Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

  “The Art of Biography is different from Geography,” the humorist Edmund Bentley observed in 1905; “Biography is about chaps, but Geography is about maps.” For many years, chaps—in the British sense of upper-class men—dominated the stories historians told, to the point that history was barely distinguishable from biography. That changed in the twentieth century as historians made women, lower-class men, and children into honorary chaps too, adding their voices to the mix, but in this book I want to go further. Once we recognize that chaps (in large groups and in the newer, broader sense of the word) are all much the same, I will argue, all that is left is maps.

  Many historians react to this claim like a bull to a red rag. It is one thing, several have said to me, to reject the old idea that a few great men determined that history would unfold differently in East and West; it is another altogether to say that culture, values, and beliefs were unimportant and to seek the reason why the West rules entirely in brute material forces. Yet that is more or less what I propose to do.

  I will try to show that East and West have gone through the same stages of social development in the last fifteen thousand years, in the same order, because they have been peopled by the same kinds of human beings, who generate the same kinds of history. But I will also try to show that they have not done so at the same times or at the same speed. I will conclude that biology and sociology explain the global similarities while geography explains the regional differences. And in that sense, it is geography that explains why the West rules.

  Put so bluntly, this probably sounds like as hard-line a long-term lock-in theory as could be imagined, and there have certainly been historians who have seen geography that way. The idea goes back at least as far as Herodotus, the fifth-century-BCE Greek often credited with being the father of history. “Soft countries breed soft men,” he insisted; and, like a string of determinists since him, he concluded that geography had destined his own homeland for greatness. Perhaps the most remarkable example is Ellsworth Huntington, a Yale University geographer who marshaled rafts of statistics in the 1910s to demonstrate that his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, had an almost-ideal climate for stimulating people to greatness. (Only England was better.) By contrast, he concluded, the “too uniformly stimulating” climate of California—where I live—merely produced elevated rates of insanity. “The people of California,” Huntington assured readers, “may perhaps be likened to horses which are urged to the limit so that some of them become unduly tired and break down.”

  It is easy to mock this kind of thing, but when I say that geography explains why the West rules I have something rather different in mind. Geographical differences do have long-term effects, but these are never locked in, and what counts as a geographical advantage at one stage of social development may be irrelevant or a positive disadvantage at another. We might say that while geography drives social development, social development determines what geography means. It is a two-way street.

  To explain this a bit better—and to give a quick road map for the rest of the book—I would like to look back twenty thousand years, to the coldest point in the last ice age. Geography then mattered very much: mile-thick glaciers covered much of the northern hemisphere, dry and barely habitable tundras fringed them, and only closer to the equator could small bands of humans make a living by gathering and hunting. Distinctions between the south (where people could live) and the north (where they could not) were extreme, but within the southern zone distinctions between East and West were relatively minor.

  The end of the Ice Age changed the meaning of geography. The poles remained cold and the equator remained hot, of course, but in half a dozen places between these extremes—what, in Chapter 2, I will call the original cores—warmer weather combined with local geography to favor the evolution of plants and/or animals that humans could domesticate (that is, genetically modify to make them more useful, eventually reaching the point that the genetically modified organisms could survive only in symbiosis with humans). Domesticated plants and animals meant more food, which meant more people, which meant more innovation; but domestication also meant more pressure on the very resources that drove the process. The paradox of development went straight to work.

  These core regions had all been fairly typical of the relatively warm, habitable regions during the Ice Age, but they now grew increasingly distinct, both from the rest of the world and from one another. Geography had favored them all, but had favored some more than others. One core, the so-called Hilly Flanks in western Eurasia, had uniquely dense concentrations of domesticable plants and animals; and since groups of people are all much the same, it was here, where resources were richest and the process easiest, that moves toward domestication began. That was around 9500 BCE.

  Following what I hope is common sense, throughout this book I use the expression “the West” to describe all the societies that have descended from this westernmost (and earliest) of the Eurasian cores. The West long ago expanded from the original core in southwest Asia* to encompass the Mediterranean Basin and Europe, and in the last few centuries the Americas and Australasia too. As I hope will become clear, defining “the West” like this (rather than picking on some supposedly uniquely “Western” values such as freedom, rationality, or tolerance, and then arguing about where these values came from and which parts of the world have them) has major consequences for understanding the world we live in. My goal is to explain why a particular set of societies that descend from the original Western core—above all, those of North America—now dominate the globe, rather than societies in another part of the West, societies descended from one of the other cores, or, for that matter, no societies at all.

  Following the same logic, I use “the East” to refer to all those societies that descend from the easternmost (and second-oldest) of the Eurasian cores. The East also long ago expanded from its original core between China’s Yellow and Yangzi rivers, where the domestication of plants began around 7500 BCE, and today stretches from Japan in the north into the countries of Indochina in the south.

