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PART III
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11
WHY THE WEST RULES
The West rules because of geography. Biology tells us why humans push social development upward; sociology tells us how they do this (except when they don’t); and geography tells us why the West, rather than some other region, has for the last two hundred years dominated the globe. Biology and sociology provide universal laws, applying to all humans in all times and places; geography explains differences.
Biology tells us that we are animals, and like all living things we exist only because we capture energy from our surroundings. When short of energy, we grow sluggish and die; when filled with it, we multiply and spread out. Like other animals, we are inquisitive but also greedy, lazy, and fearful; we are unlike other animals only in the tools we have for pursuing these moods—the faster brains, more pliable throats, and opposable thumbs that evolution gave us. Using these, we humans have imposed our wills on our environments in ways quite unlike other animals, capturing and organizing ever more energy, spreading villages, cities, states, and empires across the planet.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries plenty of Westerners thought biology was the whole answer to why the West rules. The white European race, they insisted, had evolved further than anyone else. They were mistaken. For one thing, the genetic and skeletal evidence that I discussed in Chapter 1 is unequivocal: there is one kind of human, which evolved gradually in Africa around a hundred thousand years ago and then spread across the globe, making older kinds of humans extinct. The genetic differences between modern humans in different parts of the world are trivial.
For another thing, if Westerners really were genetically superior to everyone else, the graphs of social development that fill Chapters 4–10 would look very different. After taking an early lead, the West would have stayed ahead. But that, of course, is not what happened (Figure 11.1). The West did get a head start at the end of the Ice Age, but its lead grew at some times and shrank at others. Around 550 CE it disappeared altogether, and for the next twelve hundred years the East led the world in social development.
Figure 11.1. The shape of history revisited: Eastern and Western social development and the hard ceiling, 14,000 BCE–2000 CE, shown on a log-linear scale
Very few scholars nowadays propagate racist theories that Westerners are genetically superior to everyone else, but anyone who does want to take this line will need to show that all the mettle was somehow bred out of Westerners in the sixth century CE, then bred back in in the eighteenth; or that Easterners bred themselves into superiority in the sixth century, then lost it in the eighteenth. That, to put it mildly, is going to be a tough job. Everything suggests that wherever we look, people—in large groups—are all much the same.
We cannot explain why the West rules without starting from biology, since biology explains why social development has kept moving up; but biology alone is not the answer. The next step is to bring in sociology, which tells us how social development has increased so much.
As Figure 11.1 shows, this has not been a smooth process. In the introduction, I proposed a “Morris Theorem” (expanding an idea of the great science fiction writer Robert Heinlein) to explain the entire course of history—that change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they’re doing) looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. I hope that the evidence presented in Chapters 2–10 has borne this out.
We have seen people constantly tinkering, making their lives easier or richer or struggling to hold on to what they already have as circumstances change, and, in the process, generally nudging social development upward. Yet none of the great transformations in social development—the origins of agriculture, the rise of cities and states, the creation of different kinds of empires, the industrial revolution—was a matter of mere tinkering; each was the result of desperate times calling for desperate measures. At the end of the Ice Age, hunter-gatherers became so successful that they put pressure on the resources that sustained them. Further efforts to find food transformed some of the plants and animals they preyed on into domesticates and transformed some of the foragers into farmers. Some farmers succeeded so well that they put renewed pressure on resources, and to survive—especially when the weather went against them—they transformed their villages into cities and states. Some cities and states succeeded so well that they, too, ran into resource problems and transformed themselves into empires (first land-based, later ruling the steppes and oceans, too). Some of these empires repeated the same cycle, putting pressure on their resources and turning themselves into industrial economies.
History is not just one damn thing after another. In fact, history is the same old same old, a single grand and relentless process of adaptations to the world that always generate new problems that call for further adaptations. Throughout this book I have called this process the paradox of development: rising social development creates the very forces that undermine it.
People confront and solve such paradoxes every day, but once in a while the paradox creates tough ceilings that will yield only to truly transformative change. It is rarely obvious what to do, let alone how to do it, and as a society approaches one of these ceilings a kind of race begins between development and collapse. Societies rarely—perhaps never—simply get stuck at a ceiling and stagnate, their social development unchanging for centuries. Rather, if they do not figure out how to smash the ceiling, their problems spiral out of control. Some or all of what I have called the five horsemen of the apocalypse break loose, and famine, disease, migration, and state collapse—particularly if they coincide with an episode of climate change—will drive development down, sometimes for centuries, even into a dark age.
One of these ceilings comes around twenty-four points on the social development index. This was the level where Western social development stalled and then collapsed after 1200 BCE. The most important ceiling, though, which I have called the hard ceiling, comes around forty-three points. Western development hit this in the first century CE, then collapsed; Eastern development did the same a thousand or so years later. This hard ceiling sets a rigid limit on what agricultural empires can do. The only way to break it is to tap into the stored energy of fossil fuels, as Westerners did after 1750.
Adding sociology to biology explains much of the shape of history, telling us how people have pushed social development upward, why it rises quickly at some times and slowly at others, and why it sometimes falls. Yet even when we put them together, biology and sociology do not tell us why the West rules. To explain that, we need geography.
I have stressed a two-way relationship between geography and social development: the physical environment shapes how social development changes, but changes in social development shape what the physical environment means. Living on top of a coalfield meant very little two thousand years ago, but two hundred years ago it began meaning a lot. Tapping into coal drove social development up faster than ever before—so fast, in fact, that soon after 1900 new fuels began to displace coal. Everything changes, including the meaning of geography.
