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

by Ian Morris

But there was, of course, more to the rise of Western rule than military power alone.

A deeper cause was that British factories could turn out explosive shells, well-bored cannon, and oceangoing warships, and British governments could raise, fund, and direct expeditions operating halfway round the world;

and the ultimate reason that the British swept into Tinghai that afternoon was their success at extracting energy from the natural environment and using it to achieve their goals.

It all came down to the fact that Westerners had not only scrambled further up the Great Chain of Energy than anyone else but also scrambled so high that—unlike any earlier societies in history—th...

This process of scrambling up the Great Chain of Energy is the foundation of what, following the tradition of evolutionary anthropologists since Naroll in the 1950s, I will call social development—basically, a group’s ability to master ...

Social development, we might say, measures a community’s ability to get things done, which, in principle, can be compared across time and space.

It therefore makes sense to say that modern Japan is more developed than medieval Japan. Yet this implies nothing about whether the people of modern Japan are smarter, worthier, or luckier (let alone happier) than the Japanese of the Middle Ages. Nor does it imply anything about the moral, environmental, or other costs of social development.

I will argue later in this chapter that measuring social development shows us what we need to explain if we are to answer the why-the-West-rules question; in fact, I will propose that unless we come up with a way to measure social development we will never be able to answer this question.

First, though, we need establish some principles to guide our index-making.

that is, scientists should boil their ideas down to the core point that can be checked against reality, figure out the simplest possible way to perform the check, then do just that—nothing more, but nothing less either.

But in 1919 the British astronomer Arthur Eddington came up with a clever solution, very much in the spirit of Einstein’s aphorism: by looking at the stars near the sun during a solar eclipse, Eddington realized, he could measure whether they had shifted by the amount Einstein predicted.

Eddington set off to the South Pacific, made his observations, and pronounced Einstein correct.

Just what should we be measuring to assign scores to social development?

If Einstein provides our theoretical lead, we might take a practical lead from the United Nations Human Development Index, not least because it has a lot in common with the kind of index that will help answer our question.

The Programme’s economists started by asking themselves what human development really means, and boiled it down to three core traits: average life expectancy, average education (expressed by literacy levels and enrollments in school), and average income.

They then devised a complicated weighting system to combine the traits to give each country a score between zero, meaning no human development at all (in which case everyone would be dead) and one—perfection, given the possibilities of the real world in the year the survey was done.

(In case you’re wondering, in the most recent index available as I write, that for 2009, Norway came first, scoring .971,...

Economists still find a lot not to like about it, though. Most obviously, life expectancy, education, and income are not the only things we could measure.

Other economists are comfortable both with the variables chosen and with conflating them, but do not like the way the UN statisticians weight each trait.

But despite all the criticisms, the human development index has proved enormously useful. It has helped relief agencies target their funds on the countries where they can do most good, and even the critics tend to agree that the simple fact of having an index moves the debates forward by making everything more explicit.

Each dimension of society that we measure should satisfy six rather obvious criteria.

First, it must be relevant: that is, it must tell us something about social development. Second, it must be culture-independent: we might, for example, think that the quality of literature and art are useful measures of social development, but judgments in these matters are notoriously culture-bound. Third, traits must be independent of one another—if, for instance, we use the number of people in a state and the amount of wealth in that state as traits, we should not use per capita wealth as a third trait, because it is just a product of the first two traits. Fourth, traits must be adequately documented. This is a real problem when we look back thousands of years, because the available evidence varies so much. Especially in the distant past, we simply do not know much about some potentially useful traits. Fifth, traits must be reliable, meaning that experts more or less agree on what the evidence says. Sixth, traits must be convenient. This may be the least important criterion, but the harder it is to get evidence for something or the longer it takes to calculate results, the less useful that trait is.

But after spending many months now looking into the options, I have settled on four traits that I think do quite well on all six criteria.

My first trait is energy capture.

Energy capture is fundamental to social development—so much so that back in the 1940s the celebrated anthropologist Leslie White proposed reducing all human history to a single equation: E x T → C, he pronounced, where E stands for energy, T for technology, and C for culture.

All the energy capture in the world would not have taken a British squadron to Tinghai if they had not been able to organize it.

We need to measure this organizational capacity.

but neo-evolutionists learned in the 1960s that it is almost impossible to measure differentiation directly, or even to define it in a way that will satisfy critics.

We need a proxy, something closely related to organizational capacity ...

The one I have chosen is...

On further reflection, though, I hope the choice will seem less odd. It took astonishing organization to support a city of 3 million people. Someone had to get food and water in and waste products out, provide work, maintain law and order, put out fires, and perform all the other tasks that go on, day in, day out, in every great city.

the organization needed to keep the city going was vastly beyond anything any earlier society could have managed—just as running Lagos (population 11 million) or Mumbai (population 19 million), let alone Tokyo (population 35 million), would have been far beyond the Roman Empire’s capabilities.

In our case, the size of a society’s largest cities has the extra advantage that we can trace it not only in the official statistics produced in the last few hundred years but also in the archaeological record, allowing us to get an approximate sense of levels of organization all the way back to the Ice Age.

As well as generating physical energy and organizing it, the British of course also had to process and communicate prodigious amounts of information.

Scientists and industrialists had to transfer kno...

but it had already advanced far beyond eighteenth-century levels, which, in turn, were well head of the seventeenth century.

Information processing is critical to social development, and I use it as my third trait.

Last but sadly not least is the capacit...

However well the British extracted energy, organized it, and communicated, it was their ability to turn these three traits toward des...

“Every Communist must grasp this truth: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’”

Before the 1840s, no society could project military power across the whole planet, and to ask who “ruled” was nonsense. After the 1840s, though, this became perhaps the most important question in the world.

The good news, though, is that none of the alternative traits I have looked at over the last few years changed the scores much, and none changed the overall pattern at all.33

For the chainsaw artist, the only important question is whether the tree trunk looks like a bear; for the comparative historian, it is whether the index shows the overall shape of the history of social development.

That, of course, is something historians will have to judge for themselves, comparing the pattern the index reveals with the details of the historical record.

But putting numbers on the table forces us to focus on where errors might have crept in and how they can be corrected. It may not be astrophysics, but it is a start.

How to Measure? Now it is time to come up with some numbers.

The United Nations’ various programs publish annual statistical digests that tell us, for instance, that the average American consumes 83.2 million kilocalories of energy per year, compared to 38 million for the average person in Japan; that 79.1 percent of Americans live in cities, as against 66 percent of Japanese; that there are 375 Internet hosts per thousand Americans but only 73 per thousand Japanese; and so on.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies’s annual Military Balance tells us, so far as it can be known, how many troops and weapons each country has, what their capabilities are, and how much they cost.

They do not add up to an index, though, until we decide ho...

Sticking to the simple-as-possible program, I set 1,000 points as the maximum social development score attainable in the year 2000 and divide the...