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

by Ian Morris

Figure 4.1 sums up what we saw impressionistically in Chapter 2.

At the end of the last ice age, climate and ecology conspired to set social development rising earlier in the West than in the East, and despite the climatic catastrophe of the Younger Dryas, the West maintained a clear lead.

just as long-term lock-in theories predict, the West got a head start and held on to it.

Like ropes and snakes, the two graphs do have similarities: in both graphs the Eastern and Western scores close higher than they started and in both, Western scores are always higher than Eastern.

First, the lines rise much faster in Figure 4.2 than in Figure 4.1. In the nine thousand years between 14,000 and 5000 BCE the Western score doubled and the Eastern score increased by two-thirds, but in the next four thousand years—less than half the period covered by Figure 4.1—the Western score tripled and the Eastern increased two-and-a-half times.

The second difference is that for the first time in history, we actually see social development falli...

I suggest that the acceleration and the West’s post-1300 BCE decline were in fact two sides of the same process, which ...

Figure 4.2. Onward, upward, farther apart, and closer together: the acceleration, divergence, and convergence of Eastern and Western social development, 5000–1000 BCE

Between 14,000 and 5000 BCE Western social development scores doubled and farming villages spread from their starting point in the Hilly Flanks deep into central Asia

and to the shores of the Atlantic.

In a way, that is not surprising. Since 2003 news flashes have made the world all too familiar with Iraq’s harsh environment. Summer temperatures soar over 120°F, it hardly ever rains, and deserts press in on every side.

It is difficult to imagine farmers ever choosing to live there, and back around 5000 BCE Mesopotamia was even hotter.

For twenty generations they improved their canals, ditches, and storage basins; and gradually they made Mesopotamia’s marginal lands not just livable, but actually more productive than the Hilly Flanks had ever been. They were changing the meaning of geography.

Economists sometimes call this process the discovery of advantages of backwardness.

When people adapt techniques that worked in an advanced core to operate in a less-developed periphery, the changes they introduce sometimes make those techniques work so well that t...

By 5000 BCE this was happening in southern Mesopotamia, where elaborate canals supported some of the world’s biggest towns...

So many advantages accrued to Mesopotamia that people in the old core back in the Hilly Flanks started emulating the dynamic new societies in the floodplains.

Comparable changes were probably under way all along the Euphrates and Tigris after 4500 BCE, but only after 3800 do they become clearly visible to archaeologists.

The systems Mesopotamian farmers had painstakingly built up across two thousand years no longer worked.

Climate change forced tough choices on Mesopotamians.

Or they could migrate to regions less dependent on the monsoon; but it is no small thing for farmers to abandon their well-tended fields.

If enough Mesopotamians had done nothing or run away, this new core would have collapsed.

However, a third possibility presented itself.

People could abandon their villages but stay in Mesopotamia, congregati...

But some Mesopotamians seem to have figured out that if more of them worked together they could run larger irrigation systems and store floodwaters until the crops were ready.

They could feed more miners to dig copper from the ground; more smiths to make ornaments, weapons, and tools; and more traders to carry these goods around.

So successful were they that by 3000 BCE bronze (an alloy of copper and a little tin) had largely replaced stone for weapons and most tools, sharply incre...

Getting to that point, though, required organization. Centralized adminis...

Little villages that could not support such sophisticated activities went to the wall while one site, Uruk, turned into a true city with maybe twenty thousand residents.

Mesopotamians were inventing management, meetings, and memoranda—the curses of life for so many of us today, and hardly the stuff of soaring narratives of human achievement. Yet as will become clear in the next few chapters, these were often the most important motors of social development.

Organization turned villages in the Hilly Flanks and along the banks of the Yellow River into cities, states, and empires; failur...

We will never know the stories of the ancient managers who pulled Uruk through, but archaeologists suspect that they were tied to temples.

For instance, excavations at temples have uncovered stacks of uniform-sized dishes known as “bevel-rimmed bowls,” probably for distributing food.

The earliest clay tablets scratched with crude symbols come mostly from temples, and the symbol for “rations” on them is a sketch of a bevel-rimmed bowl. And when writing systems developed to the point they could record such information, they tell us that temple...

The temples themselves mushroomed into huge monuments, dwarfing the commu...

The reason so many early civilizations had kings who claimed to talk to superhuman beings in the sky, von Däniken insisted, was that early kings did talk to superhuman beings in the sky.

Organization was the key to survival in those tough times, so the more that people did what the priests said, the better things would go (provided the priests gave reasonably sound advice).

Uruk became not only a city but also a state, with centralized institutions imposing taxes, making decisions binding the whole community, and backing them up with force.

A few men (but apparently no women) occupied the top positions, and a larger group of warriors, landowners, merchants, and literate bureaucrats assisted them.

For nearly everyone the rise of the state meant surrendering freedoms, but that was the price of success in hard times. Communities that paid the price could muster more peo...

Cities and states drove social development upward in Mesopotamia after 3500 BCE and then spread outward, just as farming village...

Uruk-style material culture (bevel-rimmed bowls, writing tablets, lavish temples) sp...

While the first farmers were sweating to make crops grow on Mesopotamia’s plains around 5000 BCE, even more intrepid folk were striking out from the Jordan Valley across the Sinai Desert to try their luck along the Nile River.

Egypt had few domesticable native plants and had lagged behind the Hilly Flanks in adopting agriculture, but once the right seeds and animals were imported, the new lifestyle flourished.

The Nile flooded at just the right time for crops each year, and large, rain-fed oases supported farmin...

These advantages meant, though, that the retreat of the monsoon around 3800 BCE hit Egypt even harder than Mesopotamia. Many Egyptians abandoned their oases and squeezed into the Nile Valley, where water was plentiful but land was sc...

As in Mesopotamia, management was...

Excavated tombs suggest that Upper Egyptian village leaders had both military and religious roles. Successful chiefs grew rich as their villages captured more land; unsuccessful chiefs disappe...

The kingdoms fought until, by 3100 BCE, only one still stood. At that point, the scale of royal monuments exploded and the distinctive Egyptian hieroglyphic script abruptly appeared.

around 3100 BCE the Nile Valley was united into the largest kingdom the world had yet seen, with maybe a million subjects.