Why the West Rules—for Now

Once you open this book, you will not be able to leave it. Ian Morris bombards you with information, not only from history and archaeology, but from a variety of auxiliary sciences, and although that makes for probably a slower reading, it also will keep you hooked in for more. The question he sets for himself is to explain why the Western civilizations of Western Europe and North America have led the world economically, culturally and militarily for the last 200 years, and not the Eastern civilizations of China and Japan; but he isn't happy with the explanations others have given. He constructs an index of social development to measure the advance of civilizations and evaluates the evolution of each region throughout history to arrive at answers as to why social development rises and falls, and rose so spectacularly since ca. 1800 in the West. Not all is successful. The huge rise in the 19th and 20th centuries of all of his index's parameters would have demanded that he split it in two; one pre- and one post- industrial, to better account for the peculiarities of both sides of the upturning curve during the Industrial Revolution. As it is, the graphic looks like a 90-degree turn from almost horizontal to almost vertical. It is a realistic view considering the enormous material growth of the last two centuries, but makes comparisons between the pre- and post- era hard to maintain. This is yet exacerbated by his usage of the same index towards the future. There really is no argument anywhere on why the slope should continue to be the same rate in the future. Another omission that I consider to be important is the almost complete neglect of South Asia. Morris does a very good job of summarizing Chinese and Japanese (for the East) and Middle Eastern and European (for the West) history, the pressures each faced, and the ways they raised (or not) their social development. The annexation of the Americas and Africa into the Western empires in the age of 1500-1950 probably is good enough to justify their omissions. Yet it doesn't seem justifiable to me to omit South Asia in a book that aspires to explain great patterns of history that explain the rise, stagnation or fall of civilizations across each great cultural core in the world. South Asia is clearly independent of both a Sinic East and a Sumerian West, and although in contact with both since classical antiquity, it has never really integrated into either anymore than you could say Japan and the Asian Tigers have Westernized in the last few decades. If even in a global village era it makes sense to speak of West and East (which Morris assumes all the book, but by the end you get the impression he leaves this assumption unjustified and probably is himself not convinced of it), then it should make sense to speak of a "middle" South Asian core too. However, the real shortcoming of this book is in its extrapolations for the future. While all of them are presented as nothing more than possibilities, you still get the impression that, compared to the great erudition and analysis displayed before, they lack a lot of rigor. Morris has exposed by now, over and over, civilizations dominating their natural environment and modifying their social and economic organization once and again; sometimes giving rise to new heights of development, and sometimes falling victim to nature or to man-made crises. These falls, themselves, sometimes are short and sometimes last for centuries, and the climbing back itself takes several forms, depending on the experiences learned and the new opportunities available. Then he does not seem to try to apply the same to the future. He posits a future where his graphics would continue under the same tendencies, with the standard of living on both the North Atlantic rim and China steadily rising until by 2103 the East surpasses the West and becomes the most advanced civilization. Then he says he doesn't really believe this will happen, and advances a dichotomy between a Singularity future, where technology again breaks all the barriers previously set, advancing social development to heights we can't imagine today; and a Nightfall future, where nuclear war or environmental catastrophe reduce humankind to the stone age again, or even exterminate it. Now, there is no denying that either of these two futures should not be discounted, and should be considered possible. What should be questioned is that *only* these two futures are considered viable by Morris, with no kind of intermediate future. Everything he wrote previously regarding past collapses of empires and civilizations seems to apply again, and imply that a collapse, while possible, should not push humanity back into the stone age, but stall, maybe even reverse, some development, but only temporarily before the challenges were met by new people and civilizations discovering new ways to organize and meet the challenges thrown at them by nature and other humans. Conversely, everything about previous rises of social development indicates that ceilings are approached sometimes and that when this happens, it takes time before any civilization is capable of breaking them. There is nothing in history that predicts either Nightfall or Singularity, and everything to predict some intermediate future, and all the previous chapters stand as proof, which makes it all the more of a shortcoming. (In this context too, it ends up being more of a disappointment that he doesn't examine more regions. South Asia, again, seems like an obvious place to examine, but now again the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and even Latin America could well be regions that discover new advantages of backwardness, surpass both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific, and solve the Gordian knot of Singularity or Nightfall, if indeed it were an unavoidable dichotomy with current ways of organization. It is also disappointing that, although he speculates about nuclear war, financial crises, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, and clean energy, he only mentions in passing the demographic crises that most of the world is heading toward, including all the core East Asian countries and all of the core Western ones except the USA). That said, I still give it 5 stars, because it is a very well researched and written book, which as I said, will keep you hooked for more from start to finish. It also seems to me that Morris makes a plausible and well supported argument about the reasons why Western dominance since the 1750s happened, which is its main goal. It should spark debate both about its main issue of Western rise to global dominance, and about its speculations about the future, which should be a positive thing. This is a seminal book, which is sure to become a classic. Yet be aware of the shortcomings I mentioned too.

