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

Ian Morris

Oct 2010 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this eBook

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011

Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West's rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last?

Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.

Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules—for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines—from ancient history to neuroscience—not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.

Ratings and reviews

The author more or less states that anything could happen. In its predictive force, this observation is true but not very useful. I daresay that I could have come to much the same conclusion with a lot less verbiage. Of course, by predicting that almost anything could happen, the author avails himself of the opportunity to never be wrong in his predictions. He definitely has his butt covered intellectually. Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel was more useful to my understanding of the world; of course, it suffered from Diamond's geographical determinism.

This book is weak and simplistic. Morris starts off by calculating an index of social development, but he forgets to think about what such and index should measure and predict. What is social development? What use is the concept? The social development index is arbitrary and seems designed to support the conclusions Morris wants to espouse. Why is high per capita energy use an indication of greater social development? Maybe it's the reverse. Morris arbitrarily pegs current military capacity for the "east" as one-tenth that of the "west", with only minimal analysis. His figure is largely based on the preponderance of nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers (all the while ignoring Russia). Are nuclear weapons even relevant given that nobody actually intends to use them? His predictions for the future begin by stating that the old east/west divide is no longer relevant given globalization. Then he embarks on simplistic prognostication that is not based on the previous thousand pages of his book, to conclude that if we don't wipe ourselves out through nuclear weapons or environmental degradation, we will enter into a great age of man-machine convergence, with humans existing either as super connected computer enhanced androids or entirely as electronically stored beings. Interesting, but very brief and entirely unconnected to the rest of the book. Give this one a miss. John

Takes off from Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel, by adding more prehistory out of Africa, and later parallel development of civilization in China that had me wondering when reading Jared's book. Reinforces many of the premises of Jared's book, that all people are the same, and it's geography that matters (although differently, at different times). Would have liked to have seen other civilization areas included. Approach focuses on "winners". Score system is good, culturally pretty fair.

About the author

IAN MORRIS is Willard Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. He has published ten scholarly books, including, most recently, The Dynamics of Ancient Empires, and has directed excavations in Greece and Italy. He lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California.