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

by Ian Morris

The high mortality/high fertility regime required most women to spend most of their lives pregnant and/or minding small children, and changes in agriculture—changes that women themselves probably pioneered—reinforced this. Domesticated cereals need more processing than most wild foods, and since threshing, grinding, and baking ...

Plenty of women are as strong as men, but men do increasingly dominate outdoor work and women indoor work as agriculture intensifies. Grown men work the fields; boys tend the flocks; and women and girls manage the ever more sharply defined domestic sphere.

With so much at stake, men in modern peasant cultures want to be sure they really are the fathers of the children who will inherit their property.

Foragers’ rather casual attitudes about sex yield to obsessive concern with daughters’ premarital virginity and wives’ extramarital activities.

Men in traditional agricultural societies typically marry around the age of thirty, after they have come into their inheritance, while women generally marry around fif...

While we cannot be sure that these patterns originated at the dawn of farming, it does seem rather likely. By, say, 7500 BCE a girl would typically grow up under the authority of her father, then, as a teenager, exchange it...

Marriage would become a source of wealth as those who already had good lands and flocks would marry others in the same happy situation, conso...

Nowhere outside the Hilly Flanks did people have so much to defend.

Even in 7000 BCE, almost everyone outside this region was a forager, shifting seasonally, and even where they had begun to settle down in villages, such as Mehrgarh in modern Pakistan or Shangshan in the Yangzi Delta, these were simple places by the standards of Jericho.

Gone would be their caves or little clusters of huts, replaced by bustling towns with sturdy houses, great stores of food, powerful art, and religious monuments.

They would find themselves working hard, dying young, and hosting an unpleasant array of microbes. They would rub shoulders with rich and poor, and chafe under or rejoice in men’s authority over women and parents’ over children.

Fast-forward ten thousand years from the origins of hierarchy and drudgery in the prehistoric Hilly Flanks to Paris in 1967.

We submit to capitalist discipline and compete to earn money so we can chase Infinite Needs by buying things we don’t really want. We could learn something, Sahlins suggested, from hunter-gatherers.

means were few but their needs were fewer, making them, Sahlins concluded, “the original affluent society.”

Sahlins had a point: Why, he asked, did farming ever replace foraging if the rewards were work, inequality, and war? Yet replace foraging it clearly did. By 7000 BCE farming completely dominated the Hilly Flanks.

Already by 8500 BCE cultivated cereals had spread to Cyprus and by 8000 had reached central Turkey. By 7000 fully domesticated plants had reached all these areas and spread eastward to (or, perhaps, developed independently in) Pakistan. They had reached Greece, southern Iraq, and central Asia by 6000, Egypt...

that farmers replaced foragers “in different ways and at different rates and for different reasons, but in comparable circumstances of challenges to the world they knew.”

Figure 2.4. Going forth and multiplying, version one: the westward spread of domesticated plants from the Hilly Flanks to the Atlantic, 9000–4000 BCE

Humans, like plants and other animals, found a major outlet for their extra energy in sexual reproduction.

High birthrates meant that new villages could grow rapidly until every square inch of available land was being farmed, whereupon hunger and sicknes...

Population boomed until deaths caught up with births again or until colonies spun off colonies of their own.

Archaeological surveys suggest that the first farmers in each region tended to settle in different areas from the local foragers, almost certainly because the best farmland and the best foraging grounds rarely overlapped. At least at first, farmers and foragers may have largely ignored each other.

Farming populations grew rapidly, needing only a few centuries to fill up the best land, until they had no option but to push into the (in their eyes) marginal territories of the foragers.

If foragers decided to fight, as happened on so many colonial frontiers in modern times, they might destroy the odd farming village, but more colonists would just keep coming, swamping resistance.

The second theory says none of these things happened, because the first farmers across most of the regions shown in Figure 2.4 were not descendants of immigrants from the Hilly Flanks at all. They were local hunter-gatherers who settled down and became farmers themselves.

Rather, he would come to villages where people farmed a little less intensively than he did (maybe hoeing their fields instead of plowing and manuring), then people who farmed less intensively still (maybe burning patches of forest, cultivating them until the weeds grew back, then moving on), and eventually people who relied entirely on hunting and gathering.

When people realized that neighbors with more intensive practices were killing the wild plants and chasing off the animals that their own foraging lifestyles depended on, rather than attacking these vandals or running away they also had the option of joining the crowd and intensifying their own cultivation.