So much for my thesis. I want to spend most of this chapter addressing some of the most obvious objections to it, but before turning to that it might be useful to recap the main details of the story that filled Chapters 2–10.
At the end of the Ice Age, around fifteen thousand years ago, global warming marked off a band of Lucky Latitudes (roughly 20–35 degrees north in the Old World and 15 degrees south to 20 degrees north in the New) where an abundance of large, potentially domesticable plants and animals evolved. Within this broad band, one region, the so-called Hilly Flanks of southwest Asia, was luckiest of all. Because it had the densest concentration of potential domesticates it was easier for people who lived there to become farmers than for people anywhere else. So, since people (in large groups) are all much the same, Hilly Flankers were the first to settle in villages and domesticate plants and animals, starting before 9000 BCE. From these first farmers descended the societies of the West. About two thousand years later people in what is now China—where potential domesticates were also plentiful, though not so plentiful as in the Hilly Flanks—moved the same way; from them descend the societies of the East. Over the next few thousand years people independently began domesticating plants and/or animals in half a dozen other parts of the world, each time beginning another regional tradition.
Because Westerners were the first to farm, and because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners were also the first to feel the paradox of development in a serious way and the first to learn what I have called the advantages of backwardness. Rising social development meant bigger populations, more elaborate lifestyles, and greater wealth and military power. Through various combinations of colonization and emulation, societies with relatively high social development expanded at the expense of those with lower development, and farming spread far and wide. To make farming work in new lands such as the sweltering river valleys of Mesopotamia, farmers were forced practically to reinvent it, and in the process of creating irrigation agriculture discovered advantages that made this rather backward frontier even more fruitful than the original agricultural core in the Hilly Flanks. And some time after 4000 BCE, with the biggest farming villages in the crowded Hilly Flanks struggling to manage, it was the Mesopotamians who worked out how to organize themselves into cities and states. About two thousand years later the same process played out in the East too, with the paradox of development exposing somewhat similar advantages of backwardness in the valleys that fed into the Yellow River basin.
The new states had to interact with their neighbors in new ways, which created even more disruptive paradoxes of development along their frontiers. They had to learn to manage these; when they got things wrong—as perhaps happened at Uruk in Mesopotamia around 3100 BCE and Taosi in China around 2300, and definitely happened in the West after 2200 and 1750 BCE—they collapsed in chaos. Each collapse coincided with a period of climate change, which, I suggested, added a fifth horseman of the apocalypse to the four man-made ones.
Rising social development produced worse disruptions and collapses, but it also produced more resilience and greater powers of recovery. After 1550 BCE Western cities and states bounced back from the disasters and expanded around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. A second great geographical contrast between East and West then came into play; the East had nothing like this extraordinary inland sea, providing cheap and easy transport. But like so much else, the Mediterranean was a paradox, offering both opportunities and challenges. When social development reached about twenty-four points the forces of disruption on this wide-open frontier spun out of control, and around 1200 BCE the horsemen of the apocalypse rode (or, to mix the metaphor, sailed) again. The Western core collapsed even more dramatically than before, ushering in a centuries-long dark age.
Thanks to the paradox of development, the lead in social development that geography had given the West at the end of the Ice Age was long-term but not locked in. Collapses are unpredictable things. Sometimes a few different decisions or a little good luck can postpone, reduce, or even head off disaster; our choices can make a difference. To break through the twenty-four-point ceiling, states had to reorganize themselves and develop a whole new way of thinking about the world, creating what we might call first-wave Axial thought. Because Westerners failed to reorganize and rethink around 1200 BCE, their lead over the East in social development narrowed; and because Westerners and Easterners both succeeded in making the necessary adjustments as development rose in the first millennium BCE, they remained neck and neck for a thousand years.
Westerners and Easterners alike created more centralized states and then full-blown empires, and after 200 BCE reached a scale that began changing the meanings of geography again. In the West the Roman Empire brought the unruly Mediterranean under control and social development spiked up past forty points. By the first century CE it was pressing against the hard ceiling. At the same time, though, the rise of the Roman and Han empires also changed the meaning of the vast spaces that separated East and West. With so much wealth at each end of Eurasia, traders and steppe nomads found new reasons to move around, tentatively linking the cores and beginning the First Old World Exchange. Contacts pushed Eastern and Western development higher still, but they also set off unprecedented disruptions. For the first time, the five horsemen of the apocalypse linked the cores, exchanging microbes as well as goods and ideas. Instead of breaking through the hard ceiling, the Roman and Han empires both came apart after 150 CE.
Both East and West slid into new dark ages in which second-wave Axial thought (Christianity, Islam, and new forms of Buddhism) displaced older first-wave ideas, but in other ways their collapses were quite different. In the West, Germanic invaders broke up the less-developed part of the Roman Empire around the western Mediterranean, and the core retreated into its older and more developed heartland around the eastern Mediterranean. In the East, Inner Asian invaders broke up the older and more developed part of the former Han Empire around the Yellow River, and the core retreated into the less-developed lands beyond the Yangzi River.
