Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris

I argue in this book that asking why the West rules is really a question about what I will call social development. By this I basically mean societies’ abilities to get things done—to shape their physical, economic, social, and intellectual environments to their own ends.

The answer to the first question—why Western social development is higher than that of any other part of the world—does not lie in any recent accident: the West has been the most developed region of the world for fourteen of the last fifteen millennia. But on the other hand, neither was the West’s lead locked in in the distant past. For more than a thousand years, from about 550 through 1775 CE, Eastern regions scored higher.

“History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” It is sometimes hard to disagree with Ambrose Bierce’s comic definition:

Morris Theorem: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. And they rarely know what they’re doing.” History teaches us that when the pressure is on, change takes off.

In case after case we will see that when societies fail to solve the problems that confront them, a terrible package of ills—famine, epidemic, uncontrolled migration, and state failure—begins to afflict them, turning stagnation into decline; and when famine, epidemic, migration, and state failure are joined by further forces of disruption, like climatic change (collectively, I call these the five horsemen of the apocalypse), decline can turn into disastrous, centuries-long collapses and dark ages.

we might draw a tentative conclusion from this: that when the four horsemen of the apocalypse—climate change, famine, state failure, and migration—ride together, and especially when a fifth horseman of disease joins them, disruptions can turn into collapses, sometimes even driving social development down.

In their day, scholars such as Porphyry and Plotinus (the latter perhaps the greatest Western thinker since Aristotle) who reinterpreted the Platonic tradition to fit modern times were among the biggest names in the West, but increasingly thinkers were looking for entirely new answers.

At just the moment that maritime technology began to turn the oceans into highways linking the whole planet, Prince Henry grasped the possibilities and Emperor Zhengtong rejected them. Here, if anywhere, the great man/bungling idiot theory of history seems to accomplish a lot: the planet’s fate hung on the decisions these two men made.

All this book-learning struck Britons as rather ridiculous, but in new, high-tech industries such as optics and chemistry, knowing a little science and management theory produced better results than going by feel. By 1900 it was Britain, with its faith in improvisation, muddling through, and inspired amateurs, that was starting to look ridiculous.

In the introduction, I proposed a “Morris Theorem” (expanding an idea of the great science fiction writer Robert Heinlein) to explain the entire course of history—that change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they’re doing) looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things.

Yet none of the great transformations in social development—the origins of agriculture, the rise of cities and states, the creation of different kinds of empires, the industrial revolution—was a matter of mere tinkering;

At the end of the Ice Age, hunter-gatherers became so successful that they put pressure on the resources that sustained them. Further efforts to find food transformed some of the plants and animals they preyed on into domesticates and transformed some of the foragers into farmers. Some farmers succeeded so well that they put renewed pressure on resources, and to survive—especially when the weather went against them—they transformed their villages into cities and states. Some cities and states succeeded so well that they, too, ran into resource problems and transformed themselves into empires (first land-based, later ruling the steppes and oceans, too). Some of these empires repeated the same cycle, putting pressure on their resources and turning themselves into industrial economies.

In fact, history is the same old same old, a single grand and relentless process of adaptations to the world that always generate new problems that call for further adaptations. Throughout this book I have called this process the paradox of development: ...

Rather, if they do not figure out how to smash the ceiling, their problems spiral out of control. Some or all of what I have called the five horsemen of the apocalypse break loose, and famine, disease, migration, and state collapse—particularly if they coincide with an episode of climate change—will drive development down, sometimes for centuries, even into a dark age.

One of these ceilings comes around twenty-four points on the social development index. This was the level where Western social development stalled and then collapsed after 1200 BCE.

The most important ceiling, though, which I have called the hard ceiling, comes around forty-three points. Western development hit this in the first century CE, then collapsed; Eastern development did the same a thousand or so years later. This ha...

I have stressed a two-way relationship between geography and social development: the physical environment shapes how social development changes, but changes in social development shape what the physical environment means.

At the end of the Ice Age, around fifteen thousand years ago, global warming marked off a band of Lucky Latitudes (roughly 20–35 degrees north in the Old World and 15 degrees south to 20 degrees north in the New) where an abundance of large, potentially domesticable plants and animals evolved. Within this broad band, one region, the so-called Hilly Flanks of southwest Asia, was luckiest of all. Because it had the densest concentration of potential domesticates it was easier for people who lived there to become farmers than for people anywhere else. So, since people (in large groups) are all much the same, Hilly Flankers were the first to settle in villages and domesticate plants and animals, starting before 9000 BCE. From these first farmers descended the societies of the West. About two thousand years later people in what is now China—where potential domesticates were also plentiful, though not so plentiful as in the Hilly Flanks—moved the same way; from them descend the societies of the East. Over the next few thousand years people independently began domesticating plants and/or animals in half a dozen other parts of the world, each time beginning another regional tradition.

Because Westerners were the first to farm, and because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners were also the first to feel the paradox of development in a serious way and the first to learn what I have called the advantages of backwardness. Rising social development meant bigger populations, more elaborate lifestyles, and greater wealth and military power. Through various combinations of colonization and emulation, societies with relatively high social development expanded at the expense of those with lower development, and farming spread far and wide. To make farming work in new lands such as the sweltering river valleys of Mesopotamia, farmers were forced practically to reinvent it, and in the process of creating irrigation agriculture discovered advantages that made this rather backward frontier even more fruitful than the original agricultural core in the Hilly Flanks. And some time after 4000 BCE, with the biggest farming villages in the crowded Hilly Flanks struggling to manage, it was the Mesopotamians who worked out how to organize themselves into cities and states. About two thousand years later the same process played out in the East too, with the paradox of development exposing somewhat similar advantages of backwardness in the valleys that fed into the Yellow River basin.

