Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  This book, I hope, might help a little in the process.

  Appendix: On Social Development

  The index of social development is the backbone of this book, holding together the body of facts that archaeologists and historians have accumulated. The index does not itself explain why the West rules, but it does show us the shape of the history that has to be explained. I provide a full account of the index, for those interested in the methods and detailed evidence behind the calculations, at the website www.ianmorris.org; this appendix is intended only as a quick summary of the main technical challenges and the basic results.

  FOUR OBJECTIONS

  I see four obvious objections to the social development index:

  1. Quantifying and comparing social development in different times and places dehumanizes people and we should therefore not do it.

  2. Quantifying and comparing societies is a reasonable procedure, but social development in the sense I defined it (as societies’ abilities to get things done) is the wrong thing to measure.

  3. Social development in the sense I defined it is a useful way to compare East and West, but the four traits I used to measure it (energy capture, organization/urbanization, war-making, and information technology) are not the best ones.

  4. These four traits are a good way to measure social development but I have made factual errors and got the measurements wrong.

  I addressed objection 1 in Chapter 3. There are plenty of historical and anthropological questions for which quantifying and comparing social development is no help at all, but asking why the West rules is by its nature a comparative and quantitative question. If we want to answer it, we must quantify and compare.

  I also said a few words in Chapter 3 about objection 2. Perhaps there are other things we could measure and compare that would work better than social development, but I do not know what they are. I leave it to other historians and anthropologists to identify other objects to measure and to show that they yield better results.

  Objection 3 can take three forms—that we should add more traits to my four; that we should use different traits; or that we should look at fewer traits. As I wrote this book I did explore several other traits (for example, area of largest political unit, standards of living [measured through adult stature], transportation speeds, or size of largest monuments), but all had severe evidence problems or failed the test of mutual independence. Most traits in any case show high levels of redundancy through most of history, and any plausible combination of traits will tend to produce much the same final result.

  There are plenty of small and two large exceptions to the redundancy rule. The first large exception is what we might call the “nomad anomaly”—the fact that steppe societies normally score low on energy capture, organization, and information technology, but high on war-making. This anomaly helps explain why true nomad societies have been so good at defeating empires but so bad at running them,* and it deserves extensive study, but it does not directly affect the comparisons between the settled, agrarian Eastern and Western cores in this book.

  Figure A.1. Energy alone: how East and West compare if we just look at energy capture per person

  Another version of objection 3 would drop organization, war-making, and information technology from the analysis and concentrate only on energy capture, on the grounds that organization, war-making, and information technology are merely ways of using energy. Figure A.1 shows what an energy-alone index would look like. It is different from the full index graph in Figure 3.3, but not hugely so. In the energy-alone graph, just like the full social development graph, the West still leads the East for 90 percent of the time, the East still overtakes it between roughly 550 and 1750 CE, there is still a hard ceiling that blocks development around 100 and 1100 CE (at just over 30,000 kilocalories per person per day), postindustrial revolution scores still dwarf those of earlier ages, and in 2000 the West still rules.

  Focusing on energy alone has the advantage of being more parsimonious than my four-trait approach to social development, but it also has one great drawback. This is the second large exception to the redundancy rule: the fact that since the industrial revolution the relationship between traits has become nonlinear. Thanks to new technologies, city size quadrupled across the twentieth century, war-making capacity increased fiftyfold, and information technology surged eightyfold, while energy capture per person merely doubled. Looking at energy alone is too simple, and distorts the shape of history.

  Objection 4 raises very different issues, because the only way to assess whether I have misunderstood the evidence or used inappropriate methods is by reexamining all the sources of information I used to calculate Eastern and Western scores across the last sixteen thousand years. Doing that in this appendix would be an expensive proposition, making an already-long book much longer still, so I have put the information on the website mentioned above. Readers with the time and inclination can find out there precisely what sources I have used and my views on the ambiguities in the evidence.

  In what remains of this appendix I will summarize the data, outline quickly how I calculated the scores, and say a few words about margins of error.

  ENERGY CAPTURE

  I discuss energy capture first and at greatest length because it is quantitatively the most important of the four traits. If we go back far enough in time, the urbanization, war-making, or information-technology scores all fall to zero because human activities were on such a tiny scale that they generate values below 0.01 point on the index. The energy-capture scores by contrast never fall to zero, because humans who capture zero energy die. Keeping body and soul together requires roughly 2,000 kilocalories per capita per day, and since modern Western energy capture is about 228,000 kcal/cap/day (= 250 points), the lowest score possible in theory would be 2.19; and in reality, energy capture has always scored above 4 points since the end of the Ice Age, because much of the energy humans use is in nonfood forms (clothes, shelter, artifacts, fuel, and so on). Until the industrial revolution, the energy capture score typically accounts for 75–90 percent of the total social development scores. In 2000 it still accounted for 28 percent of the Western and 20 percent of the Eastern scores.

