AD 300s? One might answer, they lacked time because Rome fell (the sack of Rome 410 AD; the last Roman Emperor of the West, 476 AD). There may have been insufficient time in the western Roman Empire, but Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire were Christian and they lasted another thousand years. However, other than Greek fire, where were the great inventions of the Christian empire during that millennium? To what extent was the Roman Empire, based in cities, a parasitic one? It did invent poured concrete, built colossal monuments, arenas, the Hippodrome, the Coliseum, baths, aqueducts, and a navy that cleared the Mediterranean of piracy. It built roads that eased land transport, and most importantly, assembled a Code of Law which would influence much of the world to this day. Yet Rome seemed stuck, unable to advance beyond the cities, living on the ever larger agricultural enterprises wherein the free farmer was reduced to the status of a near slave, with whom he competed for work. Stark has a very negative view of the western Roman Empire. Was there some inner corrosive factor in the Roman Empire, even at its height, that led ultimately to its decline and fall by 476? And in the east in 1453? No matter how high it rose on Morris’s SD scale? Perhaps the ideas that Rome really required were best expressed in 1896 at the Democratic Convention – “I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” But William Jennings Bryan, who spoke those words, would not have been running for the office of Emperor in Rome. Over time, the cities of the Roman Empire became ever more parasitic, living off the grains imported from Egypt, Tunisia, and Sicily, and the wines and olive produce from rural Italy. Beneficiaries of a welfare state might enjoy free wine, bread, and circuses, the daily shows in the Coliseum – shout with delight as an exotic beast, imported for the exhibition, mauls a human to death. They might wager on one gladiator as he punctures the leg of another with his sword. They stir with excitement as they watch blood flow. Of course, there were other delights, and we still speak of the Roman baths. But in all those centuries, the Romans never bothered to invent soap (an innovation of the Germanic barbarians). At the baths slaves would occasionally have to shovel out the filth and muck that settled to the bottoms of the pools. Of course, slavery was prevalent in the Roman Empire as it probably was in most of the world. When Islam rose, it conquered many of the richest areas of the world, Judah, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, all of North Africa, most of Portugal and Spain, plus Iraq, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, part of India, and beyond. If Abdul Rahman had defeated the Franks at the Battle of Poitiers (Tours) in northern France in 732, “Europe” would have disappeared, to be known henceforth only as the north-western fringe of Islam. Charles Martel defeated the Muslim invaders and saved Europe. Because of the length of my review, the full review can be read on my blogspot.