This geographical contrast made a world of difference. By 450 CE a new frontier of rice agriculture had begun booming around the Yangzi; by 600 China had been reunited; and over the following century the Grand Canal, linking the Yangzi and Yellow rivers, gave China a system of internal waterways that functioned rather like the Mediterranean had done for ancient Rome. In the West, though, where the Arab invaders were strong enough to break up the old Mediterranean core but not strong enough to remake it, social development kept falling until 700.
Around 541 Eastern development rose above Western (proving beyond all doubt that Western rule was never locked in) and by 1100 was pressing against the hard ceiling. As economic growth outran resources, ironworkers tapped into fossil fuels, inventors created new machines, and Song dynasty intellectuals plunged into a veritable Chinese renaissance. But like Rome a thousand years before, the Song Chinese could not break the hard ceiling.
To some extent, events in the early second millennium BCE paralleled those in the first, but with East and West reversed. Rising development set off a Second Old World Exchange and freed the five horsemen again. Social development fell in both cores, but fell longest and furthest in the East. In the West, the more developed Muslim heartland east of the Mediterranean suffered most, and by 1400 a new core was forming and having its own renaissance in western Europe.
These fragmented, previously peripheral European lands now discovered advantages in their own backwardness. Shipbuilding and gunnery, technologies western Europeans had learned from the East during the Second Old World Exchange, allowed them to turn the Atlantic Ocean into a highway, once again transforming the meanings of geography. Eager to tap into the wealth of the East, Western sailors fanned out and—to their surprise—bumped into the Americas.
Easterners could have discovered America in the fifteenth century (some people believe they did) but geography always made it more likely that Westerners would get there first. Easterners had far more to gain by sailing toward the riches of the Indian Ocean than into the empty Pacific and by pushing inland into the steppes, which had been the greatest threat to their security for nearly two thousand years.
In the seventeenth century the expansion of the cores changed the meanings of geography more dramatically than ever before. Centralized empires with muskets and cannons closed the Inner Asian steppe highway that linked East and West, ending nomadic migration and effectively killing one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. On the Atlantic, by contrast, the oceanic highway that western European merchants had opened fueled the rise of new kinds of markets and raised entirely new questions about how the natural world worked. By 1700 social development was again pressing the hard ceiling, but this time, with the full complement of horsemen of the apocalypse unable to ride, disaster was held at bay long enough for western European entrepreneurs to respond to the incentives of the oceanic highway by unleashing the awesome powers of coal and steam.
Given enough time, Easterners would probably have made the same discoveries and had their own industrial revolution, but geography made it much easier for Westerners—which meant that because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners had their industrial revolution first. It was geography that took Looty to Balmoral rather than Albert to Beijing.
NOT WHY THE WEST RULES
But what, you might well ask, about people? The pages of this book have been full of great men (and women), bungling idiots, the beliefs they propounded, and their unremitting conflicts; did none of these in the end matter?
Yes and no. We all have free will, and, as I have repeatedly stressed, our choices do change the world. It is just that most of our choices do not change the world very much. I could, for instance, decide right now to stop writing this book, quit my job, and become a hunter-gatherer. That would certainly make a difference. I would lose my home and, since I know rather little about hunting or gathering, would probably poison myself or starve. A few people around me would be strongly affected, and rather more people would be mildly affected. You, for instance, would have to find something else to read. But otherwise the world would go on. No decision I could conceivably make is going to change whether the West rules.
Of course, if millions of other Americans also decided to walk away from the nine-to-five and take up foraging, my odd individual decision would be transformed from a crazy personal aberration into part of a mass (but still odd) movement that really would make a difference. There are plenty of examples of such mass decisions. At the end of World War II, for instance, half a billion women decided to marry younger than their mothers had done and bear more children. Population soared. Then, thirty years later, a full billion of their own daughters decided to do the opposite, and population growth slowed. Collectively, these choices changed the course of modern history.
They were not, however, just whims. Karl Marx cut to the chase a century and a half ago: “Men [and women] make their own history,” he insisted, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.” Twentieth-century women had such good reasons for deciding to have more (and then fewer) babies that they often felt they really had no choice in the matter at all—just as the people who decided to take up farming ten thousand years ago, or to move to cities five thousand years ago, or to get jobs in factories two hundred years ago, must often have felt that there was no real alternative.
There are strong pressures on all of us to make choices that conform to reality. We all know people who ignore these pressures and make eccentric decisions anyway. Often we admire these radicals, rebels, and romantics, but rarely do we follow their lead. Most of us know all too well that predictable conformists tend to fare better (by which I mean win more access to food, shelter, and mates) than Anna Kareninas. Evolution selects for what we call common sense.
That said, eccentric choices clearly can have extraordinary consequences. Take Muhammad, perhaps the extreme case. This rather undistinguished Arab merchant could have chosen to be sensible, blaming his encounter with the Archangel Gabriel around 610 CEon a disorder of the stomach or any of a thousand plausible causes. But instead he chose to listen to his wife, who insisted that the visitation had been real. For years Muhammad looked likely to go the way of most prophets, into ridicule, contempt, and oblivion, but instead he united the Arabs. The caliphs who succeeded him destroyed Persia, shattered Byzantium, and split the West in two.
Everyone agrees that Muhammad was a great man. Few humans have had more impact on history. But even so, the transformation of the Western core in and after the seventh century cannot be ascribed solely to his idiosyncrasy. Arabs had been inventing new versions of monotheism and forming their own states in the desert for some time before Gabriel visited Muhammad. Byzantium and Persia were in desperate trouble well before Muslim war parties started crossing their borders, and the Mediterranean had been coming apart since the third century.