  The evidence for energy capture ranges from modern statistical digests to literary accounts of farming, industry, and lifestyles, to archaeological evidence for diet, crafts, and quality of life. Combining such varied materials is a challenge, but here, as elsewhere, I have built on the contributions of earlier researchers. As I explained in Chapter 3, Earl Cook’s 1971 study of energy flows provides a convenient starting point that can be constantly checked against other estimates. These all converge on contemporary levels in the Western core of around 230,000 kcal/cap/day, which Cook divides into rough categories of feed/food (for domesticated animals as well as humans), home/commerce, industry/agriculture, and transport.

  Vaclav Smil (1991, 1994) usefully breaks nonfood consumption down into biomass and fossil fuels, and graphs their development in the Western core over time. Several steps are needed to turn his data into energy-capture scores for the West, but the results come out around 93,000 kcal/cap/day in 1900 and 38,000 in 1800, neatly bracketing Cook’s estimate of 77,000 for industrialized Europe in 1860.

  The further we move back before 1800 the fewer government-generated statistics are available, but the more that economies relied on biomass fuels, the more we can substitute comparative information gathered by economic historians and anthropologists for official documents. In 1700 the average person in the Western core must have consumed somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 kcal/day. Our evidence for what Western societies did shows clearly that the further we go back into the previous thousand years the lower that number falls,* though the comparative evidence also makes it clear that Western energy consumption could never have fallen too far below 30,000 kcal/cap/day. There is room for debate, but I doubt that medieval Western energy capture ever fell below 25,000 kcal/cap/day, even in the eighth century CE. For reasons I
return to below, I do not see how these guesstimates can be more than 5–10 percent wide of the mark.

  Table A.1. Energy capture, kilocalories/person/day (selected dates)

  The impressive ruins of Roman-era houses and monuments, the numbers of shipwrecks, the volume of manufactured goods, the level of industrial pollution in ice cores, and the staggering numbers of animal bones from settlements make it clear that Western energy capture was higher in the first century CE than in the eighth or even the thirteenth, but how much higher? Ingenious calculations by economic historians point toward an answer. Robert Allen (2007a) has shown that in 300 CE real wages (which, for most of the poor in premodern times, closely mirrored energy consumption) in the Western core were comparable to those of southern Europe in the eighteenth century CE, and Walter Scheidel (2008) has suggested that Roman-era wages were comfortably higher than those in much of medieval Europe. Data gathered by Geof Kron (2005) and Nikola Koepke and Joerg Baten (2005, 2008) indicate that stature changed little between the first and eighteenth centuries, and Kron (forthcoming) suggests that ancient housing was typically better than that in the richest parts of eighteenth-century Europe. I have estimated energy capture at around 31,000 kcal/person/day in the years 1 BCE/CE, declining slowly until 500 CE and then faster until 700.

  Energy capture must have been lower in the Western core around 1000 BCE not only than in Roman times, but also than in the eighth century CE. The sharpest period of increase came after 300 BCE, as the Mediterranean was integrated into larger political and economic units and the Roman Warm Period raised output, but the mass of archaeological data also shows an earlier period of acceleration after 600 BCE. I have tentatively suggested that in 1000 BCE energy capture may have been as low as 20,000 kcal/cap/day, a slight decline on the levels of the late second millennium BCE, but still above those of the third millennium.

  Earlier in prehistory scores were lower still. At the end of the Younger Dryas foragers were probably getting by on about 5,000 kcal/cap/day, but this would have risen sharply (relative to what had gone before) as the climate warmed, plants and animals were domesticated for food, and animals were harnessed for draft power. By 3000 BCE people in established villages in the Hilly Flanks must have been consuming 12,000 kcal/cap/day for their clothes, fuel, farm animals, houses and household goods, and monuments, even if their diets were no better than they had been four millennia earlier.

  Calculating Eastern scores is more difficult still, partly because scholars such as Cook and Smil were concerned only with the region of the world that had the highest energy capture, not with regional comparisons. We can begin, though, from the United Nations (2006) estimate that in 2000 CE the average Japanese person consumed 104,000 kilocalories per day (less than half the Western level). In 1900 the Eastern core was still largely agrarian, with Japanese oil use and even coal-powered industry in its infancy. Japanese energy capture may have been around 49,000 kcal/cap/day (again less than half of Western consumption). Across the previous five centuries coal use and agricultural output had risen steadily. In 1600 productivity was higher in the Yangzi Delta than anywhere in the West, but by 1750 Dutch and English agriculture had caught up and Eastern real wages were comparable to those in southern Europe rather than wealthy northern Europe. I have estimated energy capture in the Eastern core around 29,000 kcal/cap/day in 1400 and 36,000 in 1800, with the bulk of the increase coming in the eighteenth century.

  There is also debate over how badly the crisis after 1200 impacted Chinese energy use, but there was probably at least a slight dip from the Song-era peak, when consumption probably surpassed 30,000 kcal/cap/day.