Why The West Rules- for Now is a unique look at how civilization has evolved and in particular, the driving forces of developement in both the east and the west. It is a mixture of archaeology, history, economics and sociology. The book is split into several parts, it begins with the origin of man, going thru how homo sapien came into existence and goes through the migratory patterns of pre-human ancestry. This is then followed with a study of ancient civilization, how it evolved and how society was structured. It follows then as a history lesson for major eastern and wester civilization and then finally ends with an analysis of today. I will attempt to break down the book into its 3 parts. The first part of the book I found the least intereting part of the book. It is a study of early man and the origins of our species. It goes through the bone records throughout the planet of various pre-human species and explores the possible differences in origin of eastern and western people. The author then goes through why the evidence does not support such a thesis at all, ie that eastern people can from a different, inferior genetic crop. Ive never heard such arguments in recent history and spending 60 pages on a subject that hasnt been proposed for the last 20 years was a bit of a waste of time. The book then takes a turn for the better in going through ancient civilization. The history of civilization is the meat of the book. The author goes through, by defining a social index based on some objective measures of "sophistication", the map of human developement in both east and west. The author then shows the evolution of both cultures, with the west outperforming and then underperforming post the fall of rome, only to outperform again post the industrial revolution. The author discusses the stresses and engines of growth of civilizations at each age and is very interested in describing the dynamics between these stresses and engines as the means to understanding their limitations. One gets a solid re-introduction to modern civilization by reading this section. The explanation of the differences between the developement in civilization is described as a function of several variables and puts the relative outperformance of the west over the east to be of geographic origin, in particular having sea channels to formalize trade in early civilization and the proximity to the americas in later civilization. In addition the weather patterns at the dawn of civilization clearly impacted defined where the first agricultural societies could form. As we get to the conclusion we get to the most interesting aspect of the book which is the authors conclusion. The author believes the reader should not focus on east and west. In particular he believes in the shrinking world in which labour has become a more tradeable good and we are far more interconnected than we have ever been, it can be difficult to disentangle different cultures. As a result he believes we are at a new crossroads in which either, we will stop our upward trajectory and turn back in our developement index or we will break through into a new age. The author takes a somewhat unique view of the world by looking at it as testing a new developement cieling. In a certain sense its a modified Malthusian argument, where the contraint is now resource extraction and production in conjunction with environmental repurcussions. One can get a lot out of the book, the perspective of the conclusion I thought was fresh and interesting, the rest of the book was informative in most places and in some it debated points that werent worthy of the time the author put in.

