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

by Ian Morris

When Raoul Naroll published the first modern index of social development in 1956 he also gave equal points to his three traits, if only, as he put it, “because no obvious reason appe...

Having set the maximum possible score for each trait in the year 2000 at 250 points, we come to the trickiest part, deciding how to award points to East and West at each stage of their history.

decided to go with a simpler measure: the size of the largest known settlement in East and West at each moment in time.

does, though, reduce the uncertainties to a minimum. When I played around with the numbers I found that combining largest city size with other criteria, such as the best guesses at the distribution of people between cities and villages or the average size of cities, hugely increased the difficulties of the task but hardly changed the overall scores at all;

so, since the more complicated ways of measuring produced roughly the same results but with a whole lot more guesswork, I decided to stick to simple city sizes.

In 2000 CE, most geographers classified Tokyo as the world’s biggest city, with about...

Tokyo, then, scores the full 250 points allotted to organization/urbanism, meaning that for all other calculations it will take 106,800 people (that is, 26....

The biggest Western city in 2000 CE was New York, with 16.7 million people, scoring 156.37 points. The data from a hundred years ago are not as good, but all his...

In the West, London had about 6.6 million residents (scoring 61.80 points) in 1900 CE, while in the East Tokyo was still the greatest city, but with just...

By the time we get back to 1800 CE, historians have to combine several different kinds of evidence, including records of food supply and tax payments, the physical area covered by cities, the density of housing within them, and anecdotal accounts, but most conclude that Beijing was the world’s biggest city, with perhaps 1.1 million souls (10.30 p...

The further we push back in time, the broader the margins of error, but for the thousand years leading up to 1700 the biggest cities were clearly Chinese (with Japanese ones often close behind). First Chang’an, then Kaifeng, and later Hangzhou came close to or ...

A few centuries earlier the situation was reversed: in the first century BCE Rome’s million residents undoubtedly made it the world’s metropolis, while Chang...

To score 1 point on this system requires 106,800 people, so slightly more than one thousand people will score 0.01 points, the smallest number I felt was worth entering on the index.

As we saw in Chapter 2, the biggest Western villages reached this level around 7500 BCE and the biggest Eastern ones around 3500 BCE. Before these dates, West and East alike score zero (you can see tables of the scores in the appendix).

The simplest way to think about energy capture is in terms of consumption per person, measured in kilocalories per day.

Following the same procedure as for urbanism, I start in the year 2000 CE, when the average American burned through some 228,000 kilocalories per day.

The highest Eastern consumption per person in 2000 CE was Japan’s 104,000 kilocalories per day, earning 113.89 points.

Official statistics on energy go back only to about 1900 CE in the East and 1800 in the West, but fortunately there are ways to work around that.

but there is a huge gap between Ice Age hunters’ 4.25 points and the contemporary gasoline-and electricity-guzzling West’s 250.

What happened in between? By pooling their knowledge, archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and ecologists can give us a pretty good idea.

Cook’s guesstimates have stood up remarkably well to nearly forty years of comparison with the results gathered by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and economists.

The ice cores that featured so prominently in Chapters 1 and 2 also show that airborne pollution increased sevenfold in the last few centuries BCE, mostly because of Roman mining in Spain, and in the last ten years, studies of sediments from peat bogs and lakes have confirmed this picture.

Europeans apparently produced nine or ten times as much copper and silver in the first century CE as in the thirteenth century CE, with all the energy demands that implies—people to dig the mines, and animals to cart away the slag; more of both to build roads and ports, to load and unload ships, and carry metals to cities; watermills to crush the ores; and above all wood, as timber to shore up mineshafts and fuel to feed forges. This

Not until the eleventh century CE—when Chinese documents say that the relentless demands of ironworkers stripped the mountains around Kaifeng so bare of trees that coal, for the first time in history, became an important power source—did pollution in the ice return to Roman-era levels, and only with the belching smokestacks of nineteenth-century Britain did pollution push seriously beyond Roman-era levels.

Information technology and war-making raise their own difficulties, discussed briefly in the appendix and more fully on my website, but the same principles apply as with urbanism and energy capture, and probably the same margins of error too.

When and Where to Measure? Two final technical issues. First, how often should we calculate the scores? If we wanted to, we could trace changes in social development from year to year or even month to month since the 1950s.

As we move back toward the end of the Ice Age, though, checking social development on a century-by-century basis is neither possible nor particularly desirable.

I therefore use a sliding scale. From 14,000 through 4000 BCE, I measure social development every thousand years. From 4000 through 2500 BCE the quality of evidence improves and change accelerates, so I measure every five hundred years. I reduce this to every 250 years between 2500 BCE and 1500 BCE, and finally measure every century from 1400 BCE through 2000 CE.

I described the historian Kenneth Pomeranz’s complaints about how comparative historians often skew analysis of why the West rules by sloppily comparing tiny England with enormous China and concluding that the West already led the East by 1750 CE.

We must, he insisted, compare like-sized units.

so which parts of the East and West should we focus on when working out scores for the index of social development?

When it comes to explaining why the West rules, the most important information normally comes from comparing the most highly developed parts of each region, the cores that were tied together by the densest political, economic, social, and cultural interactions. The index of social development needs to measure and compare changes within these cores.

As we will see in Chapters 4–10, though, the core areas have themselves shifted and changed across time.

The Western core was geographically actually very stable from 11,000 BCE until about 1400 CE, remaining firmly at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea except for the five hundred years between about 250 BCE and 250 C...

Otherwise, it always lay within a triangle formed by what are now Ira...

Since 1400 CE it has moved relentlessly north and west, first to northern Italy, then to Spain and France, then broadening to include Britain, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. By 1900 it straddled the At...

In the East the core remained in the original Yellow-Yangzi zone right up until 1800 CE, although its center of gravity shifted northward toward the Yellow River’s central plain after about 4000 BCE, back south to the Yangz...

It expanded to include Japan by 1900 and southeast China by...

why the cores shifted will be one of our major concerns in Chapters 4 through 10.

The Pattern of the Past So much for the rules of the game; now for some results. Figure 3.3 shows the scores across the last sixteen thousand years, since things began warming up at the end of the Ice Age.

Figure 3.2. Shifting centers of power: the sometimes slow, sometimes rapid relocation of the most highly developed core within the Western and Eastern traditions since the end of the Ice Age

The Eastern and Western lines run so close together that it is hard even to distinguish them, and they barely budge off the bottom of the graph until 3000 BCE.

Even then, not much seems to happen until just a few centuries ago, when both lines abruptly take an almost ninety-degree turn and shoot straight up.

But this rather disappointing-looking graph in fact tells us two v...

First, Eastern and Western social development have not differed very much; at the scale we are looking at, it is hard to tell...

Second, something profound happened in the last few centuries, by far the fastest and greates...

This problem afflicts all graphs that try to show patterns where growth is accelerating, multiplying what has gone before, rather than simply adding to it.

Fortunately there is a convenient way to solve the problem.

The black line in Figure 3.5 shows what happened when I paid nothing, while the gray one shows how my debt grows after those five five-dollar payments. My coffee still ends up costing more than $3 million, but that is less than half what I owed without the payments.

They were crucially important—yet they are invisible in the graph. There is no way to tell from Figure 3.5 why the gray line ends up so much lower than the black.