  The societies that descend from the other cores—a southeastern core in what is now New Guinea, a South Asian one in modern Pakistan and northern India, an African one in the eastern Sahara Desert, and two New World cores in Mexico and Peru—all have their own fascinating histories. I touch on these repeatedly in what follows, but I focus as relentlessly as I can on East-West comparisons. My reasoning is that since the end of the Ice Age, the world’s most developed societies have almost always been ones that descended from either the original Western or the original Eastern core. While Albert in Beijing is a plausible alternative to Looty in Balmoral, Albert in Cuzco, Delhi, or New Guinea is not. The most efficient way to explain why the West rules is therefore to zero in on East-West comparisons, and that is what I have done.

  Writing the book this way has its costs. A more properly global account, looking at every region of the world, would be richer and more nuanced, and would give the cultures of South Asia, the Americas, and other regions full credit for all the contributions they have made to civilization. But such a global version would also have drawbacks, particularly in loss of focus, and it would need even more pages than the book I did write. Samuel Johnson, eighteenth-century England’s sharpest wit, once observed that while everyone admired Paradise Lost, “None ever wished it longer than it is.” What applies to Milton, I suspect, applies even more to anything I might come up with.

  If geography really did provide a Herodotus-style long-term lock-in explanation of history, I could wrap this book up rather quickly after pointing out that domestication began in the Western core around 9500 BCE and in the Eastern core around 7500. Western social development would simply have stayed two thousand years ahead of Eastern and the West would have gone through an industrial revolution while the East was still figuring out writing. But that, obviously, did not happen. As we will see in the chapters that follow, geography did not lock
in history, because geographical advantages are always ultimately self-defeating. They drive up social development, but in the process social development changes what geography means.

  As social development rises, cores expand, sometimes through migration and sometimes through copying or independent innovation by neighbors. Techniques that worked well in an older core—whether those techniques were agriculture and village life, cities and states, great empires, or heavy industry—spread into new societies and new environments. Sometimes these techniques flourished in the new setting; sometimes they just muddled along; and sometimes they needed huge modifications to work at all.

  Odd as it may seem, the biggest advances in social development often come in places where methods imported or copied from a more developed core do not work very well. Sometimes this is because the struggle to adapt old methods to new environments forces people to make breakthroughs; sometimes it is because geographical factors that do not matter much at one stage of social development matter much more at another.

  Five thousand years ago, for instance, the fact that Portugal, Spain, France, and Britain stuck out from Europe into the Atlantic was a huge geographical disadvantage, meaning that these regions were a very long way from the real action in Mesopotamia* and Egypt. By five hundred years ago, however, social development had risen so much that geography changed its meanings. There were new kinds of ships that could cross what had always been impassable oceans, which abruptly made sticking out into the Atlantic a huge plus. It was Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English ships, rather than Egyptian or Iraqi ones, that started sailing to the Americas, China, and Japan. It was western Europeans who began tying the world together with maritime trade, and western European social development soared upward, overtaking the older core in the eastern Mediterranean.

  I call this pattern the “advantages of backwardness,”* and it is as old as social development itself. When agricultural villages began turning into cities (soon after 4000 BCE in the West and 2000 BCE in the East), for instance, access to the particular soils and climates that had favored the initial emergence of agriculture began to matter less than access to great rivers that could be tapped to irrigate fields or used as trade routes. And as states kept expanding, access to great rivers started mattering less than access to metals, or to longer trade routes, or to sources of manpower. As social development changes, the resources it demands change too, and regions that once counted for little may discover advantages in their backwardness.

  It is always hard to say in advance how the advantages of backwardness will play out: not all backwardness is equal. Four hundred years ago, for instance, it seemed to many Europeans that the booming plantations of the Caribbean had a brighter future than North America’s farms. With hindsight we can see why Haiti turned into the poorest place in the western hemisphere and the United States into the richest, but predicting such outcomes is much harder.

  One very clear consequence of the advantages of backwardness, though, was that the most developed region within each core moved around over time. In the West it shifted from the Hilly Flanks (in the age of early farmers) southward to the river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt as states emerged and then westward into the Mediterranean Basin as trade and empires became more important. In the East it migrated northward from the area between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers to the Yellow River basin itself, then westward to the Wei River and the region of Qin.

  A second consequence was that the West’s lead in social development fluctuated, partly because these vital resources—wild plants and animals, rivers, trade routes, manpower—were distributed in different ways across each core and partly because in both cores the processes of expansion and incorporation of new resources were violent and unstable, pushing the paradox of development into overdrive. The growth of Western states in the second millennium BCE, for example, made the Mediterranean Sea not only a highway for commerce but also a highway for forces of disruption. Around 1200 BCE Western states lost control, and migrations, state failures, famines, and epidemics set off a core-wide collapse. The East, which had no such inland sea, went through no comparable collapse, and by 1000 BCE the West’s lead in social development had narrowed sharply.

