Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  The advent of gunpowder weapons in the fourteenth century increased war-making capacity in both East and West, though much less dramatically than the inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would do. In Europe the best armies around 1500 (particularly the Ottomans) were probably twice as effective as those of five centuries earlier, though that had as much to do with size and logistics as with firepower.

  The relationship between Western war-making around 1500 and the large, highly organized, but pre-gunpowder forces of the Roman Empire is harder to calculate. One study has estimated that a single jet bomber around 2000 CE had half a million times the killing capacity of a Roman legionary, which we might take as implying that the Western score in 1 BCE/CE would be 0.0005 point; but of course Rome had far more legionaries than the United States has jet bombers, and I estimate the ratio between modern Western and Roman war-making at more like 2,000:1, putting the Western score in 1 BCE/CE at 0.12 point. That makes the Roman war machine at its height a serious rival for fifteenth-century European armies and navies, despite their guns and cannons, but not for the forces of the “military revolution” era. It also means that Roman war-making at its zenith might have competed with that of the Mongols and was superior to that of Tang dynasty China.

  In the East, where bronze weapons were still the norm as late as 200 BCE, Han dynasty (200 BCE–200 CE) forces seem to have been less effective than Roman, although Chinese military power declined much less than Western after the Old World Exchange. The armies and navies that the Sui used to reunite China in the sixth century were much stronger than anything in the West, and by the time of Empress Wu around 700 the gap was enormous.

  The militaries of the centuries BCE were much weaker than those of the Roman and Han empires. In the East I assume that no force before the time of Erlitou around 1900 BCE was effective enough to score 0.01 point; in the West, Egyptian and Mesopotamian armies probably scored 0.01 point by about 3000 BCE.

  Table A.3. War-making capacity, expressed in points on the social development index (selected dates)

  INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

  Archaeological and written sources show us what kinds of information technology existed at various periods and it is not too difficult to estimate how much information these media could communicate, at what speeds, and over what distances. The real problem lies in estimating the extent of use of different technologies, which through most of history means how many people could read and write and at what levels of competence.

  Moore’s Law—that the cost-effectiveness of information technology has doubled every eighteen months or so since about 1950—seems to imply that the score in 2000 should be about a billion times higher than that of 1900, giving us a Western score in 1900 of 0.00000025 point. But that, of course, would overlook both the flexibility of old-fashioned forms of information storage such as printed books (which digital media are only now beginning to challenge) and changes over time in access to the most advanced techniques.

  The correct ratio between modern and earlier information technology is much less than a billion to one, though it is clearly enormous, with the consequence that pre-1900 scores (and even more so, pre-1900 margins of error) are even tinier than in the case of war-making. On the other hand, the evidence for just how many people could read, write, and count at various levels of skill is much vaguer than the evidence for war, and my guesstimates are even more impressionistic.

  In table A.4 I take a multistep approach to quantifying information technology. First, following common practice among historians, I divide skills into full, medium, and basic. The bars for each category are set low—in terms of literacy, basic means being able to read and write a name; medium, being able to read or write a simple sentence; and full, being able to read and write more connected prose. The Chinese Communist Party’s definitions in its 1950 literacy drive (full literacy, being able to recognize 1,000 characters; semiliteracy, recognizing 500–1,000; basic, 300–500) were rather similar.

  Second, drawing on the available scholarship, I divide the adult male population at different periods across these three categories. For each 1 percent of men that falls into the full-literacy category I assign 0.5 point; for each percent in the medium category, 0.25 point; and for each percent in the basic category, 0.15 point. I then assign the same scores to women. The evidence for female literacy is poorer than for male, though it is clear that until the twentieth century fewer (usually far fewer) women than men could read and write. Although I am basically guessing before recent times, I hazard estimates of female use of information technology as a percentage of male use. I then assign points to each period based on the amount and level of information technology use.

  In 2000, 100 percent of men and women are in the full category in both the Western and Eastern cores,* scoring 100 information technology points for both regions. In 1900, nearly all men in the Western core had at least some literacy (50 percent full, 40 percent medium, and 7 percent basic) and women were almost as well educated, generating a Western score of 63.8 IT points. In the East literacy was also widespread among men, though not at such high levels (I estimate 15 percent full, 60 percent medium, and 10 percent basic), though literate women may have been only a quarter as common. The result is an Eastern score of 30 IT points. As I repeat these calculations further back in history, the possible margin of error around my guesses steadily increases, although the tiny numbers of literate people make the impact of these errors correspondingly small.

  The third step is to apply a multiplier for the changing speed and reach of communication technologies. I divide the most advanced tools for handling information into three broad categories: electronic (in use in both East and West by 2000), electrical (in use in the West by 1900), and preelectrical (in use in the West for perhaps eleven thousand years and in the East for perhaps nine thousand years).

