Why does the West rule? In this magnum opus, eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing on 50, years of history, archeology, and the methods of social science, to make sense of when, how, and why the paths of development differed in the East and West — and what this portends for the 21st century.
There are two broad schools of thought on why the West rules. Proponents of "Long-Term Lock-In" theories such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial, some critical factor — geography, climate, or culture perhaps — made East and West unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead of the East. But the East led the West between and , so this development can't have been inevitable; and so proponents of "Short-Term Accident" theories argue that Western rule was a temporary aberration that is now coming to an end, with Japan, China, and India resuming their rightful places on the world stage.
However, as the West led for 9, of the previous 10, years, it wasn't just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. The third reason is that Morris doesn't think the "what-if game" changes that basic fact that "whether the West would rule by [is] a matter of probabilities, not of. Geographically, nothing changed in those last years ok, the Little Ice Age, but that's a cyclical climate blip, you know? So, with Morris acknowledging that if we start again in it could "plausibly lead to Eastern rule by " p.
It's all a "wild-card. What if K'ung-fu-tzu dies in infancy and Confucianism never gets developed, gains prominence, and causes the Han dynasty to look down on merchants? One of the tasks of Zheng He's voyages is therefore to open trading routes, and his ships don't stop with the Indian Ocean. Han merchants and diplomats push on into Europe, while they also cross the Pacific, beat both France and England to Australia, and colonize South America before Portugal gets there.
Fourthly, Morris presents "rule" as a binary choice: either the West rules or the East rules. It's all luck, innit. And uncharacteristic tactical missteps. It's all a game of what-if, and Morris presents it as entirely the most probable and logical outcome. That's a lot like arguing that intelligent bipeds with binocular color vision are the most probable outcome for evolution. What I really hoped to find in this book was an understanding of the more complex reasons why China hasn't "ruled" before now and I do agree with Morris that after it's China all the way, baby.
I don't think that's shockingly new information. And no, "geography" does not provide us with the answer. Example: a Western economic paradigm does not necessarily apply to China , and compared to other aspects of culture, economics at least gives you hard data to work with.
In hail destroys French crops: in 8, starving people storm the Bastille, 7, mainly women surround Versailles. Morris calls it "the West's corrosive, liberal acid" that "[eats] away the barriers within societies and those between them" and "geography" does not explain this.
I'm going to have to find some good contextualizing histories written by Chinese authors. Aside from all this and it's a big aside I didn't find the book particularly readable. Morris wisely starts the journey by telling us that to answer the titular implied question, we must "confront the most basic issues: What is the West? What do we mean by rule?
Well, I hope you packed provisions, folks. History should be a hike through fields and forests, stopping to admire both panoramic vistas and the tiny delicate indigo stripes on a pansy, sometimes meandering, other times running and leaping like fools. Morris leads us on a forced march across a vast plain. I whined a lot. Morris kept me going with tales of bloodthirsty uppity women who had their son's eyes plucked out, or imprisoned the whole son, not just the eyes so they could rule.
Sometimes I'd heard the story before: "Wait a minute," I'd say. The text is occasionally broken by graphs. While the scope is impressive, it achieves that by leaving charm in the bedside drawer at home: it's MREs all the way and there is no room for personal extras on this journey. If you don't like history, for the gods' sake, don't make this your first book. Not recommended.
The idea that anywhere else could have come to "rule" isn't even considered. That the Shona, for example, constructing Great Zimbabwe in the 11th century, could have spread their civilization through to North Africa, Spain, and then across the Med to pre-Renaissance Europe.
Film director Robert Zemekis is, but not Zimbabwe. Equally, forget India, or Russia, and let's reduce the sacking of Bagdhad to a single paragraph on page Morris doesn't actually equate the "West" with Europe when it doesn't suit him, rather defining it sometimes as everything literally "west" of China e.
He calls Timur Lenk "Tamerlane," because military geniuses would much rather be called by the title of a romantic poem than, I don't know, their actual name. And he insists on using the term "ape-man" because it's "less of a mouthful. At one point Morris writes, "you would be hard-pressed to avoid concluding that the West was more developed than the East" p.
It's gonna be that book, is it? Employing that tone Frank Dikotter puts the death toll at 45 million, including 2.
Also, I never knew till now you only get three footnotes to play with in GR's html. View all 16 comments. Apr 20, Marc rated it liked it Shelves: world-history. This is another real doorstopper pages, without notes and bibliography about "the Great Divergence", the debate about why the West has gained such a head start in human history that it has come to dominate the world.