Later they might have to decide whether to start weeding, then plowing, then manuring, but this was—to repeat an image from the previous chapter—a series of baby steps rather than a once-and-for-all great leap from the original affluent society to backbreaking toil and chronic illness.

On the whole, across hundreds of years and thousands of miles, those who intensified also multiplied; those who clung to their old ways dwindled. In the process, the agricultural “frontier” crept forward. No one chose hierarchy and working longer hours; women did not embrace arthritic toes; these things crept up on them.

In the 1970s Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University began a massive survey of European blood groups and nuclear DNA. His team found a consistent gradient of gene frequencies from southeast to northwest (Figure 2.5), which, they pointed out, mapped quite well onto the archaeological evidence for the spread of farming shown in Figure 2.4.

Their conclusion: after migrants from western Asia brought farming to Europe, their descendants largely replaced the aboriginal foragers, pushing their remnants into the far north and west.

The archaeologist Colin Renfrew argued that linguistics also supported Cavalli-Sforza’s scenario: the first farmers, he suspected, not only replaced European genes with southwest Asian ones but also replaced Europe’s native languages with Indo-European ones from the Hill...

At first the new evidence only increased the scholarly arguments. Linguists immediately challenged Renfrew, arguing that modern European languages would differ much more from one another if they had really begun diverging from an ancestral tongue six or seven millennia ago, and in 1996 an Oxford team led by Bryan Sykes challenged Cavalli-Sforza on the genetics.

Sykes looked at mitochondrial DNA rather than the nuclear DNA Cavalli-Sforza had studied, and instead of a southeast–northwest progression, like Figure 2.5, identified a pattern too messy to be represented easily on a map, finding six groups of genetic lineages, only one of which could plausibly be linked to agricultural migrants from western Asia.

Sykes suggested that the other five groups are much older, going back mostly to the original out-of-Africa peopling of Europe 25,000 to 50,000 years ago; all of which, he concluded, indicates that Europe’s first farmers were mainly aboriginal foragers who decided to settl...

The Cavalli-Sforza and Sykes teams squared off fiercely in the pages of the American Journal of Human Genetics in 1997, but since then their positions have steadily converged.

Cavalli-Sforza now calculates that immigrant farmers from western Asia account for 26–28 percent of European DNA; Sykes puts the figure nearer 20 percent.

Competition, genetics and archaeology imply, has little to do with exams or teachers, because it has always been with us. Its logic means that things had to turn out more or less as they did.

Sometimes it did. After sweeping from what is now Poland to the Paris Basin in a couple of hundred years before 5200 BCE, the wave of agricultural advance ground to a halt (Figure 2.4).

For a thousand years hardly any farmers invaded the last fifty or sixty miles separating them from the Baltic Sea and few Baltic foragers took up more intensive cultivation. Here foragers fought for their way of life.

Archaeologists have unearthed great mounds of seashells, leftovers from feasts, which piled up around the hamlets. Nature’s bounty apparently allowed the foragers to have their cake (or shellfish) and eat it: there were enough foragers to stand up to farmers but not so many that they had to shift toward farming to feed themselves.

At the same time, farmers found that the plants and animals that had originally been domesticated in the Hilly Flanks fared less well this far north.

We frankly do not know why farming did finally move north after 4200 BCE. Some archaeologists emphasize push factors, proposing that farmers multiplied to the point that they steamrollered all opposition; others stress pull factors, proposing t...

All the same, said Tolstoy, “Free will is for history only an expression connoting what we do not know about the laws of human history.” He continued:

If any single action is due to free will, then not a single historical law can exist, nor any conception of historical events.

This is nonsense. High-level nonsense, to be sure, but nonsense all the same.

But in the long run it did not matter, because the competition for resources meant that people who kept farming, or farmed even harder, captured more energy than those who did not.

Farmers kept feeding more children and livestock, clearing more fields, and stacking the odds still further against foragers. In the right circumstances, like those prevailing around the Baltic Sea in 5200 BCE, farming’s expansion slowed to a crawl. But such circumstances could not last forever.

By 7000 BCE the dynamic, expansive agricultural societies at the western end of Eurasia were unlike anything else on earth, and by this point it makes sense to distinguish “the West” from the rest.

Yet while the West was different from the rest, the differences were not permanent, and across the next few thousand years people began independently inventing agriculture in perhaps half a dozen places across the Lucky Latitudes (Figure 2.6).