---
product_id: 2439609
title: "Why the West Rules—for Now"
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---

# Why the West Rules—for Now

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A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "A remarkable book . . . an important book―one that challenges, stimulates and entertains. Anyone who does not believe there are lessons to be learned from history should start right here."― The Economist Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West's rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last? Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process. Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules―for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines―from ancient history to neuroscience―not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.

Review: Ambitious (overly?) but addictive - Once you open this book, you will not be able to leave it. Ian Morris bombards you with information, not only from history and archaeology, but from a variety of auxiliary sciences, and although that makes for probably a slower reading, it also will keep you hooked in for more. The question he sets for himself is to explain why the Western civilizations of Western Europe and North America have led the world economically, culturally and militarily for the last 200 years, and not the Eastern civilizations of China and Japan; but he isn't happy with the explanations others have given. He constructs an index of social development to measure the advance of civilizations and evaluates the evolution of each region throughout history to arrive at answers as to why social development rises and falls, and rose so spectacularly since ca. 1800 in the West. Not all is successful. The huge rise in the 19th and 20th centuries of all of his index's parameters would have demanded that he split it in two; one pre- and one post- industrial, to better account for the peculiarities of both sides of the upturning curve during the Industrial Revolution. As it is, the graphic looks like a 90-degree turn from almost horizontal to almost vertical. It is a realistic view considering the enormous material growth of the last two centuries, but makes comparisons between the pre- and post- era hard to maintain. This is yet exacerbated by his usage of the same index towards the future. There really is no argument anywhere on why the slope should continue to be the same rate in the future. Another omission that I consider to be important is the almost complete neglect of South Asia. Morris does a very good job of summarizing Chinese and Japanese (for the East) and Middle Eastern and European (for the West) history, the pressures each faced, and the ways they raised (or not) their social development. The annexation of the Americas and Africa into the Western empires in the age of 1500-1950 probably is good enough to justify their omissions. Yet it doesn't seem justifiable to me to omit South Asia in a book that aspires to explain great patterns of history that explain the rise, stagnation or fall of civilizations across each great cultural core in the world. South Asia is clearly independent of both a Sinic East and a Sumerian West, and although in contact with both since classical antiquity, it has never really integrated into either anymore than you could say Japan and the Asian Tigers have Westernized in the last few decades. If even in a global village era it makes sense to speak of West and East (which Morris assumes all the book, but by the end you get the impression he leaves this assumption unjustified and probably is himself not convinced of it), then it should make sense to speak of a "middle" South Asian core too. However, the real shortcoming of this book is in its extrapolations for the future. While all of them are presented as nothing more than possibilities, you still get the impression that, compared to the great erudition and analysis displayed before, they lack a lot of rigor. Morris has exposed by now, over and over, civilizations dominating their natural environment and modifying their social and economic organization once and again; sometimes giving rise to new heights of development, and sometimes falling victim to nature or to man-made crises. These falls, themselves, sometimes are short and sometimes last for centuries, and the climbing back itself takes several forms, depending on the experiences learned and the new opportunities available. Then he does not seem to try to apply the same to the future. He posits a future where his graphics would continue under the same tendencies, with the standard of living on both the North Atlantic rim and China steadily rising until by 2103 the East surpasses the West and becomes the most advanced civilization. Then he says he doesn't really believe this will happen, and advances a dichotomy between a Singularity future, where technology again breaks all the barriers previously set, advancing social development to heights we can't imagine today; and a Nightfall future, where nuclear war or environmental catastrophe reduce humankind to the stone age again, or even exterminate it. Now, there is no denying that either of these two futures should not be discounted, and should be considered possible. What should be questioned is that *only* these two futures are considered viable by Morris, with no kind of intermediate future. Everything he wrote previously regarding past collapses of empires and civilizations seems to apply again, and imply that a collapse, while possible, should not push humanity back into the stone age, but stall, maybe even reverse, some development, but only temporarily before the challenges were met by new people and civilizations discovering new ways to organize and meet the challenges thrown at them by nature and other humans. Conversely, everything about