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

by Ian Morris

So far as I remember, none of this struck me as being a problem until I started graduate research at Cambridge University in the early 1980s, working on the origins of Greek city-states. This took me among anthropological archaeologists working on similar processes in other parts of the world. They openly laughed at the quaint notion that Greek ...

on the one hand, Greek society evolved along the same lines as other ancient societies; on the other, it initiated ...

Trying to make sense of this, I found myself looking at broader and broader slices of the human past. I was surprised how strong the parallels were between the supposedly unique Western experience and the history of other parts of the world, above all the great civilizations of China, India, and Iran.

I learned one big thing: to answer this question we need a broad approach, combining the historian’s focus on context, the archaeologist’s awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist’s comparative methods. We could get this combination by assembling a multidisciplinary team of specialists, pooling deep expertise across a range of fields, and that is in fact just what I did when I started directing an archaeological excavation on Sicily.

So what are the results? I argue in this book that asking why the West rules is really a question about what I will call social development. By this I basically mean societies’ abilities to get things done—to shape their physical, economic, social, and intellectual environments to their own ends.

In 1842 the hard truth was that Britain was more developed than China—so developed, in fact, that its reach had become global. There had been empires aplenty in the past, but their reach had always been regional. By 1842, however, British manufacturers could flood China with their products, British industrialists could build iron ships that outgunned any in the world, and British politicians could send an expedition halfway around the globe.

Asking why the West rules really means asking two questions.

We need to know both why the West is more developed—that is, more able to get things done—than an...

and why Western development rose so high in the last two hundred years that for the first time in history a few countries...

The answer to the first question—why Western social development is higher than that of any other part of the world—does not lie in any recent accident:

the West has been the most developed region of the world for fourteen of the last fifteen millennia.

But on the other hand, neither was the West’s lead locked in in the distant past. For more than a thousand years, from about 550 through ...

As we will see, it was only around 1800 CE that Western scores began surging upward at astonishing rates; but this upturn was itself only the latest example of a very long-term pattern of steadily accelerating social development. The long term and the short term work together.

This is why we cannot explain Western rule just by looking at prehistory or just by looking at the last few hundred years. To answer the question we have to make sense of the whole sweep of the past.

Yet behind all the sound and fury, I will argue, the past nevertheless has strong patterns, and with the right tools historians can see what they are and even explain them. I will use three of these tools.

The first is biology,3 which tells us what humans truly are: clever chimps. We are part of the animal kingdom, which is itself part of the larger empire of life, stretching from the great apes all the way down to amoebas. This very obvious truth has three important consequences.

First, like all life-forms, we survive because we extract energy from our environment and turn that energy into more of ourselves. Second, like all the more intelligent animals, we are curious creatures. We are constantly tinkering, wondering whether things are edible, whether we can have fun with them, whether we can improve them. We are just much better at tinkering than other animals, because we have big, fast brains with lots of folds to thi...

Some extract more energy from the environment than others; some reproduce more than others; some are more curious, creative, clever, or practical than others. But the third consequence of our animalness is that large groups of humans, as opposed to individual humans, are all much the same. If you pluck two random people from a crowd, they may be as different as can be imagined, but if you round up two complete crowds they will tend to mirror each other rather closely. And if you compare groups millions strong, as I do in this book, they are likely to have very similar proportions of energetic, fertile, curious, creative, clever, talkative, and practical people.

Sometimes social development has stagnated for long periods without rising at all; sometimes it has even gone into reverse. Just knowing that we are clever chimps is not enough. This is where the second tool, sociology, comes in.4

The great science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once suggested that “Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

I will start passing off a less pithy version of it as my own Morris Theorem: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. And they rarely know what they’re doing.”

History teaches us that when the pressure is on, change takes off.

But that is not the end of the story, because people’s success in reproducing themselves and capturing energy inevitably puts pressure on the resources (intellectual and social as well as material) available to them. Rising social development generates the very forces that undermine further social development.

I call this the paradox of development. Success creates new problems; solving them creates still newer problems. Life, as they say, is a vale of tears.

The paradox of development is constantly at work, confronting people with hard choices. Often people fail to rise to its challenges, and social development stagnates or even declines. At other times, though, sloth, fear, and greed combine to push some people to take risks, innovating to change the rules of the game. If at least a few of them succeed and if most people then adopt the successful in...

But as we will see, at certain points the paradox of development creates tough ceilings that will yield only to truly transformative changes.

In case after case we will see that when societies fail to solve the problems that confront them, a terrible package of ills—famine, epidemic, uncontrolled migration, and state failure—begins to afflict them, turning stagnation into decline; and when famine, epidemic, migration, and state failure are joined by further forces of disruption, like climatic change (collectively, I call these the five horsemen of the apocalypse), decline can turn into disastrous, centuries-long collapses and dark ages.