There is a great deal to recommend this book. An historical depth that I have rarely come across before (Guns, Germs, and Steel is another example). A willingness, eagerness to treat Eurasia as a single geographical organism. An attempt to develop an objective standard for measuring states and empires through social development. Much else besides. The last chapter falls apart, as futurism, generally does into bizarre, but unique, tropes drawn from Asimov and Kurzweil. This last seemed to come out of nowhere and that's one of the weaknesses of the conclusion is that the reader was not given a background for this. I've read both others and see much to recommend Asimov but feel Kurzweil, though demanding and compelling, is on the lunatic fringe of rational thought. Having said this I feel that Morris Theorem [That change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they are doing) looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things] is interesting and as cynical as the rest of the book. This is not a book where the individual [great or otherwise] has any real place. All is groups and clinical abstractions which rule our lives ... not least of these is geography. Since this last has re-appeared with Jared Diamond more and more has been ascribed to it. And here's the problem with this brilliant book [no sarcasm intended]. Morris has given himself, and us, over to his algorithms. The problem with such prognosticating is that you never ever have enough data to plug into the equation so that it returns a correct response. Take the credit crunch....only one or two saw it coming and they were unknowns...for the most part. The business of prediction is only as good as your data. Here the data is sparse and open to radically different interpretations. Then there is that business o f us all becoming spiritual machines (Kurzweil). What can I really say about that? How do you either prove or disprove this? No, there are too many variables for to take seriously his vision of the future....but environmental extremists and futurists will love him to death. What is great about this book is the examination of Eurasia from about 9,600 BCE until approximate 2050 CE. Well, up until 2010 or so is great...things go to hell after that point....but they're fun if muddled. If you are looking for an all-in-one book about Eurasia this is great. However, India has no place in this narrative (though there are glancing references). What is brilliant is how he redefines the West...not just Europe but he extends it all the way to Northern Iraq and Southern Iran (the hilly flanks of southwestern Asia....India I think). From here he tracks the evolution of the West which finally encompasses Europe...its one time periphery. The data on China's various dynasties and empires is very interesting. Also why the West discovered the Americas and had an Industrial Revolution and East Asia did not. There's a lot to find silly and more to open a dialogue with in this book but as a whole I would rate it one of my best non-fiction reads in many years. Well worth the effort (long book but well written) and price of admission. But do I believe it? Some....but not the stuff post-2010...that is just too loopy for me. Highly recommended for history, economic, fringe thought buffs.

As can be seem by both the summary and and various book reviews, this is big history, encompassing the dawn of the first homonids (or ape-men as the author put it) to present day, with a chapter conjecturing about the future. I was going to try and compare it to some of books in the same genre that I have read, but this book takes, disproves and/ or builds on their arguments - books such as Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Pommeranz's the Great Divergence, Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations - and they are all cited in his book and Morris takes pains to show how they only focus on one small piece of the picture. Indeed the feeling of reading this must have been similar for those who read Marx's Das Kapital for the first time (although the language is much more accessible and the conclusion is open ended) in that it attempts to set out underlying laws of history. In the words of the author - "History is not one damn thing after another, it is a single grand and relentless process of adaptations to the world that always generate new problems (in the form of disease, famine, climate change, migration and state failure) that call for further adaptations. And each breakthrough came not as a result of tinkering but as a result of desperate times, calling for desperate measures." There may be set backs and hard ceilings, with free will and culture being the wildcards that may hinder social development but eventually the conditions give rise to ideas that allow progress to be made. Indeed the motor of progress is not some economic logic, but what he calls the Morris Theorem - (expanding an idea from the great SF writer Robert Heinlein) to explain the course of history - Change is caused by lazy, greedy frightened people (who rarely know what they are doing) looking for easier more profitable and safer ways to do things. And it is geography that is the key determining factor where something develops first - Maps, not Chaps. Now all this sounds academic and boring and in the case of the Morris theorem a little oversimplistic, but the presentation definitely is not. As professor Jared Diamond states, it is like an exciting novel (told by a cool eccentric uncle) and he uses a wide range of popular media to support his case, at one point talking about the movies Back to the Future, 300, the Scorpion King or making references to novels such as the Bonesetters Daughter and Clan of the Cave bear to bring conditions to life. Indeed the emotional similarities (and sheer sense of fun!) to playing early versions of the Sid Meier's Civilization Computer Game are uncanny. There is a wide range of material here to satisfy a range of interests - his summaries of the fossil record, and early middle eastern and Chinese history are succinct and clear. Especially on the Chinese side, I had to read 2 books - the Golden Age of Chinese Archaelogy and the Cambridge History of Ancient China to gain the same understanding of what he summarizes in about 7-8 pages. He discourses on the role of the Axial religions, on whether democracy was important to the rule of the west, the role of free will in history, and on provocative ideas like the Qin and Roman empires expemplifing what he calls the paradox of violence: when the rivers of blood dried, their imperialism left most people, in the west and the east better off. I could go on and on and, of course, there may be many experts who take issue with his interpretations (and his predictions) but it will definitely stimulate thinking. If I had to make a criticism of the book - it is that, like Marx, it is fundamentally materialistic in its approach, ideas are like memes that facilitate social development and culture is something that can help or hinder development but has no value in itself. The great religious ideas are glossed over as a product of or reaction to their times. It has precious little to say about the spiritual life and spiritual discoveries such as ethics, meditation or psychology. It may be these discoveries and qualities that will be required to get us through the challenges - of climate change, overpopulation, resourse shortages and potential nuclear war. It is worthwhile comparing the book to two writings that he cites as inspiration (1) Herbert Spencer - Progress its Law and Cause and (2) Isaac Azimov's Foundation series. In each case they try to identify the forces that drive humanity but Spencer just doesn't have the data in the 19th century and the historian Hari Seldon is joke amongst professional historians as the novels seem so implausibly optimistic about what history can do. I don't know if Ian Morris has succeeded in identifying the laws of history but this book could only have been written now, at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, drawing together the strains from archaeology, genetics, linguistics as well as sociology and economics to create something altogether new and wonderful and accessible to that elusive thing - the educated lay reader.