If Muhammad had made different choices, seventh-century Christians might only have had one another to fight, rather than the invading Muslims. Maybe without Muhammad, Western social development would have recovered faster after 750, and maybe it wouldn’t, but it would still have taken centuries to catch up with the East. The Western core would have stayed in the eastern Mediterranean whatever Muhammad did; the Turks would still have overrun it in the eleventh century and the Mongols in the thirteenth (and again around 1400); and the core would still have shifted westward toward Italy and then the Atlantic in and after the fifteenth century. If Muhammad had been more normal, the cross, not the crescent, might now inspire the faithful from Morocco to Malaysia—no small thing; but there is no reason to doubt that Europeans would still have conquered the Americas or that the West would now rule.
What is true of Muhammad is probably even truer of the other great men we have met. Assyria’s Tiglath-Pileser III and the Qin First Emperor both created terrible, centralized, high-end ancient empires; Europe’s Habsburgs and Japan’s Hideyoshi both failed to create great land empires in the sixteenth century; England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the death of Mao in 1976 both put reformist cliques in power. Yet the most that any of these great men/bungling idiots did was to speed up or slow down processes that were already under way. None really wrestled history down a whole new path. Even Mao, perhaps the most megalomaniac of all, only managed to postpone China’s industrial takeoff, giving Deng Xiaoping the opportunity to be remembered as the great man who turned China around. If we could rerun the past like an experiment, leaving everything else the same but substituting bungling idiots for great men (and vice versa), things would have turned out much the same, even if they might have moved at a slightly different pace. Great men (and women) clearly like thinking that by force of will alone they are changing the world, but they are mistaken.
This applies outside politics as well as within. Matthew Boulton and James Watt, for instance, were certainly great men, the latter inventing and the former marketing machines that really did change the world. But they were not unique great men, any more than Alexander Graham Bell was unique when he filed a patent for his newly invented telephone on February 14, 1876—the same day that Elisha Gray filed a patent for his newly invented telephone. Nor were Boulton and Watt more unique than their acquaintance Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen in 1774, a year after a Swedish chemist had also discovered it. Or more unique than the four Europeans who separately discovered sunspots in 1611.
Historians often marvel at the tendency for inventions to come in multiples, the lightbulb going on in several people’s brains at almost exactly the same moment. Great ideas often seem to be less the result of brilliance than the logical outcome of having a set of thinkers who share the same questions and methods. So it was with European men of letters in the early seventeenth century; once someone invented the telescope (which nine different men claimed to have done) it would have been remarkable if multiple astronomers had not promptly discovered sunspots.
An extraordinary number of modern inventions were made more than once, and the statistician Stephen Stigler even proposed a law that no discovery is ever named after its real discoverer (Stigler’s Law, he observed, was actually discovered by the sociologist Robert Merton twenty-five years earlier). Boulton and Watt were ahead of the pack, but there was a pack, and if Boulton and Watt had not marketed a relatively fuel-efficient steam engine in the 1770s, one of their many rivals would surely have done so soon after. In fact, the pack might have got in even faster had Watt not finagled an extraordinary patent that excluded all competitors from the field.
Great men/women and bungling idiots are creatures of their times. So should we conclude that some sort of spirit of the age, rather than specific individuals, determined the shape of history by sometimes creating an atmosphere conducive to greatness and other times generating a culture of bungling? Some historians think so, suggesting, for instance, that the real reason the West rules is that Chinese culture turned inward in the fourteenth century, giving up on the world, while European culture turned outward, propelling explorers over the oceans until they washed up in the Americas.
I spent some time on this idea in Chapter 8, suggesting that it just does not make much sense of the facts. Culture is less a voice in our heads telling us what to do than a town hall where we argue about our options. Each age gets the thought it needs, dictated by the kind of problems that geography and social development force on it.
This would explain why the histories of Eastern and Western thought have been broadly similar across the last five thousand years. In both cores the rise of the first states, around 3500 BCE in the West and after 2000 BCE in the East, set off arguments over the nature of and limits on divine kingship. As states in both cores became more bureaucratic, after 750 BCE in the West and 500 BCE in the East, these discussions yielded to first-wave Axial thought, debating the nature of personal transcendence and its relationship to secular authority. By about 200 CE, as the great Han and Roman empires fell apart, these questions in turn gave way to second-wave Axial thought, arguing over how organized churches could save the believer in a chaotic, dangerous world. And when social development revived, by 1000 in China and 1400 in Italy, renaissance questions—how to skip over the disappointing recent past to regain the lost wisdom of the first Axial Age—became more interesting still.
Eastern and Western thought developed so similarly for so long, I suspect, because there was only one path by which social development could keep rising. To break through the twenty-four-point ceiling, Easterners and Westerners both had to centralize their states, which inevitably led intellectuals toward first-wave Axial thought. The decline of these states pushed people toward second-wave Axial thought; their revival led almost inevitably toward renaissances. Each great change pushed people to think the thoughts the age needed.
But what of the great divergence around 1600, when western Europeans moved toward scientific thought while Easterners (plus those Westerners who lived outside the core around the Atlantic’s shores) did not? Did this epochal shift in thinking reflect deep cultural differences between Easterners and Westerners rather than simply the age getting the thought it needs?
