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

by Ian Morris

But the price of growing complexity was growing fragility. This was, and remains, a central piece of the paradox of social development.

Around 2200 BCE, when the god-king Naram-Sin’s equally divine son Sharkalisharri ruled much of Mesopotamia from his throne room in Akkad, something started going wrong, and Harvey Weiss, a Yale University archaeologist who excavated ...

Tell Leilan was a city of twenty thousand people in Sargon’s day, around 2300 BCE, but a ...

Searching for explanations, the geologists on Weiss’s team discovered from microscopic studies of sediments that the amount of dust in the soil at Tell Leilan and neighborin...

A thousand miles away, in the Nile Valley, something was...

but real pharaohs had a device called the Nilometer, which measured the river’s floods and gave advance wa...

Inscriptions recording some of its readings show that floods fell sharply around 2200 BCE. Eg...

Back around 3800 BCE drier weather had propelled Uruk to greatness and set off wars that unified Egypt, but in the more complicated, interconnected world of the late third millennium BCE, abandoning sites such as Tell Leilan also meant t...

would have been as if Joseph’s brothers had come down to Egypt to buy grain...

by 2200 BCE these armed forces were themselves unraveling. Some Mesopotamians saw their Akkadian kings as cruel conquerors, and when the supposedly divine Sharkalisharri failed to cope very well with the problems he faced in the 2190s BCE many priestly families stopped cooperating with him.

His armies melted away; generals proclaimed themselves kings in their own right; and Amorite gangs took over entire cities. In less than a decade the empire disintegrated. It was every town for itself—as a Sumerian chronicler put it, “Who then was king? Who was not king?”

In Egypt tensions between court and aristocracy had also been mounting, and King Pepy II, who had sat on the throne for sixty yea...

By the time a coup set up a new dynasty in Lower Egypt around 2160 BCE there were dozens of independent lords and ungovernable Asiatic bands rampaging around the countryside.

Worse still, the high priests of the great temple of Amen at Thebes in Upper Egypt took on progressively grander titles, eventually sliding in and out of civil war with the Lower Egyptian pharaoh.

By about 2150 BCE Egypt and Akkad had decomposed into petty statelets, fighting outlaws and each other for shares o...

but it is hard not to detect a broader pattern in the fiery destruction of the biggest buildings in Greece, the end of the Maltese temples, and the abandonment of Spain’s coastal fortresses, all between 2200 and 2150 BCE

The larger, more complex systems of the Western core depended on regular flows of people, goods, and information, and sudden changes—like the drier weather at Tell Leilan or Pepy’s senility—disrupted these.

Disruptions such as the drought and migrations after 2200 BCE did not have to produce chaos, but they effecti...

Instead, the main result in Mesopotamia was that the city of Ur exploited Akkad’s collapse, carving out a new empire, smaller than Akkad’s but better known to us because its compulsive bureaucrats produced so many tax receipts. Forty thousand have been published, and thousands more await study.

Shulgi, who took Ur’s throne in 2094 BCE, pronounced himself a god and instituted a cult of personality.

Yet despite Shulgi’s talents, within a few years of his death in 2047 BCE his empire, too, imploded.

In the 2030s raiding became such a problem that Ur built a hundred-mile wall to keep the Amorites out, but in 2028 cities started pulling out of Ur’s tax system anyway, and state finances collapsed around 2020.

a rerun of the fall of Akkad, famines raged as some generals tried to requisition grain for Ur and others d...

In 2004 BCE raiders sacked Ur and carried its last king into slavery.

While Mesopotamia fell apart, however, Egypt came together again.

The Theban high priests of Upper Egypt, now acting as kings in their own right, defeated their main rivals in 2056 BCE and mas...

By 2000 BCE the Western core looked much like it had done a thousand years earlier, with Egypt unified under a god-king and Mesopotamia split into city-states ...

By this point, more than four thousand years ago, the Western core’s dizzy, wild ride had already laid bare some of the fundamental ...

Social development is not a gift or curse laid on humanity by Clarke’s monolith or von Däniken’s aliens; it is something we make ourselves...

From the rise of Uruk to the Theban reunification of Egypt, sloth, avarice, and/or fright drove every upward nudge of social development.

But people cannot nudge things any way they like; each nudge builds on all the earlier nudges. Social development is cumulative, a matter of incremental steps that have to be taken in the right order.

The chiefs of Uruk around 3100 BCE could no more have organized the kind of bureaucracy that Ur boasted under Shulgi a millennium later than William the Conqueror co...

This cumulative pattern also explains why increases in social development keep speeding up: each innovation builds on earlier ones and contributes to later ones, meaning that the higher social ...

Yet the course of innovation never did run smooth. Innovation means change, bringing joy and pain in equal measures. Social development creates winners and losers, new classes of rich and poor, n...

Its growth depends on societies becoming larger, more complicated, and harder to manage; the higher it rises, the more threats to itself it creates.

Hence the paradox: social development creates the very forces that undermine it.

And as we will see in the chapters that follow, the paradox of social development largely explains why long-term lock-in theories cannot be correct.

Despite the chaos that swept over the Western core after 2200 BCE, this was no Nightfall moment. The collapses after 2200 do not even register on the graph in Figure 4.2.40

by 2000 BCE Western social development was almost 50 percent higher than it had been in 3000 BCE.

Social development kept rising and Western societies got bigger and more sophisticated.

The cores changed in other ways, too. No Mesopotamian ruler ever again claimed to be a god after 2000 BCE, and even in Egypt some...

And in what must be a related process, state power contracted: although palaces and temples remained important, more land and trade were now in private hands.

The most important reason why the disruptions did not set the clock back, though, was that the core kept expanding through the crises, drawing in peripheries that found new advantages in their backwardness and pushed their way into the core.

From Iran to Crete people adapted Egyptian-and Mesopotamian-style palaces and redistributive economies to fluid, often-violent ...

Once again, rising social development changed the meanings of geography.

Access to a great river basin was crucial for development in the third millennium BCE, but in the second millennium living on the old core’s northern edge became an even greater advantage.

Herders in what is now Ukraine had domesticated horses around 4000 BCE, and two thousand years later horse tamers on the steppes of modern Kazakhstan started yoking these ...

few steppe herders riding around in chariots did not concern the core, but if someone with the resources to pay for thousands of chariots got hol...

Chariots’ advantages seem obvious, but armies that have done well with one tactical system are often slow to adopt another.

Setting up a corps of well-trained charioteers would throw the pecking order of all-infantry armies into chaos, empowering a whole new elite, and though the evidence is patchy, the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, with their entrenched hierarchies, seem to have adopted the new battle systems only sluggishly.