  Unlike most historians I do not make a strong distinction between print and preprint eras; the main contribution of printing was to produce more and cheaper materials rather than to transform communication the way that the telegraph or Internet would do, and these quantitative changes have already been factored in. For electronic technologies, I use a multiplier of 2.5 for the West and 1.89 for the East, reflecting the relative availability of computers and broadband communication in West and East in the year 2000. For electrical technologies, having some impact in the West by 1900, I use a multiplier of 0.05; and for preelectrical technologies, in use in all other periods, I use a multiplier of 0.01 in both East and West. Consequently, in 2000 the West scores the maximum possible 250 social development points (100 IT points × 2.5) and the East gets 189 (100 IT points × 1.89); in 1900, the West scores 3.19 points (63.8 × 0.05) and the East 0.3 (30 × 0.01). The Western score reaches the minimum level necessary to register on the index of social development (that is, 0.01 point) only around 3300 BCE; the Eastern, around 1300 BCE.

  Table A.4. Information technology scores

  MARGINS OF ERROR

  I spoke repeatedly of estimates and guesses in the previous section, because there is no way to build a social development index without them. One consequence of that is that no index will ever be “right,” whether we take that word in the strong sense of meaning that every single detail is completely accurate or in the weaker sense of meaning that all experts will make the same estimates. As a result, there is no point in asking whether the social development scores I have calculated are wrong. Of course they are. The real question is: How wrong are they? Are they so wrong that the basic shape of the history of social development as represented in the graphs in Chapters 4–10 is misleading, meaning that this whole book is fatally flawed? Or are the errors in fact relatively trivial?

  These questions can in principle be answered easily enough; we simply need to ask (1) just how much we would need to change the scores to make the past look so different that the arguments advanced in this book would cease to hold good and (2) whether such changes are plausible.

  Ultimat
ely the only way to do this is by examining the evidence listed on the website (www.ianmorris.org) for each individual calculation I have made, but here I want to address briefly the possibility that systematic errors undermine my claims about the overall shape of history. According to my index (shown on a log-linear scale in Figure 3.7), the West took a lead after 14,000 BCE. The East slowly caught up, and through most of the first millennium BCE the West’s lead was narrow. Around 100 BCE the West increased its lead, but in 541 CE the East pulled ahead. It stayed there until 1773. The West then regained the lead, and, if twentieth-century trends continue, will hold it until 2103. Western development has been higher than Eastern for 92.5 percent of the time since the end of the Ice Age.

  I suggested in Chapter 3 that overall my scores could err by as much as 10 percent without significantly altering this pattern. Figure A.2a shows how the trends would look if I have consistently underestimated Western development scores by 10 percent and overestimated Eastern scores by the same amount; Figure A.2b shows the outcome if I have underestimated Eastern development scores by 10 percent and overestimated Western scores by the same amount.

  The first point to note is that these scores severely strain credibility. Figure A.2a, raising Western and lowering Eastern scores by 10 percent, requires us to accept that the West was more developed than the East in 1400 CE, right before Zheng He sailed on the Indian Ocean; it also means that when Hannibal led his elephants to attack Rome in 218 BCE Western development was already higher than the East’s would be in Zheng’s time. As if that were not peculiar enough, the graph additionally tells us that the West was more developed when Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BCE than the East was when China’s emperor Qianlong rejected Lord Macartney’s trade embassy in 1793.

  Figure A.2b is perhaps even more peculiar. The development score it gives to the West in 700 CE, for instance, when the Arabs ruled a vast caliphate from Damascus, is lower than that for the East in the age of Confucius, which cannot be right; and it would make the Western score in 1800, when the industrial revolution was already under way, lower than the Eastern scores under the Song dynasty in 1000–1200, which seems even less likely.

  Yet even if historians could swallow such odd conclusions, the shapes of history as represented in Figure A.2 are still not different enough from that in Figure 3.7 to change the basic pattern that needs explaining. Short-term accident theories remain inadequate because even in Figure A.2b the West’s score is still higher most of the time (although “most” now means 56 percent rather than 92.5); so, too, long-term lock-in theories, because even in Figure A.2a the East does take the lead for seven centuries. Biology and sociology remain the most plausible explanations for the upward but interrupted movement of development, while geography remains the most plausible explanation for why the West rules.

  Figure A.2. Error revealed: the implications of systematic errors in social development scores. (a) raises all Western scores by 10 percent and reduces all Eastern scores by the same amount; (b) raises all Eastern scores by 10 percent and reduces all Western scores by the same amount.

  To change the fundamental patterns my estimates would need to be 20 percent wide of the mark. Figure A.3a shows how history would look if I have consistently underestimated Western development scores by 20 percent and overestimated Eastern scores by the same amount; Figure A.3b, the outcome if I have underestimated Eastern development scores by 20 percent and overestimated Western scores by the same amount.