Some (Western) sociologists think so. When psychologists strap people into functional magnetic resonance imaging machines and ask them to solve problems, these scholars point out, the frontal and parietal areas in Western subjects’ brains light up more (indicating that they are working harder to maintain attention) if the question requires placing information within a broad context than if it calls for isolating facts from their background and treating them independently. For Easterners the reverse is true.
What does this difference mean? Isolating facts and treating them independently from their context are hallmarks of modern science (as in the beloved caveat “other things being equal …”); perhaps, one theory runs, the contrast in brain function means that Westerners are simply more logical and scientific than Easterners.
But perhaps not. The experiments do not show that Easterners cannot separate facts from their background or that Westerners cannot put things in perspective; only that each group is less accustomed to thinking that way, and has to work harder to pull it off. Both groups can, and regularly do, perform both kinds of tasks.
In every age and every land we find rationalists and mystics, those who abstract from the details and those who revel in the complexities, and even a few who do all these things at once. What varies is the challenges facing them. When Europeans started creating the Atlantic economy around 1600, they also created new problems for themselves, and mechanical, scientific models of reality turned out to solve these best. Across the next four hundred years these ways of thinking became embedded in Western education, increasingly becoming the default mode of thought. In the East, where the kind of challenges that the Atlantic economy created seemed less pressing until well into the nineteenth century, this process has not yet gone as far.
As recently as the 1960s some Western sociologists argued that Eastern culture—in particular, Confucianism—had prevented those who were steeped in it from developing the entrepreneurial spirit of competition and innovation essential for economic success. In the 1980s, faced with the obvious fact of Japanese economic success, a new generation of sociologists concluded that Confucian values of respect for authority and self-sacrifice for the group did not inhibit capitalism; rather, they actually explained Japan’s success. A more sensible conclusion might be that people accommodate their culture to the needs of social development, which, in the late twentieth century, produced Confucian and Communist capitalists as well as liberal ones.
The conclusion that we get the thought we need might also make sense of another odd phenomenon, which psychologists call the Flynn Effect. Since IQ tests began, average scores have steadily moved upward (by about three points per decade). It would be cheering to think that we are all getting smarter, but most likely we are just getting better at thinking in the modern, analytical ways that these tests measure. Reading books made us more modern than telling stories, and (to the horror of many educators) playing computer games apparently makes us more modern still.
It is certainly true that not all cultures are equally responsive to changing circumstances. The Islamic lands, for instance, have produced notoriously few democracies, Nobel Prize–winning scientists, or diversified modern economies. Some non-Muslims conclude that Islam must be a benighted creed, miring millions in superstition. But if that were true it would be hard to explain why a thousand years ago many of the world’s best scientists, philosophers, and engineers were Muslims or why Muslim astronomers outperformed all comers until the sixteenth century.
The real explanation, I suspect, is that since 1700 many Muslims have turned inward in response to military and political defeat, just as many Chinese Confucians did in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Islam remains a broad tent. At one extreme is Turkey, which has modernized so effectively that it is a plausible candidate to join the European Union; at the other we find people such as some of the Taliban, who would kill women for showing their faces in public. Overall, though, as the Muslim world slid from being the core of the West to being an exploited periphery, its social development stagnated in a sense of victimhood. Ending that is modern Islam’s great burden; and who knows what advantages the Muslim world might then discover in its backwardness.
Culture and free will are wild cards, complicating the Morris Theorem that change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people (who rarely know what they’re doing) looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. Culture and free will speed up or slow down our reactions to changing circumstances. They deflect and muddy any simple theory. But—as the story that filled Chapters 1–10 shows all too clearly—culture and free will never trump biology, sociology, and geography for long.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
The causes of Western rule are both long-term and short-term, lying in the constantly shifting interplay of geography and social development, but Western rule itself was neither locked-in nor accidental. It would make more sense to call it probable, the most likely result, through most of history, in a game where geography stacked the odds in the West’s favor. Western rule, we might say, has often been a good bet.
To explain these rather cryptic comments I want to borrow a method from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 comedy Back to the Future. Near the beginning of the movie, a mad professor has combined a giant guitar amplifier, stolen plutonium, and a DeLorean car to create a time machine. When terrorists kill the professor, the teenage Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) gives chase and the time machine/car catapults him back to 1955. There he meets his future parents when they were his age. Disaster strikes—instead of falling in love with his father-to-be, Marty’s mother-to-be falls in love with Marty himself. A small dropped stitch in the tapestry of history, we might say, but to Marty it matters very much: unless he can put the past straight before the film ends, he will never be born.
Instead of following the historian’s normal method of starting a story at the beginning and telling it until we reach our own times, I think it might be useful to leap McFly-like into the past, and then, just as the movie does, stop to ask what could have happened to prevent the future—let us say the year 2000—from turning out more or less as it did.
I will start two centuries ago, in 1800. Alighting in the age of Jane Austen we will find that it was already overwhelmingly likely that the West would come to rule by 2000. Britain’s industrial revolution was under way, science was thriving, and European military power dwarfed everyone else’s. Of course, nothing was set in stone; with a bit more luck Napoleon might yet have won his wars or with a bit less luck Britain’s rulers might have bungled the challenges of industrialization. Either way, the British takeoff would have been slower, or—as I suggested in Chapter 10—the industrial revolution might have shifted to northern France. There are all kinds of possibilities. It is very hard, though, to see what could plausibly have happened after 1800 to have prevented a Western industrial revolution altogether. And once industrialization got going, it is equally hard to imagine what could have stopped its insatiable markets from going global. “It is … in vain,” Lord Macartney spluttered when the Chinese government rejected his trade embassy in 1793, “to attempt arresting the progress of human knowledge”—a pompous way to put it, perhaps, but he had a point.