⭐This is a contribution to the body of writings addressing the question of why the “West” rose and came to dominate the “rest”. This is a question that has interested scholars – especially Western scholars – for at least a hundred years. Different answers have been produced. Some early scholars looked to biological superiority although there are few takers for this line of thinking these days – expect in far right fringe groups. Others look to cultural attributes such as the Protestant work ethic (Weber and RH Tawney) but also more general attributes of Western Christendom going back to the Middle Ages (David Landes). Karl Marx emphasised the importance of the development of industrial capitalism in the West in making it a leader. Another school looks at material factors such as the easy availability of coal in places like England (Pomeranz) or the discovery of the Americas and the “free kick” provided to the West in the harnessing its resources (Pomeranz and Frank).For Morris, the answer is geography. This does not mean a crude geographic determinism that permanently locks in advantage. Rather, while the West has led in social development, that is the sum competencies of a society for at least 14 millennia according to Morris, the “East” not the West led between 550CE and about 1775CE. It was “brute material forces” determined by geography and their intersection with social factors that explains the waxing and waning of the respective leads of “East” and “West”.The authors methodology is to assess and rate on a numeric scale the respective capabilities of West and East over a long period by means of a number of measures. These are energy capture (manifested for example in the ability to produce goods and deploy force), urbanisation (as a proxy for organisational ability), the ability to process information and the ability to deploy military force. He uses this to construct a kind of historical human development index to measure the capability of societies over millennia. This of itself is an ambitious task and resembles Angus Maddison’s work to construct a measure of the size of economies in the past including the distant past.The author commences his argument by looking at what he says were the natural advantages of the “hilly flanks” area in the Middle East, namely the wider variety of crops and animals available for domestication compared with other parts of the world and more favourable climate. The argument is that these circumstances gave the Western descendants of the Hilly Flanks an early advantage. He goes on to survey the subsequent rise of the two “Western cores”, namely Mesopotamia and Egypt to show an early lead for the West in the achievements of these two societies.The East then plays catch up and by the time of the Han Dynasty had just about caught up.The advantage given to the West by access to the resources of the Americas which were easier to get to from Western Europe than the Middle East or China is the key turning point giving the West its later advantage. It goes on to develop this advantage and eventually crowns it in the nineteenth century with the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution allows the West (led by England) to accumulate huge amounts of wealth and power and use this to dominate the East and the rest of the world.That advantage however is short lived. The East is quick to absorb and assimilate the technological and organisational capabilities of the West and begin rolling back the tide – even without the advantage of American resources or an equivalent. Japan leads the way with its crash programme of modernisation commencing in the 1870s. China begins modernising in the 1950s and India in the 1990s. He sees India’s lag as a product of the fact that it was directly colonised by the West so holding it back. China and Japan avoided this fate and could begin to modernise earlier. He sees the West’s lead rapidly coming to an end. Some scholars refer to this process as the “Great Convergence” as a mirror to what is called the “Great Divergence” when the West after the 1770s took the lead.The attempt made by Morris to answer the question he poses is interesting. He covers vast ground and collects together a huge amount of information. This of itself makes his book worth reading although for anyone with some basic knowledge of world history, there might be too much basic information that is not really necessary to make the points that Morris wishes to make. There is also nothing really new in his ideas (other than perhaps use of a historic HDI) but his work is an easy to read synthesis of other writings. Morris however makes a good case to convince the reader that in the end it is not matters of culture and race that matter but the “brute material” elements, consideration of which he skilfully weaves into the narrative to explain why some develop faster than others and achieve dominance. In this regard, Morris may be closer in his broad approach to that of Frank, Pomeranz and Jack Blaut than the cultural determinism of David Landes and Max Weber, particularly his emphasis on the key advantages gained by Europe in first getting to the Americas and harnessing its resources to get one over the “East”.The main weakness of the book is the focus on Europe and North America on the one hand and China on the other as the basis for his argument. If the task is to explain who led and why, the limits that the author places on his enquiry – which he himself admits – becomes problematic, in particular, the omission of any serious consideration of India and Islam. For parts of the period in question, there is a strong case that India was the leader not China or the West. India not China contained the world’s largest economy for much of the period after 200BCE and held that position until the early modern times according to data complied by the economist Angus Maddison. That economic power was also mirrored by the cultural pull of India – “soft power” we would say these days – from the time of the Mauryas. Indian culture and influence spread far afield – into South East Asia, Central Asia and even China. Chinese or Western influence at the time did not have so wide a reach – as Morris acknowledges. Indian science was also widely admired and studied for example at the House of Wisdom in Abbasid Baghdad and in China. There is little evidence of a reverse movement of knowledge and ideas until much later strongly suggesting that the “centre” at the time arguably lay in India at least until the Tang era in China and the Abbasid in the Middle East. India therefore was at least as much a leader if not more so during the earlier period in question.The omission of Islam also is a deficiency even if there is greater coverage of Islam than of India. Under the Ummayads and Abbasids, a case for Islam as the leader can also be made in all fields using measures of economic power, political power and cultural reach. During the High Middle Ages, it was Westerners who studied Arabic and learnt from Islamic science rather than the converse. It was also the case that the Islam by the end of the period had established dominance in India and parts of Europe and was banging at the gates of China. Even in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans arguably were the dominant political power in Europe not Spain or the Austrian Hapsburgs.A narrative based on the Euro-American and Chinese world may not therefore be well suited to addressing the basic question posed. “Who lead and why?” Morris’ narrative is the “G-2” version. A “G-20” version might do better in dealing with the subject. The work of world history by the father and son McNeill team “The Human Web” might better answer the question at hand using a much broader canvass even if this work of history does not expressly set out to answer the question posed by Morris.There is also a question of what Morris means by the “West”. He makes the statement that for all but two of the last 14 millenia, the West has led the way. This statement requires inclusion of the Fertile Crescent area of the Middle East as belonging to the “West”. This no doubt accurately reflects the canonical view where the story of the West is said to begin in Mesopotamia. However, the problem is that what is today the Islamic world of the Middle East also traces its beginnings to the same roots and arguably has a better claim to these roots as theirs rather than belonging to the “West”. Mesopotamia was also linked to the beginnings of Indian culture in the cities of the Indus with a direct and more immediate connection than that of Europeans to Mesopotamian culture. Indeed, it is not uncommon to understand the entire area of the Fertile Crescent and the areas of Iran and the Indus Valley as a common hearth where agriculture and urbanisation underwent a common process of development. Mesopotamia in this sense belongs more to the Middle Eastern “core” (Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Anatolia and the Levant) and to a lesser extent India, than it does to Euro-America. Morris seems to deal with this problem at times by implying a broader concept of what is the “West” by including in it Europe as well as the Middle East. This is an idea that deserves further exploration going against the usual definition of what is the “West”.What though do Asians and Africans make of the whole debate? Intriguingly, the best known writings on the question “why did the West lead” come from Western sources. There appears to be a lacuna in scholarship on the problem by the “rest”. The answer as to what the rest thought however may be found most easily not in the work of scholars but in the writings of early Asian and African nationalists and nation builders. They did in fact address the question in detail and come up with some answers. The question for them was “How did the West do it?” and the complementary question of “what do we need to do to catch up?” For the Chinese reformers during the late Qing era, the Meiji era Japanese and nineteenth and twentieth century Indian reformers, it was a matter of mastering and applying Western technology and institutions in a selective way without the need to assume Western culture as such. No large non-Western society saw the solution to the problem of “catching up” in a wholesale absorption of Western culture such as through conversion to Christianity. They gave a more narrowly focused attention to technology and selective adoption of Western institutions. Indeed, it cannot be said that those who have adopted Western religion and culture in a more wholesale manner such as in Christian Africa or the Philippines have as a result acquired advantages over those who have not done so – such as Japanese, Indians (and even Chinese despite their adoption of Marxist-Leninism for a while).The proof of the pudding lies in the eating in that the simple formula used first by the Japanese has proved effective including China and India of today. These societies have narrowed the gap or caught up without taking to heart the message of Max Weber, David Landes or RH Tawney. Non-Western nation builders have narrowed or closed the gap not by reading Calvin’s institutes but by paying attention to and reading engineering and science manuals – and also adopting some of the instruments of social mobilisation first used in the West, importantly the nation state and all its trappings. Morris’ emphasis on brute material forces therefore adds up when tested against the actual record is asking why do societies rise and fall. Indeed, Morris at the end of his book poses the complementary question “How did the rest start catching up”? The simple formula pioneered by the Japanese and followed by others comes close to the answer – and this becomes apparent to anyone in the world of business who has some first hand knowledge of the rapid industrialisation of China and India – even just in witnessing what was one day a field worked by farmers becoming an efficient modern factory virtually overnight. This happens against a context of largely continuity and evolution of the local culture. The same forces that allowed the West to rise went on to allow the rest to catch up or start catching up – without the wealth of the Americas.Finally, there is another question. Why did the West at the point of its dominance have to let go of its empires in Asia and Africa? As the leader by such a margin employing the four point index suggested by Morris, should the West have not been able to easily hold on using its huge advantages? However, it did not. This may suggest that Morris’ indexes of capability need to be tested further to explain how a less capable society through mobilisation of its own (on Morris’ argument) lesser resources can get rid of the more capable society’s political dominance? The answers may involve more than just an aggregation of quantifiable material capabilities as a survey of the history of colonial nationalist movements and their eventual success against powerful Western empires suggests. How the weaker can overcome the stronger is not easily understood using Morris’ index. If history could indeed be reduced to the ability to understanding its processes through a capability index, this would make the historian’s task so much easier – but less satisfying. If there is a master key to history, it may not be reducible to a capability index of the kind devised by Morris (and he does not make that claim) – and that master key is yet to be found.