  As in the West, the archaeological evidence makes it clear that energy capture went through a trough in the mid first millennium CE, but again it is difficult to say just how steep the decline was. The evidence I reviewed in Chapter 5 suggests that Han dynasty energy consumption was higher than anything previously seen in the East but lower than contemporary Roman or later Song levels; I have estimated 27,000 kcal/cap/day in 1 BCE/CE, returning to the same level by 700 CE after a slight fall.

  Again paralleling the West, Eastern energy capture in the first millennium BCE saw steady increases, accelerating after about 500 BCE and still more after 300 BCE with the spread of canal networks, trade, and metal tools. Back in 1000 BCE the average energy capture may have been around 17,000 kcal/cap/day; by the time of the Qin First Emperor it was probably more like 26,000.

  In prehistoric times Eastern energy capture seems to have passed through much the same thresholds as Western, but began moving upward later and generally ran one to two millennia behind.

  ORGANIZATION

  Throughout preindustrial history organization was always the second-largest component in social development scores. I used this trait as my main example in Chapter 3, explaining why I use largest city size as a proxy for social organization. There is enough ambiguity in the data and flexibility in definitions that experts disagree over city sizes in every period, and I explain my decisions on the website. In Table A.2 I just summarize some of my main calculations.

  WAR-MAKING

  Since writing began, people have recorded their wars, and since early prehistory have often buried their dead with weapons. As a result we know a surprising amount even about premodern warfare. The major challenge in scoring war-making capacity is not empirical but conceptual—how we compare radically different fighting systems that are often intended to be incomparable with earlier systems. Most famously, when Britain launched HMS Dreadnought in 1906, the whole idea was that its supersized guns and heavy armor meant that no number of 1890-era ships would add up to one post-1906 ship.

  The reality, though, is that things never work out so simply. Improvised explosive devices can, under the right circumstances, give even the highest-tech army a run for its money. In principle we can assign scores on a single index to wildly different military systems, even if experts might argue over what those scores should be.

  In 2000 CE, the West’s unprecedented military power earns 250 points, and is clearly much greater than the East’s. Some Eastern armies are large, but weapons systems matter far more than sheer numbers. The United States outspends China 10:1, and outnumbers it 11:0 in carrier groups and 26:1 in nuclear warheads. The qualitative differences between America’s M1 battle tanks and precision weapons and China’s outdated systems are still greater. Setting the West:East points ratio as low as 10:1 or as high as 50:1 both seem extreme, and I have guessed at 20:1, meaning that the East scores 12.5 points in 2000 as against the West’s 250.

  Table A.2. Population of the largest settlement in each core, thousands (selected dates)

  Comparing scores in 2000 with those in earlier periods is even more difficult, but by looking at the changes in the size of forces, the speed of their movement, their logistical capacities, the range and destructiveness of their striking power, and the armor and fortifications at their disposal, we can make rough estimates. According to one calculation, the effectiveness of artillery fire increased twentyfold between 1900 and 2000 and that of antitank fire sixtyfold; factoring in all the other changes across the twentieth century, I set the ratio between Western war-making capacity in 2000 and 1900 at 50:1, meaning that the West scores 5 points in 1900 compared with its 250 points in 2000.

  Western military power in 1900 was much greater than Eastern, though the gap was certainly not as large as it was by 2000. The British navy had nearly six times the tonnage of the Japanese in 1902, and any one of Europe’s great powers had more men under arms than Japan; I set the West:East ratio in 1900 at 5:1, meaning that the East scores just 1 point in 1900 (as compared with the West’s 5 points in 1900 and the East’s 12.5 points in 2000).

  Not everyone will be comfortable with the level of subjectivity in calculations such as these, but the important point is that the West’s military capacity in 2000 was so enormous that all other scores—including the West’s in 1900 or even the East’s in 2000—are necessarily tiny; and, as a
result of this, the errors involved in estimation are insignificant. We could double, or cut in half, any or all of the war-making scores for all periods up to 1900 without having a noticeable impact on the total development scores.

  The contrast between Western war-making in 1800 and that in 1900 was less than the contrast between 1900 and 2000, but it was still enormous, taking us from the age of sail, cavalry charges, and smoothbore muzzle-loaded muskets to that of explosive shells, armored oil-powered ships, and machine guns, with tanks and aircraft just around the corner. The nineteenth century probably raised Western war-making capacity by an order of magnitude, and I set the West’s war-making capacity at just 0.5 point in 1800. Western warfare at that point was vastly more effective than Eastern, which should perhaps earn just 0.1 point in 1800.

  Between 1500 and 1800 Europe went through what historians commonly call a “military revolution,” perhaps quadrupling the effectiveness of its war-making. Eastern war-making, by contrast, actually went backward between 1700 (when Kangxi began conquering the steppes) and 1800. In the absence of existential threats, Chinese rulers regularly sought peace dividends by reducing their armed forces and ignoring expensive technological advances. Eastern war-making was not noticeably more effective in 1800 than it had been in 1500, and was much less effective than it had been in 1700—which has a lot to do with why Britain’s forces swept China’s aside so easily in the 1840s.