No matter how much we stack the deck against the West, such as by imagining a hundred-year delay in its industrialization and little European imperial expansion until the twentieth century, there is still no obvious reason to think that there would have been an independent Eastern industrial revolution before then. Such an Eastern takeoff would probably have required the rise of a diversified regional economy like the one Westerners had created around the shores of the Atlantic, and that would have taken several centuries to build up. Western rule by 2000 was not locked in in 1800, in the sense of being 100 percent certain, but I suspect it was at least 95 percent probable.
If we leap back another hundred and fifty years from 1800 to 1650, when Newton was still a boy, Western rule by 2000 would look less certain but still likely. Guns were closing the steppes and ships were creating the Atlantic economy. Industrialization remained undreamedof, but its preconditions were settling into place in western Europe. If the Dutch had won their wars against England in the 1650s, if the Dutch-backed coup in England had fallen through in 1688, or if the French had successfully invaded England in 1689, the particular institutions that wet-nursed Boulton and Watt might never have taken shape; and in that case the industrial revolution might, as I suggested earlier, have taken decades longer or have happened somewhere else in western Europe. But once again it is difficult to see what could plausibly have happened after 1650 to prevent it altogether. Perhaps if Western industrialization had slowed and the Qing rulers had also behaved differently, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China might have caught up more quickly with European science, but as we saw in Chapter 9, it would have taken more than that for the East to have industrialized first. Western rule by 2000 was less locked in in 1650 than it would be by 1800, but it was still the most plausible outcome—perhaps 80 percent likely?
Another hundred and fifty years earlier, in 1500, the prognosis was murkier still. Western Europeans had ships that could sail to the New World, but their first instinct was simply to plunder it. If the Habsburgs had been even luckier than they actually were (if, perhaps, Luther had never been born, or if Charles V had co-opted him, or if the armada against England had succeeded in 1588 and the Dutch rebellion had then folded), perhaps they really would become the shepherds of Christendom—in which case the Spanish Inquisition might have silenced radical voices such as Newton’s and Descartes’s, and arbitrary taxation might have destroyed Dutch, English, and French trade the way it destroyed Spanish commerce in historical reality. That is a lot of ifs, though, and for all we know a Habsburg Empire might have had exactly the opposite effect, driving even more Puritans to cross the Atlantic and build cities on hills, kick-starting an Atlantic economy and scientific revolution from the far side.
Alternatively, the Habsburgs could easily have fared worse than they did in reality. If the Ottomans had defeated Shiite Persia more thoroughly, the Turks might have taken Vienna in 1529; minarets and the muezzin might yet have pierced the skies over England and, as Gibbon put it, the interpretation of the Koran might now be taught in the schools of Oxford. A Turkish triumph would perhaps have kept the West’s center of gravity in the Mediterranean, leaving the Atlantic economy to wither on the vine—but on the other hand, like the Habsburg victory I imagined a moment ago, it might also have stimulated an even stronger Atlantic world. Another possibility: if the Ottomans and Russians had fought each other more vigorously in the seventeenth century, they might have been too weak to close the Western steppes to nomads. In that case the Qing victories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have driven the Mongols into Europe, turning the West’s seventeenth-century crisis into something as grim as the last days of Rome. With a new dark age in the West, China might, after the passage of enough centuries, have had its own scientific and industrial revolutions as its social development pressed against the hard ceiling. Who knows? One thing is clear, though: in 1500 the odds of Western rule by 2000 were much lower than they would be by 1650, perhaps not much more than fifty-fifty.
Another hundred and fifty years take us back to 1350, in the dark days of the Black Death, and from that vantage point Western rule by 2000 would have looked frankly rather unlikely. The wildest card in the near future was Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror who burst out of central Asia to devastate India and Persia and then shattered the Ottoman Empire in 1402. At that point Tamerlane decided to turn east to avenge some imagined slight from the Chinese emperor but died before reaching his goal. If instead he had kept riding west after 1402, he might well have devastated Italy, aborting its Renaissance and setting Western development back by centuries. On the other hand, if instead of dying in 1405 on his eastward journey he had hung on a few years longer, he might have repeated Khubilai Khan’s brutal conquest of China, holding back Eastern, not Western, development by centuries.
There are plenty of other ways things could have gone. The Ming dynasty founder, Hongwu, could easily have failed to reunite China after its civil wars, leaving a cluster of warring states rather than a great empire in the fifteenth-century Eastern core. Who can say what the consequences would have been? There might have been chaos, but perhaps removing the heavy hand of Ming autocracy would have stimulated even more vigorous maritime trade. I suggested in Chapter 8 that Ming China was never likely to create an Eastern version of the West’s later Atlantic economy—geography was too strongly against it—but without the Ming, Eastern colonists and merchants might yet have made a smaller Atlantic-style economy closer to home in Southeast Asia and the Spice Islands. The bottom line, though, is that options were even more open in 1350 than they would be in 1500. Western rule by 2000 was just one of many possibilities, perhaps no more than 25 percent likely.
