At first glance, it might not look like I have set myself a very difficult task. Nearly everyone agrees that the West rules because the industrial revolution happened there, not in the East. In the eighteenth century British entrepreneurs unleashed the energies of steam and coal. Factories, railroads, and gunboats gave nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans the ability to project power globally; airplanes, computers, and nuclear weapons allowed their twentieth-century successors to cement this dominance.