It is a bold undertaking that he has dared to tackle this tricky issue that so many others have gotten their teeth in. Judgi This is another real doorstopper pages, without notes and bibliography about "the Great Divergence", the debate about why the West has gained such a head start in human history that it has come to dominate the world.
Judging from his bibliography and the notes, he did not do that a blink of the eye: this thick book is based on a cartload of reading material and every claim is, as it should be, substantiated with references. Morris' view on the Divergence issue is that geographic coincidence was decisive for the temporary dominance of the West: because as a peripheral area in the Middle Ages, Western Europe frantically tried to get up to the level of the much richer Islamic world which according to him at that time was the core area of the West , and because the Atlantic gave it much easier access to a vast area the New World with huge resources.
Put a bit briefly, according to Morris everything else really didn't matter that much. The East for him only limited to China could just as well have achieved dominance, but it was much less challenged by geography. The great strengths of this work are Morris' own systematic approach, with even an attempt to make a measurable comparison of human cultures, and the very legible, narrative character of this almost world-wide history.
His major weaknesses, on the other hand, are a very negative view of what drives humanity, a questionable interpretation of what the terms "East" and "West" cover, and a geographical determinism that particularly undervalues the cultural factor in human history.
View all 9 comments. Mar 11, Mark rated it liked it. First off, this is a very readable, interesting and often insightful book. It works as a good history of development in East Asia and Europe. I have mixed feelings about the scale of Morris' ambition, though. Or maybe just his framing. He does make a convincing case that Europe did have some nice advantages built in, but this is a tendency and certainly not a lock.
So then he keeps stressing how "great men" and "bungling idiots" influence things but really didn't change much, and this or that event probably wouldn't have changed much on its own. To the point that I thought he was really protesting too much, trying to save a theory that promised too much.
But in point of fact, when at the end he does make a stab at probabilities, I thought they were perfectly reasonable--so some element is rhetorically I won't summarize his approach in any detail, but some of the things that I didn't know, or hadn't thought about in this perspective include: 1 The west did start agriculture earlier and essentially built up an "early lead" in the development race that lasted millennia until after Rome ; 2 both civilizations hit somewhat hard limits imposed by energy requirements, alleviated only intermittently by opening up new sources like water, wind and eventually coal; 3 the great nomads who roamed between the Russian steppes and Mongolia impacted everywhere, but geography meant they'd always draw more of China's focus towards the vast, less controllable land areas as opposed to the option to exploit the seas for Europeans.
Arbitrary and unnecessary numbers being assigned to things is a peeve of mine, and he overuses but doesn't actually abuse his "development index. Still, a very strong 3 stars. Apr 20, Sense of History rated it liked it Shelves: great-divergence , global-history , history-of-china , world-history.
The charm of Ian Morris' work is that he combines modesty and boldness. His entire book, for example, is based on the view that human history is driven by 3 petty human impulses: that people are lazy, greedy and fearful and always seek solutions to their problems based on those three characteristics.
Time and again he explains major changes in history through one or a combination of those characteristics. A bit blunt, he even calls this approach "the Morris theorem". There is a slight sarcasm involved in this, and that brings some lightness into this academic work. Another merit of Morris is that, unlike others in the Great Divergence debate, he does not limit himself to the last to years of human history, but he covers the whole of human history.
Of course that is what you could expect from an archaeologist, but it seems to me that Morris is on this by Jared Diamond who has elaborated an equally broad approach in his 'Horses Morris fits in with this view in his own way, but he emphasizes more the geographical component and the interaction between core areas and periphery though absolutely not in the way Immanuel Wallerstein used that model. Without a doubt the greatest merit of Morris is that he has tried to capture the whole of human development in a theoretical model that makes social development measurable and shows how humanity has realised ever higher levels of development with ups and downs of course , in different geographical areas.
He deliberately kept the criteria on which he based his quantification limited energy consumption, organizational capacity, military capacity and information technology , and due to his focus on East and West the graphs that he worked out are very transparent and seem utterly relevant. Of course, you can endlessly criticize the choices he has made and the data on which he relies, and Morris himself admits that his model is open to discussion even though he defends his choices with fervour.
I personally think it's great that he did this exercise, and it certainly is a starting point for further discussion. On top of that, Morris is not afraid to make projections for the future based on his findings. Just one more positive addendum: the readability of this book. Packing the whole of human history in more than pages I am not including his projections for the future is no small achievement, certainly because he succeeds in keeping our attention as a reader.