I could go on; it is fun to play the what-if game. But the point is probably clear. Whether the West would rule by 2000 was a matter of probabilities, not of lock-ins or accidents, and the further back we go, the more wild cards there are. In 1800 it was highly unlikely that different decisions, cultural trends, or accidents would delay Western rule until after 2000; in 1350 that outcome was perfectly plausible. However, it is hard to think of anything happening after 1350 that would have led to the East industrializing before the West or have prevented industrialization altogether.
To find a past that could plausibly have led to Eastern rule by 2000 we have to go back a full nine centuries, to 1100. If at that point the Song dynasty emperor Huizong had handled the Jurchen nomads better, saving Kaifeng in 1127, or if the baby Temujin’s parents really had forgotten him on the steppes and he had died instead of growing up to be Genghis Khan, who knows what might have happened? Distance and maritime technology probably ruled out a Pacific version of the route to industrialization that Europe followed in the eighteenth century, via an Atlantic economy, but possibly a similar economy could have been created by other means. If China had escaped Jurchen and Mongol devastation, its renaissance culture might have blossomed into a scientific revolution instead of withering into complacency and footbinding. Internal demand from a hundred million Chinese subjects, trade between an agricultural south and an industrial north, and colonization in Southeast Asia might then have been enough to tip the balance. On the other hand, possibly not; until it had the kinds of guns and armies that could close the steppes, China remained open to devastating migrations. It is probably optimistic to think the mandarins could keep so many balls in the air indefinitely. The odds against an Eastern takeoff in the twelfth century were, I suspect, very long.
If we make one last trip in the time machine, plunging back another thousand years before the Song, the great question changes again. Now we have to ask not whether the East might end up ruling by 2000 but whether the Roman Empire might break through the hard ceiling seventeen hundred years before the West actually did so. Frankly, I do not see any way that could have happened. Like the Song, Rome needed not only to find a way through the hard ceiling without the benefits of an Atlantic economy but also to have astonishing luck in evading the five horsemen of the apocalypse. When China’s Han Empire fell in the third century, Rome muddled on in a weakened state, only to crack in the fifth century. There were certainly ways Rome might have gotten the better of the Goths and their kindred and carried on with their muddling along, but could the empire then have handled the crisis of the seventh century? And even if some larger Roman Empire had survived, how would that have escaped the long winding down of Western social development? A Roman industrial revolution after 100 looks even less likely than a Song breakthrough after 1100.
What all this adds up to is the conclusion that Western rule by 2000 was neither a long-term lock-in nor a short-term accident. It was more of a long-term probability. It was never very likely, even in 1100, that the East would industrialize first, gain the ability to project its power globally, and turn its lead in social development into rule the way the West would subsequently do. It was always likely, though, that someone would eventually develop guns and empires capable of closing the steppes, and ships and markets capable of opening the oceans. And once that happened, it would become increasingly likely that new geographical advantages would lead Westerners into an industrial revolution before Easterners. The only thing that could have prevented it, I suspect, was a genuine Nightfall moment, the kind of disaster Isaac Asimov described in the story of that name that I talked about in Chapter 2: a cataclysm that overwhelms all responses, destroying civilization and hurling humanity back to square one.
NIGHTFALL
But that was never very likely either. The closest the world ever came to Nightfall before the era of Western rule was around 10,800 BCE, when a vast icy lake drained into the North Atlantic and lowered its temperature enough to turn off the Gulf Stream. The twelve-hundred-year-long mini–ice age that followed, known as the Younger Dryas, halted social development and snuffed out the first experiments in settled village life and early farming in the Hilly Flanks. The Younger Dryas makes every episode of global cooling since then seem barely worth the effort of putting a sweater on.
The consequences of an event on the scale of the Younger Dryas anytime in the last few thousand years are too horrible to think about for long. The world’s harvests would have failed year after year after year. Hundreds of millions would have starved. Mass migration would have emptied much of Europe, North America, and Central Asia. The resulting wars, state failures, and epidemics would have dwarfed anything known. It would have been as if the five horsemen of the apocalypse had traded their steeds for tanks. A shrunken, shivering population would have ended up clustered in villages around the Lucky Latitudes, praying for rain and scratching a meager living from the dry soil. Thousands of years of social development would have been wiped off the graph.
Other Nightfall-like paths are imaginable too. Morbidly inclined astronomers have calculated that if an asteroid a mile or so in diameter hit the earth, the explosion would be equivalent to 100 billion tons of TNT going off at once. Opinions differ on just how grim that would be. It would certainly temporarily fill the upper atmosphere with dust, blocking the sunlight and causing millions to starve. It might release enough nitrogen oxide to degrade the ozone layer and expose the survivors to murderous solar radiation. A two-mile-wide asteroid impact, by contrast, is easier to model. It would be like setting off 2 trillion tons of TNT, which would probably kill everyone.
The good news—obviously—is that no such rocks lay in our path, so there is not much point in depressing ourselves by speculating on just how bad things would have been. Asteroid collisions and ice ages are not like wars or culture: they are (or perhaps we should say until recently were) beyond human control. No bungling idiot, cultural trend, or accident could have conjured up another body of icy water large enough to turn off the Gulf Stream, meaning that a new Younger Dryas was impossible, and even the gloomiest astronomers think we will collide with mile-wide asteroids only once every few hundred thousand years.
