Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future
Very few authors are audacious enough to attempt to explain the entire history of the world in one book, but Morris does so with great gusto, and a surprising amount of success. Not only does the book maintain a coherent narrative and logic, but also remains informative and interesting to the historian and amateur alike.
In thirteen chapters and just under six hundred pages, Morris takes the reader on a seven million year journey to understand the history of the human (and pre-human) species. Beginning with Neanderthals and Peking Man, Morris traces the human journey out of Africa, through to Europe and the New World in the West, and past the Yangzi Valley through to China and Japan in the East. Along the way, he dismisses previously erroneous views of racism, culture and “great men” as the reasons for the West’s current lead and argues that geography itself is the reason for its current position. With this narrative in mind, he deftly traces migration patterns, climate change and technological innovation to demonstrate how each region developed over time. To measure these advancements, Morris introduces a insightful social development index that provides a quantitative indication of the relative level of development of the East and West at any given point. Using his index, Morris constructs an account consistent with much of the recent work of economic historians, suggesting the neither the West or the East saw terribly much in the way of growth until the Industrial Revolution. After this juncture, the West took off in the 18th century and the East followed nearer the 20th century. Morris ends the book suggesting that the East is catching up and likely to surpass the West, but that climate change poses an existential threat to both groups.
Particularly striking in the book is the attention paid to differences in the West and East before the Common Era. Morris belies his archeological roots in beginning, quite literally, before the dawn of time to demonstrate the physical and genetic equality of those in the West and East. Weaving evidence together from numerous archeological findings, Morris claims that the West initially started in the lead, as agricultural fertility inclined the West to eschew hunting-and-gathering sooner than in the East, giving it a slight head start. This advantage became more pronounced, however, with the rise of the Roman Empire. During Rome’s reign, the West achieved a social development score neither region would earn again until the Industrial Revolution. Overall, this detailed focus on humanity’s early period is particularly welcome, as it is too often under-covered by economic historians studying the Great Divergence who are eager to jump to periods where quantitative data becomes large enough for statistical analysis.
This is not to say that Morris is anything less than thorough in his coverage of the Modern Era. Picking up after the fall of Rome, the East overtakes the West with the rise of the Sui Dynasty and development of a strong waterway system. This continues until the Industrial Revolution in which Britain and Europe over take the East and set the world on a new Trajectory. Morris somewhat side-steps the academically fraught question of why the Revolution started in Britain, suggesting that it was not “locked-in”, but was due to cumulative technological advantage that came from years of trading, less restrictive legal structure and larger supply of finance and coal. From here, Morris is on more familiar ground, articulating the impact of the Industrial Revolution and subsequent technological growth, as well as the rise of Japan and later China. He ends the book rather boldly, not just noting that the East is growing but extrapolating his index to claim that the East may well claim the lead for a new era, though a number of variables, not least of which is climate change, make the world quite unpredictable.
Beyond the successful completion of such a mammoth task as explaining the history of the world, there are three particularly strong points of the book that are worth highlighting. First, Morris succeeds in creating a social development index that is generally quite helpful, in particular because he does not attach a moral or social value of the index, but merely tries to explain societies improvement in terms of living standards and technology. His transparency regarding his methods (including an additional book), as well as honesty about the index’s limitations serve to make the index quite useful in comparing the regions relative to each other and relative to their future selves. Second, far from being a stream of facts, Morris lays out a theoretically interesting claim that “lazy people”, and not “great men” are what move history. This theory provides depth to the book by allowing the reader to feel she is reading not just about history, but also about how to understand history. Finally, Morris successfully navigates the difficult balance between injecting contemporary political issues into history unnecessarily, and not whitewashing history so as not to suggest any modern motifs (particularly around climate change). Though written with popular audiences in mind, Morris avoids adding grist to anyone’s mill and instead focuses on the intellectual question of East and West, as the book claimed to do at the onset. Each of these achievements is no small feat, and speak highly of Morris’s ability as a scholar.
The one criticism I would make of the book, however, is that it seems to go to great lengths at times to avoid controversy. While one certainly understands that Morris did not wish to write a book on the history of the world and stake a position on every tussle between academics, by avoiding any confrontation at all, Morris’s explanations can become quite tenuous. In discussing the Greeks, for example, Morris claims the West’s classical thinkers did not increase its social development, but rather, that they stemmed from its previous growth. While one can understand his not wishing to weigh the philosophical traditions between West and East, to claim that thinkers such as Pythagoras offered nothing to the West’ development seems a stretch, as it would be to say Confucius, for example, was completely superfluous to the East’s development. This occurs again in the question of the genesis of the Industrial Revolution. Here, the narrative attempts a middle ground between “lock-in” theorists, who see the West on firmer footing long before Revolution’s start and “short-termers” who see the West as only surpassing the Industrial Revolution due to immediate factors. One can’t help but feel Morris is being a bit coy, however, as he argues that Britain was not “locked-in” to experience the Industrial Revolution, but that it stemmed from “technological accumulation” through decades of better trade policies and investment. One understands that he wishes to avoid claiming that the Industrial Revolution was predestined to be in Britain (and rightly so), but addressing this outright would have been more convincing than bending to avoid controversy. This point notwithstanding, Morris’s Why the West Rules is an excellent book that deserves the accolades it has received.