previous rises of social development indicates that ceilings are approached sometimes and that when this happens, it takes time before any civilization is capable of breaking them. There is nothing in history that predicts either Nightfall or Singularity, and everything to predict some intermediate future, and all the previous chapters stand as proof, which makes it all the more of a shortcoming. (In this context too, it ends up being more of a disappointment that he doesn't examine more regions. South Asia, again, seems like an obvious place to examine, but now again the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and even Latin America could well be regions that discover new advantages of backwardness, surpass both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific, and solve the Gordian knot of Singularity or Nightfall, if indeed it were an unavoidable dichotomy with current ways of organization. It is also disappointing that, although he speculates about nuclear war, financial crises, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, and clean energy, he only mentions in passing the demographic crises that most of the world is heading toward, including all the core East Asian countries and all of the core Western ones except the USA). That said, I still give it 5 stars, because it is a very well researched and written book, which as I said, will keep you hooked for more from start to finish. It also seems to me that Morris makes a plausible and well supported argument about the reasons why Western dominance since the 1750s happened, which is its main goal. It should spark debate both about its main issue of Western rise to global dominance, and about its speculations about the future, which should be a positive thing. This is a seminal book, which is sure to become a classic. Yet be aware of the shortcomings I mentioned too.
Review: Very interesting read in its conclusion though some of the body can be tedious - Why The West Rules- for Now is a unique look at how civilization has evolved and in particular, the driving forces of developement in both the east and the west. It is a mixture of archaeology, history, economics and sociology. The book is split into several parts, it begins with the origin of man, going thru how homo sapien came into existence and goes through the migratory patterns of pre-human ancestry. This is then followed with a study of ancient civilization, how it evolved and how society was structured. It follows then as a history lesson for major eastern and wester civilization and then finally ends with an analysis of today. I will attempt to break down the book into its 3 parts. The first part of the book I found the least intereting part of the book. It is a study of early man and the origins of our species. It goes through the bone records throughout the planet of various pre-human species and explores the possible differences in origin of eastern and western people. The author then goes through why the evidence does not support such a thesis at all, ie that eastern people can from a different, inferior genetic crop. Ive never heard such arguments in recent history and spending 60 pages on a subject that hasnt been proposed for the last 20 years was a bit of a waste of time. The book then takes a turn for the better in going through ancient civilization. The history of civilization is the meat of the book. The author goes through, by defining a social index based on some objective measures of "sophistication", the map of human developement in both east and west. The author then shows the evolution of both cultures, with the west outperforming and then underperforming post the fall of rome, only to outperform again post the industrial revolution. The author discusses the stresses and engines of growth of civilizations at each age and is very interested in describing the dynamics between these stresses and engines as the means to understanding their limitations. One gets a solid re-introduction to modern civilization by reading this section. The explanation of the differences between the developement in civilization is described as a function of several variables and puts the relative outperformance of the west over the east to be of geographic origin, in particular having sea channels to formalize trade in early civilization and the proximity to the americas in later civilization. In addition the weather patterns at the dawn of civilization clearly impacted defined where the first agricultural societies could form. As we get to the conclusion we get to the most interesting aspect of the book which is the authors conclusion. The author believes the reader should not focus on east and west. In particular he believes in the shrinking world in which labour has become a more tradeable good and we are far more interconnected than we have ever been, it can be difficult to disentangle different cultures. As a result he believes we are at a new crossroads in which either, we will stop our upward trajectory and turn back in our developement index or we will break through into a new age. The author takes a somewhat unique view of the world by looking at it as testing a new developement cieling. In a certain sense its a modified Malthusian argument, where the contraint is now resource extraction and production in conjunction with environmental repurcussions. One can get a lot out of the book, the perspective of the conclusion I thought was fresh and interesting, the rest of the book was informative in most places and in some it debated points that werent worthy of the time the author put in.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #493,695 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #14 in Historical Geography #35 in Human Geography (Books) #65 in International Economics (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 907 Reviews |