  Over the three thousand years that followed, the same pattern has played out again and again with constantly changing consequences. Geography determined where in the world social development would rise fastest, but rising social development changed what geography meant. At different points the great steppes linking eastern and western Eurasia, the rich rice lands of southern China, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean were all crucially important; and when the Atlantic rose to prominence in the seventeenth century CE, those people best placed to exploit it—at first chiefly the British, then their former colonists in America—created new kinds of empires and economies and unlocked the energy trapped in fossil fuels. And that, I will argue, is why the West rules.

  THE PLAN

  I have divided the chapters that follow into three sections. Part I (Chapters 1–3) confronts the most basic issues: What is the West? Where do we start our story? What do we mean by “rule”? How can we tell who is leading or ruling? In Chapter 1, I set out the biological basis of the story in the evolution and dispersal of modern humans over the planet; in Chapter 2, I trace the formation and growth of the original Eastern and Western cores after the Ice Age; and in Chapter 3, I break the narrative to define social development and explain how I will use it to measure differences between East and West.*

  In Part II (Chapters 4–10), I trace the stories of East and West in detail, asking constantly what explains their similarities and differences. In Chapter 4, I look at the rise of the first states and the great disruptions that wracked the Western core in the centuries down to 1200 BCE. In Chapter 5, I consider the first great Eastern and Western empires and how their social development rose toward the limits of what was possible in agricultural economies; then in Chapter 6, I discuss the great collapse that swept Eurasia after about 150 CE. In Chapter 7, we reach a turning point, with the Eastern core opening a new frontier and taking the lead in social development. By about 1100 CE the East was again pressing against the limits of what was possible in an agricultural world, but in Chapter 8 we will see how this set off a second great collapse. In Chapter 9, I describe the new frontiers that Eastern and Western empires created on the steppes and across the oceans as they recovered, and examine how the West closed the development gap on the East. Finally, in Chapter 10, we will see how the industrial revolution converted the West’s lead into rule and the enormous consequences this had.

  In Part III (Chapters 11 and 12) I turn to the most important question for any historian: So what? First, in Chapter 11, I pull together my argument that behind all the details of what has happened in the last fifteen thousand years, two sets of laws—those of biology and sociology—determined the shape of history on a global scale, while a third set—those of geography—determined the differences between Eastern and Western development. It was the ongoing interplay between these laws, not long-term lock-ins or short-term accidents, that sent Looty to Balmoral rather than Albert to Beijing.

  This is not how historians normally talk about the past. Most scholars seek explanations in culture, beliefs, values, institutions, or blind accident rather than the hard surfaces of material reality, and few would be caught dead speaking of laws. But after considering (and rejecting) some of these alternatives, I want to go one step further, suggesting in Chapter 12 that the laws of history in fact give us a pretty good sense of what is likely to happen next. History has not come to an end with Western rule. The paradox of development and the advantages of backwardness are still operating; the race between the innovations that drive social development upward and the disruptions that drag it down is still on. In fact, I will suggest, the race is hotter than ever. New kinds of development and disruption promise—or threaten—to transform not just geography but biology and sociology too. The great question for our times
is not whether the West will continue to rule. It is whether humanity as a whole will break through to an entirely new kind of existence before disaster strikes us down—permanently.

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  PART I

  ________________________________

  1

  BEFORE EAST AND WEST

  WHAT IS THE WEST?

  “When a man is tired of London,” said Samuel Johnson, “he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” It was 1777, and every current of thought, every bright new invention, was energizing Dr. Johnson’s hometown. London had cathedrals and palaces, parks and rivers, mansions and slums. Above all, it had things to buy—things beyond the wildest imaginings of previous generations. Fine ladies and gentlemen could alight from carriages outside the new arcades of Oxford Street, there to seek out novelties like the umbrella, an invention of the 1760s that the British soon judged indispensable; or the handbag, or toothpaste, both of them products of the same decade. And it was not just the rich who indulged in this new culture of consumption. To the horror of conservatives, tradesmen were spending hours in coffee shops, the poor were calling tea a “necessary,” and farmers’ wives were buying pianos.

  The British were beginning to feel they were not like other people. In 1776 the Scottish sage Adam Smith had called them “a nation of shopkeepers” in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, but he had meant it as a compliment; Britons’ regard for their own well-being, Smith insisted, was making everyone richer. Just think, he said, of the contrast between Britain and China. China had been “long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous, countries of the world,” but had already “acquired that full complement of riches which the measure of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire.” The Chinese, in short, were stuck. “The competition of the labourers and the interest of the masters,” Smith predicted, “would soon reduce them to the lowest rate which is consistent with common humanity,” with the consequence that “the poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe … Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries.”