History is a fascinating subject, if it is told in the right way. To me, the right way means--instead of rotely reciting the facts or twisting them to fit into a narrow thesis--tapping into the big trend, showing the big picture, making connections between seemingly unrelated events and giving objective insights into the multifaceted dynamics of large groups of people interacting with one another. While there have been some great titles available to 21st century readers, none comes close to being as grand, broad, deep and innovative as this book. The question of why the West rules the world for the past two centuries has always been an intriguing one, at least to people of Chinese descent. In recent years, it has taken on significantly greater urgency and relevance to mainstream Americans. But the various answers to date have been narrow, incomplete analysis like those given by the blind men who tried to describe an elephant. To reach a comprehensive understanding, Ian Morris has had to combine multiple disciplines, including physics, botany, economics, anthropology, paleontology, archaeology and history, and invent his own index of "Cultural Development". Just this metric is a great contribution to mankind's knowledge base, as it finally gives a concrete, quantitative measure to the general concepts of advanced versus backward and rise versus decline. To convince the readers of his conclusion, the author retells the entire history of mankind, from ape-men to the year 2010. I am totally amazed by his ability to do so in 645 fun-filled pages and still to cover practically every relevant detail. Even more impressively, he often sheds new light on these familiar facts for me so that I finally can see the history in the right context. For example, who are the Hittites? What is their relevance? Well, not until I read this book did I understand that they represent the infusion into the core of western civilization (Mesopotamia/Egypt) a new weapon (chariot) driven by a new large domesticated mammal (horse) that is the only major natural resource missing in the blessed region militarily, agriculturally and economically since the dawn of history. What is the author's conclusion after going through the entire human history with his new fine-tooth comb, the index of cultural development? He finds that, although individuals vary from one another greatly, large groups of people are often very much alike. He shows convincingly that this is definitely the case between the west (Europeans and Americans) and the east (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans). Differences exist in styles but not in substance. Whatever causes one to lead the other in cultural development is always exogenous, mainly climatic and geographical factors. He also illustrates clearly that each level of development brings about new challenges, which can be overcome only with the right organization using the right technology under the right circumstances. Those who fail at these challenges either stagnate or sink into dark ages, allowing the "advantage of backwardness" to be realized. Extrapolating from recent trends, the author thinks that the east will most likely catch up with the west by the end of this century. This, in itself, is not too surprising, but the stories that leads to this conclusion are full of parallels and lessons for modern societies facing problems originating from their own development process. Anyone who cares about the fate of his nation and/or this earth will surely benefit from this book.

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.