## Images

![Why the West Rules—for Now - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/817UEZ-CciL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Ambitious (overly?) but addictive
*by A***X on May 18, 2012*

Once you open this book, you will not be able to leave it. Ian Morris bombards you with information, not only from history and archaeology, but from a variety of auxiliary sciences, and although that makes for probably a slower reading, it also will keep you hooked in for more. The question he sets for himself is to explain why the Western civilizations of Western Europe and North America have led the world economically, culturally and militarily for the last 200 years, and not the Eastern civilizations of China and Japan; but he isn't happy with the explanations others have given. He constructs an index of social development to measure the advance of civilizations and evaluates the evolution of each region throughout history to arrive at answers as to why social development rises and falls, and rose so spectacularly since ca. 1800 in the West. Not all is successful. The huge rise in the 19th and 20th centuries of all of his index's parameters would have demanded that he split it in two; one pre- and one post- industrial, to better account for the peculiarities of both sides of the upturning curve during the Industrial Revolution. As it is, the graphic looks like a 90-degree turn from almost horizontal to almost vertical. It is a realistic view considering the enormous material growth of the last two centuries, but makes comparisons between the pre- and post- era hard to maintain. This is yet exacerbated by his usage of the same index towards the future. There really is no argument anywhere on why the slope should continue to be the same rate in the future. Another omission that I consider to be important is the almost complete neglect of South Asia. Morris does a very good job of summarizing Chinese and Japanese (for the East) and Middle Eastern and European (for the West) history, the pressures each faced, and the ways they raised (or not) their social development. The annexation of the Americas and Africa into the Western empires in the age of 1500-1950 probably is good enough to justify their omissions. Yet it doesn't seem justifiable to me to omit South Asia in a book that aspires to explain great patterns of history that explain the rise, stagnation or fall of civilizations across each great cultural core in the world. South Asia is clearly independent of both a Sinic East and a Sumerian West, and although in contact with both since classical antiquity, it has never really integrated into either anymore than you could say Japan and the Asian Tigers have Westernized in the last few decades. If even in a global village era it makes sense to speak of West and East (which Morris assumes all the book, but by the end you get the impression he leaves this assumption unjustified and probably is himself not convinced of it), then it should make sense to speak of a "middle" South Asian core too. However, the real shortcoming of this book is in its extrapolations for the future. While all of them are presented as nothing more than possibilities, you still get the impression that, compared to the great erudition and analysis displayed before, they lack a lot of rigor. Morris has exposed by now, over and over, civilizations dominating their natural environment and modifying their social and economic organization once and again; sometimes giving rise to new heights of development, and sometimes falling victim to nature or to man-made crises. These falls, themselves, sometimes are short and sometimes last for centuries, and the climbing back itself takes several forms, depending on the experiences learned and the new opportunities available. Then he does not seem to try to apply the same to the future. He posits a future where his graphics would continue under the same tendencies, with the standard of living on both the North Atlantic rim and China steadily rising until by 2103 the East surpasses the West and becomes the most advanced civilization. Then he says he doesn't really believe this will happen, and advances a dichotomy between a Singularity future, where technology again breaks all the barriers previously set, advancing social development to heights we can't imagine today; and a Nightfall future, where nuclear war or environmental catastrophe reduce humankind to the stone age again, or even exterminate it. Now, there is no denying that either of these two futures should not be discounted, and should be considered possible. What should be questioned is that *only* these two futures are considered viable by Morris, with no kind of intermediate future. Everything he wrote previously regarding past collapses of empires and civilizations seems to apply again, and imply that a collapse, while possible, should not push humanity back into the stone age, but stall, maybe even reverse, some development, but only temporarily before the challenges were met by new people and civilizations discovering new ways to organize and meet the challenges thrown at them by nature and other humans. Conversely, everything about previous rises of social development indicates that ceilings are approached sometimes and that when this happens, it takes time before any civilization is capable of breaking them. There is nothing in history that predicts either Nightfall or Singularity, and everything to predict some intermediate future, and all the previous chapters stand as proof, which makes it all the more of a shortcoming. (In this context too, it ends up being more of a disappointment that he doesn't examine more regions. South Asia, again, seems like an obvious place to examine, but now again the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and even Latin America could well be regions that discover new advantages of backwardness, surpass both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific, and solve the Gordian knot of Singularity or Nightfall, if indeed it were an unavoidable dichotomy with current ways of organization. It is also disappointing that, although he speculates about nuclear war, financial crises, nanotechnology, robotics, genetics, and clean energy, he only mentions in passing the demographic crises that most of the world is heading toward, including all the core East Asian countries and all of the core Western ones except the USA). That said, I still give it 5 stars, because it is a very well researched and written book, which as I said, will keep you hooked for more from start to finish. It also seems to me that Morris makes a plausible and well supported argument about the reasons why Western dominance since the 1750s happened, which is its main goal. It should spark debate both about its main issue of Western rise to global dominance, and about its speculations about the future, which should be a positive thing. This is a seminal book, which is sure to become a classic. Yet be aware of the shortcomings I mentioned too.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Very interesting read in its conclusion though some of the body can be tedious
*by A***N on January 31, 2011*

