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

by Ian Morris

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.