Morris also introduces a lot of new material, especially in the first chapters, while for the more recent periods roughly from onwards he advances much faster, even somewhat more superficial. Also commendable is his relatively much greater attention to Eastern history, as an understandable correction for the eurocentrism of most World Histories.
Very occasionally Morris loses himself a bit in the chaotic succession of Chinese dynasties, but all in all this book is very good edited. Weak points The first is a very important issue: Morris uses a very broad geographical concept of what the West is, and a very limited one for the East.
Remarkably he also includes all of Arabia and the Islamic culture; that is original and astonishing, and he has some strong arguments for this, but it also comes with some downsides, making his story of Western History rather less homogenic than he presents it to be. Worse still, Africa and especially India remain almost completely out of the picture, and that is simply incomprehensible and a great distortion of human history. I think Morris's compulsion to simplify as much as possible is the cause of this omission, because if he had to push Africa and India into his story, his beautiful East-West schedule would have been greatly distorted.
In line with that, the entire book also suffers from an East-West myopia that almost constantly leads Morris to highlight the similarities in the development of East and West, reducing his divergence story to a divergence only in pace, not in essence, and also that leads to a very debatable representation of world history.
Some detail criticism is also possible on Morris's treatment of the earliest times. Like so many others he sketches an image of the earliest human history based on very limited finds and sources, although as an archaeologist he must be very well aware of the limitations of his metier.
It is also striking that he almost constantly cites climate change as a probable explanation for major shifts in human development, and he attributes these almost exclusively to deviations in the Earth's axis and Earth's orbit; now, the study of these phenomena to me still seem so to be in a pioneering stage, and so it is strange Morris lends so much authority to the few works that have been published on this subject. In many reviews Morris is accused of determinism, and there is something to be said for that.
In my enumeration of the positive aspects of the book, I already mentioned Diamond and his biological-geographic determinism. In his sketch of the constant dynamics between core areas and periphery and the Great Exchange between East and West, he certainly attributes some space to biological and sociological elements, but very strikingly cultural elements are almost completely absent.
Also, the input of individual choices by leading figures is reduced to an absolute minimum. According to Morris, each culture simply and inevitably developed the obvious solutions to the problems with which that culture was confronted due to shifts in the geographical horizon ; individual creativity, the obstinate will of great rulers or the impact of cultural factors such as religion at most played a role in the pace at which the changes occurred, nothing more.
And that is an essential weakness. These human impulses naturally play a major role in history, there is simply no discussion about that. But here too Morris goes way too far in his simplification. Because inevitably it gives his history a very negative focus: why should only the "low impulses" of man be decisive, and not just the more positive ones such as the urge for excellence, the drive to transcend oneself, to indulge in empathy and altruism?
Or, to keep it less elevated: adventurousness, practical utilitarianism and so on? I fully understand that Morris wanted to keep his story manageable, and he really succeeds in that. But he does so at the expense of a number of elements that deny the complexity of human history and of reality itself. Futurism In the end, all these weaknesses become clear in the "futuristic" section at the end of his book.
Again, it is worthwhile that he tries to learn lessons from history I know that academic historians are very hesitant about this, but under certain conditions it is worth to try.
But because of his geographical determinism and his narrow view of what drives humanity, his look into the future just ends up in open doors: yes, after a period of years of western domination, the east is now coming up, and yes, humanity faces enormous challenges because the nuclear weapons arsenal and the threat of major climate change make the total destruction of our planet conceivable.
Morris gets lost in a chaotic, almost endless sequence of "what if" arguments, where he only ends up in a plea for a "Great Singularity" the merging of all differences between east and west, even in the form of a connected human brain and a Kantian plea for a world government. The whole of this futuristic chapter, written in , immediately brings at light how quickly such looking ahead can become obsolete.
All these critical remarks do not alter the fact that I think this is a very worthwhile book. And his quantification method may be open to discussion, it is at least a starting point for further adjustments and refinements. Morris rightly quotes Karl Popper: progress in exact science is a matter of speculation and refutation, it follows a zigzag course because one researcher suggests an idea and others rush to refute it, and in the process come up with better ideas.
View all 3 comments. While the title "Why the West Rules For Now" suggests a right wing polemic mourning the decline of Western Civilization, something written by Niall Ferguson at best, and Mark Levin at worst, Ian Morris' weighty volume is far from it in fact, he has been criticized as being too culturally relativist. Instead, Ferguson gives a survey of the long view of human history, bringing into focus patterns that are obscured when one views history in terms of decades and centuries.