⭐This was not quite the book I was expecting from the title. Although Ian Morris does eventually address the statement directly in Part 3 – and does so in a bold and thought-provoking way – the rest of the book is actually a fairly comprehensive history of the world from the very beginning of human history. The author contends throughout that this extensive assessment of the past is essential in order to understand where we are now and what the future may hold but the main lesson, that social development has waxed and occasionally waned at differential rates in different parts of the world above all as a consequence of geography, could have been made without much of the detail on ancient civilisations he provides. It’s not helped by the fact his definition of both West and East is so fluid (in the former case the Middle East, then Mediterranean Europe, then Atlantic Europe and finally the United States). Also until the Silk Road trade routes started to become significant in the final few centuries BC and global competition began, to my mind the relative sophistication of the two development cores doesn’t really matter that much.Ian Morris is more than anything else an archaeologist so I suppose the attention he gives to early history is understandable. And he writes clearly and concisely, bringing in some interesting incidental detail and references to popular culture’s take on the past which definitely makes the narrative more engaging than it would otherwise be. Any attempt to condense world history into a single volume is inevitably constrained by the construct used, but although the focus on ‘East’ and ‘West’ marginalises the great Inca, Aztec and Mayan civilisations in the Americas, the author’s approach fundamentally works pretty well (and better for example than the Peter Frankopan book The Silk Roads which almost completely ignores the Industrial Revolution, to date arguably the most significant event in human history, only because it doesn’t fit into his thesis). Ian Morris also addresses something that has bugged me ever since reading the totally Western-oriented account of scientific discovery contained in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything: namely the extent to which the same breakthroughs were occurring independently in Asia. The answer in the 18th and 19th centuries – for reasons which are well articulated – genuinely seems to be: not very much.To conclude: there is much to admire about this book and the author’s scholarship is highly impressive; just be warned that it goes way beyond the subject matter of its title.