Why The West Rules- for Now is a unique look at how civilization has evolved and in particular, the driving forces of developement in both the east and the west. It is a mixture of archaeology, history, economics and sociology. The book is split into several parts, it begins with the origin of man, going thru how homo sapien came into existence and goes through the migratory patterns of pre-human ancestry. This is then followed with a study of ancient civilization, how it evolved and how society was structured. It follows then as a history lesson for major eastern and wester civilization and then finally ends with an analysis of today. I will attempt to break down the book into its 3 parts. The first part of the book I found the least intereting part of the book. It is a study of early man and the origins of our species. It goes through the bone records throughout the planet of various pre-human species and explores the possible differences in origin of eastern and western people. The author then goes through why the evidence does not support such a thesis at all, ie that eastern people can from a different, inferior genetic crop. Ive never heard such arguments in recent history and spending 60 pages on a subject that hasnt been proposed for the last 20 years was a bit of a waste of time. The book then takes a turn for the better in going through ancient civilization. The history of civilization is the meat of the book. The author goes through, by defining a social index based on some objective measures of "sophistication", the map of human developement in both east and west. The author then shows the evolution of both cultures, with the west outperforming and then underperforming post the fall of rome, only to outperform again post the industrial revolution. The author discusses the stresses and engines of growth of civilizations at each age and is very interested in describing the dynamics between these stresses and engines as the means to understanding their limitations. One gets a solid re-introduction to modern civilization by reading this section. The explanation of the differences between the developement in civilization is described as a function of several variables and puts the relative outperformance of the west over the east to be of geographic origin, in particular having sea channels to formalize trade in early civilization and the proximity to the americas in later civilization. In addition the weather patterns at the dawn of civilization clearly impacted defined where the first agricultural societies could form. As we get to the conclusion we get to the most interesting aspect of the book which is the authors conclusion. The author believes the reader should not focus on east and west. In particular he believes in the shrinking world in which labour has become a more tradeable good and we are far more interconnected than we have ever been, it can be difficult to disentangle different cultures. As a result he believes we are at a new crossroads in which either, we will stop our upward trajectory and turn back in our developement index or we will break through into a new age. The author takes a somewhat unique view of the world by looking at it as testing a new developement cieling. In a certain sense its a modified Malthusian argument, where the contraint is now resource extraction and production in conjunction with environmental repurcussions. One can get a lot out of the book, the perspective of the conclusion I thought was fresh and interesting, the rest of the book was informative in most places and in some it debated points that werent worthy of the time the author put in.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Lazy, Greedy, and Fearful...Lions and Tigers, and Bears
*by D***R on December 26, 2010*

There is a great deal to recommend this book. An historical depth that I have rarely come across before (Guns, Germs, and Steel is another example). A willingness, eagerness to treat Eurasia as a single geographical organism. An attempt to develop an objective standard for measuring states and empires through social development. Much else besides. The last chapter falls apart, as futurism, generally does into bizarre, but unique, tropes drawn from Asimov and Kurzweil. This last seemed to come out of nowhere and that's one of the weaknesses of the conclusion is that the reader was not given a background for this. I've read both others and see much to recommend Asimov but feel Kurzweil, though demanding and compelling, is on the lunatic fringe of rational thought. Having said this I feel that Morris Theorem [That change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they are doing) looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things] is interesting and as cynical as the rest of the book. This is not a book where the individual [great or otherwise] has any real place. All is groups and clinical abstractions which rule our lives ... not least of these is geography. Since this last has re-appeared with Jared Diamond more and more has been ascribed to it. And here's the problem with this brilliant book [no sarcasm intended]. Morris has given himself, and us, over to his algorithms. The problem with such prognosticating is that you never ever have enough data to plug into the equation so that it returns a correct response. Take the credit crunch....only one or two saw it coming and they were unknowns...for the most part. The business of prediction is only as good as your data. Here the data is sparse and open to radically different interpretations. Then there is that business o f us all becoming spiritual machines (Kurzweil). What can I really say about that? How do you either prove or disprove this? No, there are too many variables for to take seriously his vision of the future....but environmental extremists and futurists will love him to death. What is great about this book is the examination of Eurasia from about 9,600 BCE until approximate 2050 CE. Well, up until 2010 or so is great...things go to hell after that point....but they're fun if muddled. If you are looking for an all-in-one book about Eurasia this is great. However, India has no place in this narrative (though there are glancing references). What is brilliant is how he redefines the West...not just Europe but he extends it all the way to Northern Iraq and Southern Iran (the hilly flanks of southwestern Asia....India I think). From here he tracks the evolution of the West which finally encompasses Europe...its one time periphery. The data on China's various dynasties and empires is very interesting. Also why the West discovered the Americas and had an Industrial Revolution and East Asia did not. There's a lot to find silly and more to open a dialogue with in this book but as a whole I would rate it one of my best non-fiction reads in many years. Well worth the effort (long book but well written) and price of admission. But do I believe it? Some....but not the stuff post-2010...that is just too loopy for me. Highly recommended for history, economic, fringe thought buffs.

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