Between them, biology and sociology explain most of the shape of history—why social development has generally risen, why it rises faster at some times and sl...

To explain that, I will argue throughout this book, we need a third tool: geography.5

Once we recognize that chaps (in large groups and in the newer, broader sense of the word) are all much the same, I will argue, all that is left is maps.

Many historians react to this claim like a bull to a red rag. It is one thing, several have said to me, to reject the old idea that a few great men determined that history would unfold differently in East and West; it is another altogether to say that culture, values, and beliefs were unimportant and to seek the reason why the West rules entirely in brute material forces. Yet that is more or less what I propose to do.

I will try to show that East and West have gone through the same stages of social development in the last fifteen thousand years, in the same order, because they have been peopled by the same kinds of...

But I will also try to show that they have not done so at the same times...

I will conclude that biology and sociology explain the global similarities while geography explains the regional differences. And in that sense, it is g...

It is easy to mock this kind of thing, but when I say that geography explains why the West rules I have something rather different in mind. Geographical differences do have long-term effects, but these are never locked in, and what counts as a geographical advantage at one stage of social development may be irrelevant or a positive disadvantage at another. We might say that while geography drives social development, social development determines what geography means. It is a two-way street.

Distinctions between the south (where people could live) and the north (where they could not) were extreme, but within the southern zone distinctions between East and West were relatively minor. The end of the Ice Age changed the meaning of geography.

These core regions had all been fairly typical of the relatively warm, habitable regions during the Ice Age, but they now grew increasingly distinct, both from the rest of the world and from one another. Geography had favored them all, but had favored some more than others. One core, the so-called Hilly Flanks in western Eurasia, had uniquely dense concentrations of domesticable plants and animals; and since groups of people are all much the same, it was here, where resources were richest and the process easiest, that moves toward domestication began. That was around 9500 BCE.

I use the expression “the West” to describe all the societies that have descended from this westernmost (and earliest) of the Eurasian cores.

My goal is to explain why a particular set of societies that descend from the original Western core—above all, those of North America—now dominate the globe, rather than societies in another part of the West, societies descended from one of the other cores, or, for that matter, no societies at all.

Following the same logic, I use “the East” to refer to all those societies that descend from the easternmost (and second-oldest) of the Eurasian cores. The East also long ago expanded from its original core between China’s Yellow and Yangzi rivers, where the domestication of plants began around 7500 BCE, and today stretches from Japan in the north into the countries of Indochina in the south.

The societies that descend from the other cores—a southeastern core in what is now New Guinea, a South Asian one in modern Pakistan and northern India, an African one in the eastern Sahara Desert, and two New World cores in Mexico and Peru—all have their own fascinating histories. I touch on these repeatedl...

My reasoning is that since the end of the Ice Age, the world’s most developed societies have almost always been ones that descended from either the original Western or the original Eastern core. While Albert in Beijing is a plausible alternative to Looty in Balmoral, Albert in Cuzco, Delhi, or New Guinea is not. The most efficient way to explain why t...

If geography really did provide a Herodotus-style long-term lock-in explanation of history, I could wrap this book up rather quickly after pointing out that domestication began in the Western core around 9500 BCE and in the Eastern core around 7500.

Western social development would simply have stayed two thousand years ahead of Eastern and the West would have gone through an industrial revolution while the East was still figuring out writing.

But that, obviously, did not happen. As we will see in the chapters that follow, geography did not lock in history, because geographical advantages are always ultimately self-defeating. They drive up social development, but in...

As social development rises, cores expand, sometimes through migration and sometimes through copying or independent innovation by neighbors. Techniques that worked well in an older core—whether those techniques were agriculture and village life, cities and states, great em...

Odd as it may seem, the biggest advances in social development often come in places where methods imported or copied from a more developed core do not work very well. Sometimes this is because the struggle to adapt old methods to new environments forces people to make breakthroughs; sometimes it is because geographical factors that do not matter much at one stage of social development matter much more at another.

Five thousand years ago, for instance, the fact that Portugal, Spain, France, and Britain stuck out from Europe into the Atlantic was a huge geographical disadvantage, meaning that these regions were a very long way from the real action in Mesopotamia7 and Egypt.

By five hundred years ago, however, social development had risen so much that geography changed its meanings. There were new kinds of ships that could cross what had always been impassable oceans, which abruptly made sticking out into the Atlantic a huge plus. It was Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English ships, rather than Egyptian or Iraqi ones, that started sailing to the Americas, China, and Japan. It was western Europeans who began tying the world together with mar...

I call this pattern the “advantages of backwardness,”8 and it is as old as social development itself. When agricultural villages began turning into cities (soon after 4000 BCE in the West and 2000 BCE in the East), for instance, access to the particular soils and climates that had favored the initial emergence of agriculture began to matter less t...