⭐History is not my strong subject. I didn’t really connect with it at school. Looking back, I think the way it was taught was too disconnected: We would be taught about ‘The Romans’, ‘The Egyptians’, ‘The Civil War’ as isolated modules. I like to understand how things work, and pursued more technical subjects. But I’ve always wished to understand how the world came to be the way it did – what the mechanism is.That’s what this book mainly does. For me, the East vs. West thing is a lesser part of the story. Here is a book that tells the tale of humanity, from monkey to cyborg. A book that connects history into a joined-up narrative.It explains how human drives interacted with the environment – climate, geography, resources – to create the various institutions and lifestyles that characterized each different civilization. It shows how progress sows the seeds of trouble for itself, how development often hits a ‘ceiling’ and falls back several times until a specific innovation in technology or politics can break through.When reading it I had alternate feelings of astounding luck and ominous dread:Luck to be living at this time, when most of history is filled with violence, hardship, disease and oppression. (I lost count of the cumulative death toll from these causes, but it definitely runs into the billions)Dread at what the author predicts for the future, where development is accelerating at an exponential rate, and a gentle leveling-off just isn’t going to happen (it never does). It’s techno-utopia or bust (really big bust, loads more billions dead).If traditional history books aren’t really for you then don’t be put off. This is well worth the read for anyone who is interested in sociology, politics, technology or anthropology (in fact it may make you want to learn more about these subjects and to link them in your mind).It’s much more about trends and causality than about great individual characters – in fact it downplays individual greatness and ego, stating that each age inevitably generates the people and thought that it needs.I really enjoyed it and would recommend.

⭐Anyone wanting an overview of western and eastern civilization from the last Ice Age until the present – written in the most entertaining and likeable style – and the reasons for the different development time-scales, could not pick a better book. He certainly demolishes the idea that the western superiority was anything in-built, and also demolishes the idea that the Chinese rise is inevitable. Taking a sweep that encompasses the external reasons for the rise and fall of each ‘core’ and the probable patterns involved, I found this book both extremely informative and a different way of looking at history.

⭐This is the best single volume history of the world I have ever read. What makes it even better is that it is also numerate history, with many numbers, graphs and tables to back up the narrative. What makes it even more interesting is Morris’ use of a “social development” index as the fundamental backdrop to his narrative. Essentially, Morris quantifies human development with a four part index of social development, made up of four parts: energy capture, war making ability, social organisation (measured by largest city size) and information technology, and applies this to both the West (essentially southwest Asia, Europe and north Africa) and the East (essentially China and east Asia). He uses this to answer the question of why the West took over a global Earth rather than the East. The book will be of interest also to Science Fiction fans, as it makes liberal use of Heinlein and Asimov; indeed, his numerical approach to all of human history is the first groping attempt at Asimov’s pschohistory of the Foundation series. What is interesting is his conclusions about what is likely to happen next. Not everyone will agree with his conclusion that human civilisation is doomed: sometime in the 21st Century, either the Singularity or Nightfall will happen, i.e. civilisation will survive (but it won’t be human) or it will collapse completely.

⭐Helps the reader understand why Western culture has come to dominate the planet. Too much use of data at times

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