Other reviews have covered this book well enough, on the whole. It's good. The best thing about it is the detail. Morris has an amazing head for small but telling details and quotes. I love every statistic and quote in here. The farther he gets from details, the shakier. I accept the general conclusions about geography and the near-inevitability of some sort of dominance by some sort of western core, thanks to that geography. Morris might make more of the geographic disunity of Europe; he does mention it, but could work it harder. Europe was spared from a stagnant land empire largely because the Alps and Carpathians and Pyrennees make it almost impossible. As a China scholar, I could pick some flies off the China coverage--some parts are out of date, notably--but this would not change his conclusions. I might use better measures of social development; the energy measure in particular bothers me--the basic idea is from Leslie White, and a number of trenchant critiques of his work are not answered here. But, again, I doubt if changing the measure would change the conclusions much. He can't quite sustain his indifference to "Great Man" theories; he has to admit Muhammad was rather special, and would surely do as much for Genghis Khan. There are a few other cases. But, overall, he makes a convincing case for broader forces. The one indefensible thing here is his "theorem" (of course it is no such thing) that people are lazy, greedy, and frightened, and so invent stuff to alleviate this. Everything is wrong with this claim. First, the terms are nasty judgments, not scientific or measurable appraisals. Second, they are relative. Laziness has to be defined in relation to industry; greed, to laudable desire to help one's family and fellow humans; fear, in relation to bravery. Third, if one gets around that by providing tight definitions, it's absurd. It would involve claiming that all humans really want only to lie under trees, steal everything from their neighbors (remember "greed" doesn't mean just wanting stuff, it means wanting to get it by unfair means), and run from mice and fleas. It would appear, from internal evidence, that Morris is just taking a silly and crowd-shocking way of saying that people like to invent labor-saving devices, like to get a bit more of everything for their loved ones, and need security. This isn't any normal definition of laziness, greed or fright. History reveals that labor-saving devices are invented by terribly hard-working, diligent people, and are invented to remove labor bottlenecks, not to let everyone sleep in the sun. The vacuum cleaner led to bigger houses with more carpets, not to easier housework. The automobile hasn't even shortened commuting time much (if at all)--it just means longer commutes. Actually, lazy peple are the last to invent or even adopt new stuff, even labor-saving new stuff. I could write a book on this, after a lifetime spent in and around international development. Pascal was much more correct when he said: "If you want a person to be grateful for even the worst job, make him [or her] do nothing for a week." Similarly for greed: people may want more, but economic progress comes from hard-working and usually self-sacrificing people, while the greedy are merely trying to steal it all. Similarly for fear. So, forget the flip cynicism and revel in the detail.

This has immediately become one of my favorite books. I'm a fan of "big history" and, thanks to his background in archaeology and incredible command of narrative history, Ian Morris goes about as big as you can get: starting from the beginning at the dawn of humanity to explain why the West rules. Going so far back is part of Morris's design to examine Western rule with greater rigor than most, first explaining what it means to rule (to have greater social development, that is the ability to get things done) and the division of West in East in prehistory. He further demonstrates that all humans are essentially the same and operate based on fear, laziness, and greed. Since we are all about the same, it is really geography, rather than culture or genetics, that explains why the West rules. While this might seem to be simply a redux of Jared Diamond's argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Morris's arguments are more complex and persuasive. Unlike Diamond, Morris does not think geography gave the West a long-term lock-in for rule. Rather, as social development changes over time, it changes the meaning of geography, as technology and accumulated learning allows people to discover advantages in peripheral areas. Indeed, the East surpassed the West in development for around 1200 years until the late 18th century. Morris further contends that although Western rule was very probable after the 14th century or so, the East had chances to keep its lead into the present before them. Like many writers of "big history," Morris sees humankind's path as being determined by impersonal forces of nature, geography, and biology, perhaps to the chagrin of historians/history buffs that prefer greater human agency. Morris addresses this convincingly, showing that people do have agency, but usually only over the timing of shifts that dictated by greater forces. However, he proposes that as social development is rising more rapidly than ever before, the world is much smaller, and people--namely world leaders--are poised to have a greater impact on the course of history than ever before. Considering the state of world leadership in 2017, this is a dark prospect. Made all the darker still by Morris's final conclusion that the next few decades are likely to be perhaps the most important in history, as we are poised to either reach transhuman levels of development, or hit a very hard development ceiling that could spell doom. I hope I've illustrated that I think this is an important book. It explains not only history, but the challenges that are ahead. Morris is also an incredible writer, never losing your attention as he covers centuries in paragraphs. He also has a lively sense of humor and grasp of popular culture. I especially appreciated his references to Isaac Asimov's work, especially his Foundation series, which has strikingly similar themes to Why the West Rules.

