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

by Ian Morris

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.