Conquest and imperialism have been part of human history since the first caveman speared his rival in a fight over a hunk of mammoth meat, and they reached their zenith with the European powers of the nineteenth century. But why was it Europeans, not Chinese or Indians or Africans or Native Americans? And why, now, do we still live in a world where the largest economy is that of the United States, whose popular culture and international system were shaped by Westerners, and where I am writing this post in English? It was with these questions in mind that I read two books, Niall Ferguson’s Civilization and Ian Morris’ Why The West Rules – For Now, and while neither truly answered me, one turned out to be a fantastically worthwhile read anyway.
Please note I am not an expert in the topics covered by these books; rather, my perspective is that of an interested lay reader.
Civilization: The West and the Rest, by Niall Ferguson (2011): This book purports to be about how six “killer apps†(competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic) allowed Westerners to conquer the rest of the world. None of these ideas is radically new, but given the author’s talents as a narrative historian (see my review of The Ascent of Money), I was looking forward to, at the very least, a gripping argument. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Unlike The Ascent of Money, where yarns, vignettes and data all helped illustrate a central organising theme (finance throughout history), in Civilization they just turn the book into a combination of trivia grab bag and all-purpose authorial soapbox. It doesn’t help that Civilization’s strongest chapter, its conclusion, is an expanded version of a speech that you can find elsewhere on the web for free. I do not believe this is Professor Ferguson’s best book, and I would advise prospective readers to seek out his other work (such as the speech linked above) instead.
You can buy Civilization: The West and the Rest from Amazon here.
Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, by Ian Morris (2010): Now this is epic, big-picture history. Its subject is nothing less than human social development (both technological and organisational), as seen through the lens of European, Middle Eastern and Chinese history. Spanning the tens of thousands of years all the way from prehistory to the present day, it effectively picks up where Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel left off, right down to pursuing an argument that “maps, not chapsâ€, are the ultimate drivers of history. Great men, blundering idiots and dumb luck may well decide the fate of empires, argues Professor Morris, but they are ultimately second to structural factors in the grand scheme of progress. The last section of the book, which turns to futurology, tends to be overlooked by reviewers who focus on “why the West rules† — but this is their mistake, because this is where Prof Morris points out that extrapolating the exponential progression of the last couple of centuries gives the lie to conventional arguments that “the future will look much like the present, but with a richer Chinaâ€. For a book on human social development, an examination of a possible Singularity or environmental cataclysm makes for the perfect conclusion.  To cap things all off, the book is extremely lively and readable. I would highly recommend it for any lay reader interested in history.
I am interested in Ferguson’s arguments re: Protestant work ethic. I always looked at the idea of labor for labor’s sake = virtue as a tool for keeping the working class in check, especially since the upper classes in major capitalist powers did not get most of their wealth by being paid for their labor until very recently in history. (The rise of the CEO being my primary anecdatal evidence.) Does he frame Protestant economies as a contrast to other european non-protestant powers? Catholic countries like France, Spain, and Portugal engaged in colonial imperialism like whoa. Or does he stick with comparing Protentant colonialism with nonwestern powers?
I am mainly curious because the virtues of Team Protestant were used to rationalize the oppression of Catholic Ireland back in the day.
This is where it gets interesting. Ferguson himself doesn’t buy the “Protestant work ethic” thesis, observing:
“Even more problematic was Weber’s scathing sideswipe at the Jews, who posed the most obvious exception to his argument… Weber was also mysteriously blind to the success of Catholic entrepreneurs in France, Belgium and elsewhere… Later scholars… have tended to cast doubt on Weber’s underlying argument that the direction of causation ran from religious doctrine to economic behaviour.”
What he DOES argue is that “Protestantism encouraged literacy, not to mention printing, and these two things unquestionably encouraged economic development (the accumulation of ‘human capital’) as well as scientific study.”
However, the key thing is that _the actual discussion of how religion contributed to Western economic primacy is minimal_. This ties in to what I said about the book being a thematically inconsistent collection of trivia — most of the chapter in fact consists of various digressions as to the state of Christianity in America and Europe (potentially interesting but irrelevant to the book’s purported topic), Christian proselytising in China (ditto), and concern about modern moral relativism in the face of militant Islam (huh?).
Now that I think about it, Ferguson writing this book “with his children in mind” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization) probably explains its ‘freewheeling’ nature. A soapbox makes a lot more sense if it’s intended as a tract for one’s own kids.
I’m reading Morris’s book at the moment and just listened to Ferguson’s TED talk: http://youtu.be/xpnFeyMGUs8 It sounds to me like he is trying to rebut Morris, but he does a poor job of it. The first thing Ferguson does is ignore Morris’s qualified definition of “geography” in his two test cases. Morris uses the Atlantic Ocean as an example of how prior to the 1500’s it served as a barrier to development but after the 1500’s it was a facilitator of development. In other words, Morris includes human geography and not just land form geography in his definition. I don’t know why someone as smart as Ferguson either doesn’t get it, ignores it, or thinks we won’t catch on to it.
Aside from that, Ferguson’s talk begs the question – if the West has killer apps the East doesn’t have, where did these come from and how does that explain the thousands of years of history leading up to the great divergence beginning in the 1800’s? It seems to me that if Ferguson has a case with his killer apps, why then the disparity among nations that employ them?
Hey Richard, thanks for the link to the TED talk. I actually like it much better than Ferguson’s book – I still don’t agree with everything he says, but by virtue of its short length, it is far more focused, far more on-topic, and accordingly, far more effective at conveying Ferguson’s arguments than the book…
I don’t think the idea that institutions drive development is that controversial. It’s clearly visible in modern times, as Ferguson’s West/East German and South/North Korean examples (amongst many others) illustrate. The issue, as you point out, is what gave rise to the institutions. And that, I think, is what Morris and other geographically-focused authors bring to the table. For example, isn’t Ferguson’s “killer app” of competition usually explained by arguing that geography was what prevented Europe from being united under a single banner? I’m not yet convinced by Morris’ “Atlantic economy” argument — I think he should have fleshed it out in greater detail — but at least he addresses the question by claiming that societies developed those institutions in response to the geographically-driven challenges they faced.
Regarding your question of what drives distinctions between one Western nation and the next, this is when I think we can fall back on traditional historical explanations (as Morris puts it, “great men, blundering idiots and dumb luck”) — wars won or lost, sensible or foolish policies, etc. It’s the great inter-civilisational distinctions that demand a deeper look.
By the way, have you read Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence? If you have, I’d love to hear your take on it — while I haven’t yet gotten around to it, I understand Pomeranz takes a geographical view, pointing to e.g. more accessible coal deposits in England. (IIRC Ferguson claims the facts don’t support Pomeranz’s argument that the West only overtook China in the 1800s, but the book should still be worth checking out.)
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