  This time the patterns are very different. In Figure A.3a the Western score is always higher than the Eastern, making long-term lock-in theories seem very plausible and also invalidating my claim that social development changes the meaning of geography. Figure A.3b, by contrast, effectively reverses the conclusions of my actual index, having the East lead 90 percent of the time since the Ice Age.

  If either Figure A.3a or A.3b is correct, everything you have just read in this book is wrong. We can be confident, though, that they are not correct. Figure A.3a, raising Western scores and reducing Eastern scores by 20 percent, tells us that imperial Rome’s development in 1 BCE/CE was only five points behind industrial Japan’s in 1900, which cannot be true; while Figure A.3b, raising Eastern scores and reducing Western scores by 20 percent, means that Eastern development was higher in pre-Shang times than Western would be under the Persian Empire; that the West caught up with the East only in 1828, on the eve of the Opium War; and that Western rule has already ended (in 2003). None of this seems credible.

  Hence my suggestions in Chapter 3 that (a) the margin of error in my estimates is probably less than 10 percent and definitely less than 20 percent, and (b), even if the margin of error does rise to 10 percent, the basic historical patterns I am trying to explain still hold good.

  CONCLUSION

  I observed several times in Chapter 3 that making a social development index is chainsaw art. The best an index can do is to give us a rough, good-enough approximation that makes the index designer’s assumptions explicit. I have argued that the main reason we have for so long failed to explain why the West rules is that protagonists have defined their terms in different ways and focused on different parts of the problem. The simple act of setting up an index should therefore move the debate forward. Critics of this book who raise the first of the objections I listed at the start of this appendix—that quantitative comparisons are unacceptable because they dehumanize us—will be forced either to find another way to explain why the West rules or to show why we should not be asking that question at all, while critics who raise objections 2 through 4—that I have defined social development badly, used the wrong traits, or misunderstood the evidence—will be forced to come up with better indices of their own. And then, perhaps, we will see some real progress.

  Figure A.3. Even greater error: (a) raises all Western scores and reduces all Eastern scores by 20 percent, and (b) raises all Eastern scores and reduces all Western scores by 20 percent

  Notes

  This section provides references for quotations and works mentioned by name in the main text. I refer to sources by the authors’ or editors’ last names and the date of publication; the full details can be found in the bibliography that follows. For works of the last hundred years or so I provide a precise page number; for older works that have been reprinted in multiple versions with varying page numbers, I give the source’s full title and refer to the chapter or other subdivision from which I have taken the quotation. Translations are my own unless indicated otherwise.

  The “Further Reading” section suggests books and articles that I have found particularly helpful in writing this book.

  INTRODUCTION

  11 “I am wearing”: Shad Kafuri (August 1994), cited in Jacques 2009, p. 113.

  12 “Whatever happens”: Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveler (1898), part 6.

  13 “The farther backward”: Winston Churchill, cited from http://quotationsbook.com/quote/40770/.

  19 “distant marginal peninsula,” “Sinocentric world order,” and “a third-class seat”: Frank 1998, pp. 2, 116, 37.

  20 “It’s well”: William III of England (1690), cited from Goldstone 2006, p. 171.

  22 “between that era”: Crosby 2004, p. 42; italics in original.

  26 “History, n.”: Bierce 1911, p. 51.

  27 “Progress is made”: Heinlein 1973, p. 53.

  29 “The Art of Biography”: Bentley 1905, p. 1.

  30 “Soft countries”: Herodotus, History 9.122.

  30 “too uniformly stimulating” and “The people”: E. Huntington 1915, p. 134.

  32 “None ever wished”: Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1780), section on Milton.

  34 “advantages of backwardness”: Gerschrenkon 1962.

  1. BEFORE EAST AND WEST

  39 “When a man”: Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791), vol. 3, entry for September 20, 1777.

  39 “necessary”: Arthur Young (1761), quoted in Briggs 1994, p. 196.<
br />
  40 “long one of” etc.: Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), book I, chapter 8.

  41 “elastic geography” etc.: Davies 1994, p. 25.

  45 “punctuated equilibrium”: Gould 2007. The expression goes back to an essay Gould published with Niles Eldredge in 1972.

  59 “Are you going”: Richard Klein, quoted in “Scientists in Germany Draft Neanderthal Genome,” New York Times, February 12, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/science/13neanderthal.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss.

  62 “What a piece”: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2.

  63 “inquisitive tendrils” and “The very atoms”: A. C. Clarke 1968, pp. 16, 17.

  71 “one lucky mother”: Cann et al. 1987.

  72 “modern Chinese man”: “Stirring Find in Xuchang,” China Daily, January 28, 2008, http://www.chinadaily.com/cn/opinion/2008-01/28/content_6424452.htm.

  72 “the data”: Ke et al. 2001, p. 1151.