This is an informative book, well-presented and well-written (apart from where the author writes "looks like" when he means "looks as though.") His theme is that humans are humans, wherever they live, and respond in roughly the same way to the same stimuli, even if those stimuli occur at different times in different parts of the world. The East retreated into navel-gazing at precisely the same time as the West was discovering the New World and the possibilities of power from fossil fuels. Now the West has shot its bolt and the East is pulling ahead. But - and it's a big But - this book was written some years ago, just after the 2008 financial crisis. The author didn't anticipate Europe's failure to respond adequately to the GFC; he didn't anticipate Trump's elephantine effect on America; he didn't anticipate Covid's effect on the world's economy; he didn't anticipate the Ukraine war, which Nato cannot hope to win without going nuclear and can't hope to win if it does; and, worst of all, he didn't anticipate this year's *2023) dramatic proof that climate is real, is devastating, and is now unmistakably upon us. The author cannot be blamed for not foreseeing this tsunami of disasters. His book describes the disastrous effect of mass migrations on settled, prosperous societies; now we are going to see this for ourselves. The steady stream of refugees we are already unable to deal with is going to become a flood of millions upon millions of climate refugees, sloshing backwards and forwards, looking for somewhere new to settle and not finding it. Or, worse still, finding it.

Answering an important question by starting at the very beginning of human history - a daunting task well executed, with plenty of valuable lessons along the way. Also useful to brush up on your history in general.

Pictured on the dust cover, Ian Morris looks like central casting's idea of the rather less than satisfactory new husband of the ex-wife of the hero in a US TV cop series, probably, like Morris himself, English. Fortunately, given this image, Morris proves himself a much more than satisfactory author and analyst of the past, placing him firmly close to David Landes's tour de force The Wealth And Poverty Of Nations in its scope and ambition, marginally superior to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs And Steel in its audacity and conclusions, and almost on a par with Douglass North's Understanding The Process Of Economic Change in providing a coherent framework for doing exactly that. I will also claim a sort of affinity with a working class boy from the industrial Midlands, who got Betta Bilda for Xmas when he was young and developed an interest in everything and how it all joins together. Some of Morris's tale is, of course, fairly familiar to anyone who has read from the embarrassment of riches in the published economic, social, political and science histories of the last decade or so. Most will know of the extraordinary scale of the eunuch admiral Zheng-he's imperial Chinese fleet of the early 15th Century, and of how insularity and complacency curtailed its adventures; of how Muslims invented or protected an awful lot of what was worth having and knowing for a millennium, before conservative zealots decided that such things threatened their power; and of how the largely man-made miseries of the 20th Century gave way to a less zero-sum world in which second place was still first loser, but at least you didn't need fifty million body bags to start to clear up the mess (which isn't to say we're completely through with large-scale blood-letting, unfortunately). In short, he confirms for us enlightened (and possibly self-satisfied) liberals (a category which here would include both David Cameron and Vince Cable, not to mention Ed Miliband and bro Dave) the downside of a closed mind. Less often encountered previously, if at all, are the parallels he draws between events in the West and those in the East, with developments in the Roman and Qin empires looking remarkably similar. And certainly unique is his measure of development, an index based upon energy capture, urbanism, information processing and capability in war, which gives Morris the gauge by which he evaluates relative progress, and most dramatically enables him to chart the breath-taking, nose-bleed invoking rise of the West in the 19th Century. And it is this that gives it an edge over analyses such as that of Niall Ferguson in Civilisation, although Scotland's latest Best Export Historian compensates a little in brevity (but only by 200 pages) and in having a catchy, if slightly irritating hook in the form of the six "killer apps". (Ferguson also strikes me as the kind of guy who would give the TV cop a run for his money in muscle flexing. In a parallel universe he likely heads up a Glasgow razor gang.) Morris's analysis thus helps us to discern that whilst environment, geography and biology certainly had a lot to do with the West's advantage - the dice are totally loaded towards the region with most of the world's quota of domesticable fauna and edible flora, for example - the people involved were themselves essentially the same, and it was ultimately down to an accident of what he (somewhat irritatingly) labels as "maps, not chaps". The East and West have had the brilliant and the bungling in almost equal measure, but Morris, much like Landes and Diamond before him, though all by different routes, concludes that it has been the resources handed to them locally that have made the big difference. Now, however, with the world moving from "small" to "tiny", everything is homogenising, the advantages of locale are being eroded, and the East appears to be drawing level. Nevertheless, it has to be pointed out that the West still remains the more innovative, and that the R&D expenditures of India and China are still dwarfed by those of the West. Moreover, as Morris and Ferguson point out, in some respects the West is maintaining its hegemony through the legions of consumerism. Morris concludes by presenting two polarised visions of the future, one a Brave New World-like "good", the other an Apocalyptic "bad". This is interesting and worthy of note and caution, but probably less weighty as he extrapolates a continuing trajectory of progress or a cataclysmic outcome of hubris which, despite his assertions, both seem too extreme. Whilst at times, particularly towards the end, circling around itself in its reasoning, generally this is a well-written, well-presented piece of work. The author employs an eclectic battery of sources and analogies, including the space invader fantasies of Eric von Daniken, Isaac Asomov's futurism and The Life Of Brian's riff on what the Romans did for us. The editing is well done, with only a few typos and some inconsistency in possessives (seriously, it's Marcus's, not Marcus'!). And, good, secular, 21st Century author that he is, Morris gives dates as BCE or CE.