The new states had to interact with their neighbors in new ways, which created even more disruptive paradoxes of development along their frontiers. They had to learn to manage these; when they got things wrong—as perhaps happened at Uruk in Mesopotamia around 3100 BCE and Taosi in China around 2300, and definitely happened in the West after 2200 and 1750 BCE—they collapsed in chaos. Each collapse coincided with a peri...

Rising social development produced worse disruptions and collapses, but it also produced more resilience and greater powers of recovery. After 1550 BCE Western cities and states bounced back from the disasters and expanded around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. A second great geographical contrast between East and West then came into play; the East had nothing like this extraordinary inland sea, providing cheap and easy transport. But like so much else, the Mediterranean was a paradox, offering both opportunities and challenges. When social development reached about twenty-four points the forces of disruption on this wide-open frontier spun out of control, and around 1200 BCE...

To break through the twenty-four-point ceiling, states had to reorganize themselves and develop a whole new way of thinking about the world, creating what we might call first-wave Axial thought. Because Westerners failed to reorganize and rethink around 1200 BCE, their lead over the East in social development narrowed; and because Westerners and Easterners both succeeded in making the necessary adjustments as development rose in the first millennium BCE, they remained neck and neck for a thousand years.

Westerners and Easterners alike created more centralized states and then full-blown empires, and after 200 BCE reached a scale that began changing the meanings of geography again. In the West the Roman Empire brought the unruly Mediterranean under control and social development spiked up past forty points. By the first century CE it was pressing against the hard ceiling. At the same time, though, the rise of the Roman and Han empires also changed the meaning of the vast spaces that separated East and West. With so much wealth at each end of Eurasia, traders and steppe nomads found new reasons to move around, tentatively linking the cores and beginning the First Old World Exchange. Contacts pushed Eastern and Western development higher still, but they also set off unprecedented disruptions. For the first time, the five horsemen of the apocalypse linked the cores, exchanging microbes as well as goods and ideas. Instead of breaking through the hard ceiling, the Roman and Han empires both came apart after 150 CE.

Both East and West slid into new dark ages in which second-wave Axial thought (Christianity, Islam, and new forms of Buddhism) displaced older first-wave ideas, but in other ways their collapses were quite different. In the West, Germanic invaders broke up the less-developed part of the Roman Empire around the western Mediterranean, and the core retreated into its older and more developed heartland around the eastern Mediterranean. In the East, Inner Asian invaders broke up the older and more developed p...

This geographical contrast made a world of difference. By 450 CE a new frontier of rice agriculture had begun booming around the Yangzi; by 600 China had been reunited; and over the following century the Grand Canal, linking the Yangzi and Yellow rivers, gave China a system of internal waterways that functioned rather like the Mediterranean had done for ancient Rome. In the West, though, where the Arab invaders were strong enough to ...

Around 541 Eastern development rose above Western (proving beyond all doubt that Western rule was never locked in) and by 1100 was pressing against the hard ceiling. As economic growth outran resources, ironworkers tapped into fossil fuels, inventors created new machines, and Song dynasty intellectuals plunged into a veritable Chinese renaissance...

To some extent, events in the early second millennium BCE paralleled those in the first, but with East and West reversed. Rising development set off a Second Old World Exchange and freed the five horsemen again. Social development fell in both cores, but fell longest and furthest in the East. In the West, the more developed Muslim heartland east of the Mediterranean su...

These fragmented, previously peripheral European lands now discovered advantages in their own backwardness. Shipbuilding and gunnery, technologies western Europeans had learned from the East during the Second Old World Exchange, allowed them to turn the Atlantic Ocean into a highway, once again transforming the meanings of geography. Eager to tap into the wealth of the East, Western sailors fanned out and—to their surprise—bumped into the Americas. Easterners could have discovered America in the fifteenth century (some people believe they did) but geography always made it more likely that Westerners would get there first. Easterners had far more to gain by sailing toward the ri...

In the seventeenth century the expansion of the cores changed the meanings of geography more dramatically than ever before. Centralized empires with muskets and cannons closed the Inner Asian steppe highway that linked East and West, ending nomadic migration and effectively killing one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. On the Atlantic, by contrast, the oceanic highway that western European merchants had opened fueled the rise of new kinds of markets and raised entirely new questions about how the natural world worked. By 1700 social development was again pressing the hard ceiling, but this time, with the full complement of horsemen of the apocalypse unable to ride, di...

Stephen Stigler even proposed a law that no discovery is ever named after its real discoverer (Stigler’s Law, he observed, was actually discovered by the sociologist Robert Merton twenty-five years earlier).

Each age gets the thought it needs, dictated by the kind of problems that geography and social development force on it.

culture and free will never trump biology, sociology, and geography for long.

Plenty of people in the Western core already see migration as a threat, even though since the closing of the steppe highway three centuries ago migration has more often been a motor of development than a danger to it.138 In 2006 a Gallup poll reported that Americans thought immigration was the country’s second-worst problem (after the war in Iraq). To many Americans, the danger of Mexicans smuggling drugs and taking jobs seems to outweigh all benefits; to many Europeans, fears of Islamist terrorism loom just as large. In both regions, nativist lobbies argue that the new settlers are uniquely difficult to assimilate.