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Why does the West rule? In this magnum opus, eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing on 50,000 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 500 and 1600, 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 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, it wasn't just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian's focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist's awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist's comparative methods to make sense of the past, present, and future — in a way no one has ever done before.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #6562779 in Books
- Brand: imusti
- Published on: 2011-08-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x 1.77" w x 5.08" l, 1.33 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
Features
From Booklist
Only the supremely self-confident put forth all-encompassing theories of world history, and Morris is one such daredevil. An archaeologist by academic specialty, he advances a quasi-deterministic construct that is suitable for nonacademics. From a repeatedly enunciated premise that humans by nature are indolent, avaricious, and fearful, Morris holds that such traits, when combined with sociology and geography, explain history right from the beginning, when humanity trudged out of Africa, through the contemporary rivalry between China and America. Such temporal range leaves scant room for individual human agency: Morris names the names of world history, but in his narrative, leaders and tyrants, at best, muddle through patterns of history that are beyond their power to shape. And those patterns, he claims, can be numerically measured by a “social development index” that he applies to every epochal change from agriculture to the industrial revolution. However, the reading is not as heavy as it may sound. His breezy style and what-if imagination for alternative scenarios should maintain audience interest; whether his sweeping perspective convinces is another matter altogether. --Gilbert Taylor
Review
"Formidable, richly engrossing. . . . Readers will enjoy [Morris's] lively prose and impressive combination of scholarship . . . with economics and science. A superior contribution to the grand-theory-of-human-history genre."
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
About the Author
IAN MORRIS is Willard Professor of Classics, Professor of History, and Director of the Archaeology Centre at Stanford University. He has written and edited a number of books, most recently The Greeks: History, Culture, Society and The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, and has appeared on a number of television networks, including the History Network and PBS. This is his first trade book.
From the Hardcover edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting way to view history using numerical values
By lawrence kittiver
A 14,000 year review of human history using a value called social development. He gives the year 2000 a base value of 1000 divided into four categories: urbanism, energy, communication and military. Each gets 250 points. History starts in 14,000BCE with a 4 or 5 score while today society gets a score of over 1000. Almost all this gain has been in the last 250 years. Progress has been ragged and often runs into ceilings and drops back for several centuries ( like the dark ages). He then uses this score in graph form and explains what was going on historically to give these results.
he then takes it a step further to compare Western (Middle east to USA) and Eastern ( China) civilizations. We watch the lines run parallel for a long period and diverge and crossover and he this way we have a race. He explains key historical events and shows how that shows up in the values and on the graphs. All very good and very informative and unique to see history told this way.
But in parts there is too much detail and thus the book is excessively long, over 600 pages. I had to speed read at least 200-250 pages and I don't think I lost anything. In fact on reviewing the book I am convinced I didn't miss anything of much value by my skimming vast sections.
He then looks into the future using his developed theories of what contributes to society and its development and hence its history. He acknowledges others who have gone before him in this endeavor, notably the geographer Jared Diamond author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse ( I have also read and recommend these excellent books) His look into the future relies heavily on the dominant progress of technology and mirrors what others have said about robots, artificial intelligence, mind/machine merger etc. It is interesting to see how similar the thoughts on the future are among historians, sociologists, neuro scientists , technologists and futurists.
So if you can speed read parts that would otherwise bog you down, while stopping and pondering the significant things the author has to say and those parts that spark your interest, this book is a good and worthwhile read. In other words I would urge you to read discriminatingly and not compulsory. Everything he says does not have equal value or is necessary to know for the reader.
254 of 267 people found the following review helpful.
Like playing Sid Meier's Civilization
By Bernard Kwan
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Big Picture, Big Ideas, and a Terrific Read
By Anne Mills
This is one of the most interesting books I have read in a long time, even if the author's arguments don't always convince me entirely. But he does attempt an heroic task -- explaining the broadest rhythms of human history -- and he does offer brilliant exposition. Also, the book is a pleasure to read: Morris is an entertaining and sometimes amusing writer whose prose is refreshingly free of academese. What's best about the book, I think, is its presentation of history outside the narrow confines in which we in the West tend to think -- "modern" European history, i.e. European and North American history since the Renaissance. Morris shows that other cultures have shown parallel patterns, in the process teaching me a great deal that I did not know about ancient history apart from the Greeks and Romans, and about Chinese history. The tool that he uses to compare different cultures is an index of social development: he recognizes that there are a whole lot of questions about this, but in general offers it as a very rough and imprecise measure: as a metaphor, I can live with it. The final section of the book, on where we go from here, was interesting (and scary) though I found it a bit less gripping that Morris's views on where we have been. All in all, and enjoyable and mind-opening book.
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