大作のためか読み終わるのに長い時間がかかった。なぜ西 洋が支配するようになったのかを氷河期以前の人類発生の時代から書き起こしている。文明のレベルをある指標で数値化し、その数値が大きいほど文明のレベルが高いとして、それが時代ともに西洋と東洋でどう変化してきたかを述べている。人類発生からローマ期までは西洋がリード、中国の漢帝国から清までは東洋がリード、産業革命を期に西洋が圧倒したと書いており、この点はおおむね同感である。 この評価の基準としている数値は一人当たりのエネルギー、あるいは人当たりのGDPのようなものらしいが、氷河期の昔からどうやって数値を計算したかはよく分からなかった。考古学の重要性を強調しているので、発掘資料が重要なデータ源となっているようだが、具体的にどう計算しているのかは読み取れなかった。 西洋、東洋が各時代で優劣があったのは、ひとえに地理的条件によるものと言っている。すなわちローマまでは地中海の存在が西洋の文明発展に大きく寄与しており、漢から清の中国の優位は大運河や中東と結ぶシルクロードの存在が東洋に有利に働いたと言う。また大航海時代以降西洋が急速にキャッチアップし産業革命を期に一気にリードしていったのは、太平洋と大西洋の新大陸への距離の差のためと言う。 また文明発展の原動力は SLOTH、FEAR、GREED だと言うが説得力のある言葉である。楽をしたい気持ち、恐れる対象があること、強欲に利益を得たいという気持ちが人をしてリスクをとり、積極的に前にすすむ原動力だと言っている。現代の企業の成功、個人の成功の元も確かに同じ原理が働いているように思う。 最後の章でこれからはどうなるかが書かれているが、中国がアメリカに追いつき追い越すのは間違いないと言っているが、アメリカが世界にもっとも影響力のある国であることは間違いないと言う。さらに言えば、フリードマンの著書にあるように世界がフラット化し、地理的距離の意味がなくなる未来においては西洋、東洋の区分け自体が意味のないことになると言う。 自分の英語力の問題もあり読むのに時間がかかったが、非常に興味深く読むことができた本である。

Offre uno schema misurabile della capacita` organizzativa della societa` umana durante i secoli, e come mai la capacita` organizzativa cala ed aumenta o si traferisce geograficamente. Societa` umane dinamicamente organizzate. Molto molto interessante. La conclusione e` pero` forzata; prolunga i punti e suppone una funzione iperbolica o a parabola, ma nulla impedisce che sia un polinomio o sinusoidale. Semplicemente, una curva costruita con dati empirici vale solo nell'ambito in cui viene studiata, non puo` essere prolungata arbitrariamente senza avere una teoria che la spieghi o che lo preveda compiutamente (cioe` i fenomeni che prevedibilmente accadranno).