HISTORY: Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the FutureBy Ian Morris Profile Books, 750pp. £25
IS HISTORY “just one damn thing after another”, asked Arnold Toynbee, a prolific scholar of the past. Certainly not, is Ian Morris’s answer, set out in an extraordinary new book offering nothing less than an original explanation of human progress since we emerged shivering from caves at the end of the last ice age, 15,000 years ago. If you appreciate erudition, originality and big-picture thinking, this book will delight and surprise, awe and inform, provoke and sometimes frustrate.
Its central assertion is that over those 15 millennia the West has been ahead of the rest for all but the brief, 1,200-year period from the time Dark Ages dusk settled, after Rome’s fall, to the dawning of the Industrial Revolution in Europe’s northwest, in the late 18th century.
This is a bold and eye-catching theory, and adds to the dozens of other theories that seek to explain why the West is so dominant. However, Morris’s explanation differs from all others in a number of important respects.
His central narrative involves a comparison of humanity’s two most consistently successful civilisations, those of China and the “West” – by which, incidentally, Morris means the civilisation that emerged in southern Turkey as the glaciers retreated but whose centre of gravity over the millennia has drifted westwards, first to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, then to Greece, Rome and northwest Europe, and, very recently, to North America.
His explanation for the West’s success has nothing to do with culture, political institutions, reason, race or great men, as some other theories hold. For Morris, geography is the key – or, as he catchily puts it, it’s all about “maps, not chaps”.
This is so, he claims, because “wherever we look, people (in large groups) are all much the same” – a phrase repeated throughout the book. And because people everywhere are lazy, fearful and greedy, they seek easier, safer and more profitable ways of doing things. These are the drivers of human progress, according to Morris. (Here, his desire for a theory of human behaviour as it applies to history leads to reductionism: what about, for instance, man’s innate curiosity and desire for status as motivating factors in doing things differently, and better?) Because people react in the same way to challenges they face, external environment is everything. Hence the centrality of geography.
The earliest example is the first major breakthrough in social development: the move from foraging to farming. Agriculture arose independently in many places across the planet, but it happened first in the West. Why? Simply because there were more naturally occurring species of domesticable plants and animals in Anatolia than anywhere else.
Another example is the Eurasia-wide decline of the early first millennium AD, when climate change and new diseases clobbered civilisations from the Atlantic Ocean to the Yellow Sea. The reason, writes Morris, that Han China did not fall as far as the Rome-centred West was because it had other areas of food production on its doorstep while Rome had nothing to replace its north African breadbasket when it was over-run by barbarians.
Yet another example of geography’s centrality was the reaching of the Americas. Europe beat China to the New World (despite hugely inferior maritime technology) because the Atlantic is much smaller than the Pacific and its winds and currents more favourable to seafarers attempting to get there.
Does this theory convince? In short: no. To attribute differences in civilisational achievement to geography – always and everywhere – borders on absurd reductionism and is the greatest weakness of a book that, despite this serious flaw, still manages to make a major contribution to the burgeoning field of world history.
One reason for its importance is its eclecticism. As a gifted polymath, Morris draws on a huge range of disciplines and sources. Although he developed a second career specialising in ancient Mediterranean history, he began his professional life as an archaeologist. This has made him a self-described academic impresario.
On archaeological digs he needs zoologists and botanists to make sense of animal and plant matter unearthed. When piecing together findings from his excavations and putting them in context, he seeks input from anthropologists, climatologists, geologists, geographers and epidemiologists.
UNDERSTANDING PATTERNSin human affairs across time and continents can be done only by synthesising the insights of many disciplines. In a world in which scholarly specialisation has led many academics to disappear into silos, Morris has pushed farther than anyone else the view that history is too complicated (and too important) to be left to historians alone. Many trained in the trawling of dusty archives won't like it, but he is surely correct in his view that the future of understanding the past is interdisciplinary.
Morris takes all these sources to create the book’s boldest innovation: an attempt to ascertain the “shape of history” by measuring social development since the ice age. Using the UN’s Human Development Index as his inspiration, he has laboriously devised his own 15,000-year index of social development.
This index, which at 233 pages was too large to be included in an already tome-sized book and is available only online, will surely cause great controversy in the academy – quantifying history won’t be to everyone’s taste.
Nor will Morris’s crystal-ball gazing. Macrohistorians seek to understand that which is common to all societies over time and that which is unique; that which is constant and that which changes. For anyone interested in such megatrends, extrapolating into the future is usually irresistible. Good macrohistorian that he is, Morris can’t resist the temptation.
His final chapter looks to the next 100 years and envisages only two possible outcomes: a new golden age if the challenges facing humanity, most notably climate change, can be overcome; and an apocalyptic reversal of much recent progress because of famine, failing states and war.
There is nothing implausible in these two extreme scenarios, but the either/or vision is, yet again, reductionist. There are an infinite number of possible outcomes for humanity, and muddling through some middle ground between utopia and catastrophe is surely the most likely of them.
But despite this flaw and others, Why the West Rulesrivets and enlightens, and its innovations on how we think about the past will almost certainly influence a generation of scholars.
Dan O'Brien is Economics Editor of The Irish Times