Morris' book is in t While the title "Why the West Rules Morris is a materialist, and clearly defines East and West, not through subjective cultural values, but as the civilizations emerging from the respective original cores of the "Hilly Flanks" one of the many terms Morris uses , and the North China Plain.
However, Morris' history is not about the oppositional contest between East and West, but more generally about the patterns of human social development, to which his quantitative mind provides a numerical index.
Similarly to his colleague Fukuyama's recent work, Morris both spends much time discussing China, sees us at "the end" history. However, unlike Fukuyama's End of History once , now ? His future is not that of the triumph of liberal democracy, rather he sees humanity on the precipice of either the Singularity, or global nuclear and climate catastrophe. Either way, we are in for "interesting times". I highly reccomend this book to anyone interested in the long view of history, how we got from stone tools to Ipads, and how unique and unstable our modern civilization is.
View 1 comment. Aug 01, David rated it it was amazing. To make his case, Morris starts us at the dawn of humankind and takes us on a guided tour through all periods of human history until a little less than a year ago. His writing is wonderful. I felt as though I had a firm grasp on the big picture throughout the entire book. His tone is conversational and he interjects very mild humor where appropriate. As someone who has not Astounding! As someone who has not read a lot of history, I found the specific historical topics completely fascinating.
There are too many delightful historical anecdotes peppered throughout this book to count. I loved the fact that Morris occasionally referenced science fiction such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and non-fictional works by authors like Erich von Daniken Chariots of the Gods. He used these references to great effect in a "what if" sense to explore humankind's past, present, and future.
As for his theorem that the West gained traction over the East in the last few hundred years because of its geography, I can't really comment in a critical way because I simply don't have the background. But I felt Morris did an excellent job of explaining it. Most importantly, it seemed to make more sense than the competing theories many of which have racist underpinnings. According to Morris's theory, the people of the East and West were more or less interchangeable.
Their geography was not. And history seems to bear this out. Do not be intimidated by the scope or subject of this book. It is an easy read and an absolute page-turner. I can't remember the last time I learned so much! Nov 11, Blair rated it liked it Shelves: politics , history , zzz-own-e-book , non-fiction-book-club.
We open with the Chinese navy sailing up the Thames, forcing Queen Victoria to sign a humiliating treaty and taking Prince Albert back to China as a hostage. Why did this story in fact happen the other way around?
After all, five hundred years ago the outcome was not obvious. Ian Morris explores this question by presenting the entire history of a world reduced to two regions, which he chooses to call East and West. The East essentially means China, while the West is defined as the descendants of We open with the Chinese navy sailing up the Thames, forcing Queen Victoria to sign a humiliating treaty and taking Prince Albert back to China as a hostage.
The East essentially means China, while the West is defined as the descendants of the civilizations that arose in the Middle East. Thus Persia and the various Islamic Empires are considered to be a part of the West.
People complain that this grouping is arbitrary, and their favourite region is left out. The main distinction is that East and West developed separately. While there was much diversity within the West, all its parts were in constant contact. This serves as a useful device to ask why the West eventually surpassed China, but it obscures the equally interesting question of why Europe also surpassed the Islamic countries. The history of China and the West are told together so we can compare the relative levels of development.
Being ignorant of Chinese history, I found this approach very informative. I was more interested in how the development of these two very separate regions was so similar. It is as if periodic collapses are built into the very process of creating a civilization.
Perhaps fitting for an archaeologist, one who reconstructs history from material objects, that shape is a material one. The importance of individual leaders, whether we think of them as great men or bumbling idiots, is downplayed.
Culture is said to be merely a consequence of the level of social development. He develops an index based on four factors: energy use, social organization based on the size of the largest city , information processing capacity, and ability to make war. I think this is a useful exercise for measuring the material state of a society at a given time.
It is less useful for predicting what will happen next, which also depends on a fact this book tries to deny: culture makes a difference. For example, European technology may have surpassed that of China by , but that does not show up on a development index that measures things like city sizes. It took time for the material consequences to arrive. Imagine trying to estimate the potential of Germany and Japan by measuring their development index in The most important development was already in the minds of their people.
Uses four factors—energy capture per capita, organization, information technology and war-making capacity—to attempt to show which world regions were the mo. Geography Is Destiny. Geography is Destiny tells the history of Britain and its changing relationships with Europe and the wider world, from its physical separation at the end of the. An Introduction to the Algae. General classification of algae - Vegetative structure and methods of reproduction - Cyanophyta - Chlorophyta - Xanthophyta - Chrysophyta - Bacillariophyta - Py.
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