Why the West Rules--for Now Review Journal World History

Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal Near the Future. By Ian Morris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 750 pages; $35. To be published in Britain by Profile in November; £25. Buy from Amazon.com ; Amazon.co.uk

IAN MORRIS, a polymathic Stanford University professor of classics and history, has written a remarkable book that may come to be as widely read as Paul Kennedy's 1987 work, "The Rise and Fall of the Neat Powers". Similar Mr Kennedy's epic, Mr Morris's "Why the Due west Rules—For Now" uses history and an overarching theory to accost the anxieties of the present. Mr Kennedy warned American policymakers of the consequences of "majestic overstretch", although it was the sudden implosion of the Soviet Union that proved the nigh spectacular vindication of his thesis.

For his office, Mr Morris sets out to show 2 things that are just equally of import; first that civilisations throughout history accept waxed and waned, commonly for reasons their rulers were powerless to influence, and second, that the West's authorisation of the past 200 years was neither inevitable nor "locked in" for the future.

Mr Morris's refrain is "maps, not chaps"—the belief that human destiny is generally shaped by geography and the efforts of ordinary people to cope with whatsoever is thrown at them in the course of climate change, dearth, migration, illness and state failure (what the writer describes as the "five horsemen of the apocalypse"). He argues that "history teaches usa that when the pressure is on, modify takes off." According to what he calls, somewhat annoyingly, the Morris Theorem, "Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer means of doing things. And they rarely know what they are doing."

Amongst the many things the author sets out to explain is why, throughout human being history, social development has gone in fits and starts, sometimes retreating in i place for a millennium or 2 before of a sudden spurting forwards again elsewhere. As a way of dramatising this, Mr Morris presents these ebbs and flows in the grade of a competition between Eastward and West. Why, he asks, did British boats shoot their way up the Yangzi in 1842 rather than Chinese ones upwards the Thames, and why do many more than people from the East speak English than Europeans speak Mandarin?

At showtime glance the answer is obvious. The industrial revolution began in the Westward in the belatedly 18th century thanks primarily to the efforts of British engineers and entrepreneurs who sought to exploit the free energy from the country's arable coal stocks and use information technology to harness the power of steam to drive ships, trains and machines in factories. The rapid march of technology gave Britain a temporary edge over every other land and immune it to project both economical and maritime military power on a global scale that remained virtually unchallenged for most of the next 100 years, and to establish the ascendancy of the Due west that continues today. But why did China, with its sophisticated cloth industry, advanced metallurgy, massive supplies of coal and lots of clever, inventive people non get in that location get-go? After all, a couple of centuries earlier it had been college up the social-evolution scale than United kingdom, or indeed anywhere else in the Due west.

And why, come to that, was Britain, rather than China, the foremost naval power of the age? More than 80 years earlier Christopher Columbus fix sail for America with 90 seamen in three pocket-sized ships, the Chinese admiral, Zheng He, was exploring the coasts of Africa and India with a total of nearly 300 much bigger vessels and 27,000 men. Mr Morris observes: "Zheng had magnetic compasses and knew enough virtually the Indian Ocean to fill a 21-foot-long sea chart; Columbus rarely knew where he was, let alone where he was going."

Mr Morris begins his story more than 50,000 years ago, but it only actually gets going with the beginning of agriculture and the nascence of large-scale organised societies after the concluding ice age, around 12,000 years agone. He shows how successive civilisations radiated outward from 2 geographically distinct cores—the "hilly flanks" of western Eurasia and the area between the Yangzi and Yellow rivers in modern People's republic of china—because of their relative abundance of domesticable plants and animals. Development started in the West almost 2,000 years before similar advances got going in the East. Its lead shrank from about 1,000BC on, subsequently which East and West were roughly level until the deadening collapse of the Roman empire, which represented a peak of Western social development not matched until the commencement of the early modern era in the 17th century.

What Mr Morris shows is that over a period of 10,000 years one civilisation after another hit a "hard ceiling" of social development before falling apart, unable to control the forces its success had unleashed. For every two or three steps forward, there was at least ane pace back. During those periods of advance the W tended to pull alee of the Due east, and during the steps dorsum the gap narrowed once more. On this went in a series of waves, each, Mr Morris says, cresting higher than the last, just with the West'south atomic number 82 evidently locked in. That procedure connected until the middle of the sixth century AD when the Due east of a sudden, and for the start time, spurted alee as Europe entered the and so-called Night Ages and the Sui dynasty united China, laying the foundations for the Eastward to hold the lead for the next ane,000 years.

Although the West eventually caught up, thanks in part because information technology began making ships that could sheet to America (the Atlantic is much smaller than the Pacific) and because its constant wars helped develop armed services applied science, even by the mid-18th century there was not much difference between East and Westward. As Mr Morris observes: "…although the hard ceiling had been pushed upwards a little, it remained as hard as ever." The West may take caught up, but according to a new brood of political economists, such as Thomas Malthus, iron laws governing humanity, in particular the one that held that people always converted the extra wealth earned from ascension productivity into more babies to consume it, would preclude either the West's or the Eastward'due south social development score rising much further. Malthus, all the same, had not reckoned on the transformative power of steam to blast through the West'southward hard ceiling.

Towards the end of his book, Mr Morris attempts to answer the question posed in the title. The Due west may all the same rule, simply for how much longer? His conclusion is that although power, influence and commercial dynamism are shifting e at a relentless footstep, the question itself may be wrong. If Eastern and Western social development scores continue ascension at their current rates, Western "dominion" will end early in the side by side century. Only the rise in the index over the next 100 years, propelled by quantum leaps in computing power and bioscience, is and then exponential that humankind itself will be profoundly changed, making distinctions between East and Due west seem weirdly anachronistic.

At that place is, on the other hand, a real possibility that we fail to negotiate even the side by side fifty years without triggering environmental catastrophe, global pandemics or nuclear state of war. In which instance, both West and East will simultaneously crash into the difficult ceiling of our own era. Mr Morris ends on an optimistic note. If we can put off "Nightfall" long enough, he says, the difference between the trials nosotros face today and those that eventually did in the Song dynasty in China when information technology pressed against the difficult ceiling 1,000 years ago, or the Roman empire 1,000 years before that, is that we are so much more able to understand and counter the forces that threaten us—if we have the wit and purpose to do then.

Mr Morris writes with clarity and vigour, if occasionally with a jaunty informality that becomes dull. That said, this is an of import book—1 that challenges, stimulates and entertains. Anyone who does not believe at that place are lessons to exist learned from history should kickoff hither.

This commodity appeared in the Culture department of the print edition under the headline "On superlative of the world"

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Source: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2010/10/07/on-top-of-the-world

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