There is, in fact, almost nothing that bungling idiots and so on could have done at any point in human history that would have brought on a Nightfall moment. Even the bloodiest wars we have inflicted on ourselves, the twentieth-century Wars of the World, merely confirmed trends that were already under way. In 1900 the United States, a new kind of subcontinental empire with an industrial core, was already challenging western Europe’s oceanic empires. The Wars of the World were largely struggles to see who would replace the western Europeans. The United States itself ? The Soviet Union, rapidly industrializing by the 1930s? Germany, trying to conquer its own subcontinental empire in the 1940s? In the East, Japan tried to conquer and industrialize a subcontinental empire and expel the West in the 1930s–40s; when that failed, China industrialized the subcontinental empire it already had, disastrously in the 1950s–60s and spectacularly since the 1980s. It is hard to see how Europe’s oceanic empires could have survived such competition, particularly when we add the rising tide of nationalism from Africa to Indochina and the steady decline of western Europe’s population and industry relative to its challengers’.
If Europe’s great powers had not thrown themselves off cliffs in 1914 and 1939 their oceanic empires would surely have lasted longer; if the United States had not fled its global responsibilities in 1919 the oceanic empires may have collapsed even faster. If Hitler had defeated Churchill and Stalin, things would perhaps have turned out differently; or then again, perhaps they wouldn’t. Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland provides a wonderful illustration. It is a murder mystery set in 1964 Germany, but—as quickly becomes clear—this is a Germany that won the Second World War. Everything seems eerily different. Hitler has killed all of Europe’s Jews, not just most of them. His architect Albert Speer has made his master’s fantasies material, rebuilding Berlin with an Avenue of Victory twice as long as Paris’s Champs Elysées, leading to the biggest building in the world, where the Führer delivers speeches under a dome so high that rain clouds can form inside it. And yet as the story unfolds, the landscape begins to take on an even eerier familiarity. A cold war is under way between the United States and a huge, rickety, totalitarian empire based in eastern Europe. The two empires glower at each other from behind hedges of nuclear missiles, fight proxy wars and manipulate client states in the Third World, and are edging toward détente. In some ways things are not so different from reality after all.
The only way the twentieth-century Wars of the World could plausibly have produced a wildly different outcome was by descending into all-out nuclear war. If Hitler had developed atom bombs he would surely have used them, but since he virtually canceled his nuclear program in 1942, that was never likely. That left the United States free to drop two bombs on Japan with impunity. But once the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon in 1949, Nightfall became increasingly possible. Even at their peak levels in 1986, all the world’s warheads combined only had one-eighth of the destructive power of a two-mile-wide meteor impact, but that was still more than enough to annihilate modern civilization.
It is hard to understand those—like Chairman Mao—who can contemplate nuclear war with anything approaching equanimity. “Let us speculate,” he said to the Communist world’s leaders in 1957.
If war broke out, how many people would die? There are 2.7 billion people in the entire world … If the worst comes to the worst, perhaps one-half would die. But there would still be one-half left; imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. After a number of years, the world’s population would once again reach 2.7 billion and certainly become even bigger.
Fortunately for us all, the men who actually made the decisions in the Soviet Union and United States in the 1950s realized that the only way to handle nuclear weapons was through Mutual Assured Destruction, a no-middle-ground doctrine where one false move would mean annihilation all around. The details of how to play this game remained nail-bitingly murky, and there were some close calls, particularly when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev tried to work out the rules in the autumn of 1962. Khrushchev, alarmed by American saber rattling, had installed Soviet missiles on Cuba, and Kennedy, worried, had blockaded the island. Soviet warships sailed within a few miles of the American line in the sea; Kennedy sent an aircraft carrier to cut them off. Kennedy suspected at this point that the odds of disaster were reaching one in three or even one in two. And then, around ten in the morning on Wednesday, October 24, they worsened sharply. As Kennedy and his closest advisers sat in strained silence, news came that a Soviet submarine had blocked the American aircraft carrier’s path. What could its intention be, if not to attack? Kennedy’s “hand went up to his face and covered his mouth,” his brother remembered. “He opened and closed his fist. His face seemed drawn, his eyes pained, almost gray.” His next move would be to launch four thousand warheads. But the Soviet submarine did not fire. The clock ticked on; and at 10:25 the Soviet ships slowed, then turned back. Night did not fall.
For thirty years brinksmanship and blunders produced an agonizing sequence of glimpses of the outer darkness, but the worst never came to the worst. Since 1986 the number of warheads in the world has fallen by two-thirds, with further big reductions agreed upon in 2010. The thousands of weapons that the Americans and Russians still have could kill everyone on earth with megatons to spare, but Nightfall now seems far less likely than it did during the forty years of Mutual Assured Destruction. Biology, sociology, and geography continue to weave their webs; history goes on.
FOUNDATION
Asimov’s story “Nightfall” has not, so far at least, provided a very good model for explaining the onward march of history, but perhaps his Foundation novels can do better. Far, far in the future, says Asimov, a young mathematician named Hari Seldon takes a spaceship to Trantor, the mighty capital of a Galactic Empire that has endured for twelve thousand years. There he delivers a scholarly paper at the Decennial Mathematics Convention, explaining the theoretical basis for a new science called psychohistory. In principle, Seldon claims, if we combine regular history, mass psychology, and advanced statistics, we can identify the forces that drive humanity and then project them forward to predict the future.
Promoted from his provincial home planet to a chair at Trantor’s greatest university, Seldon works out psychohistory’s methods. His major conclusion is that the Galactic Empire is about to fall, leading to a thirty-thousand-year dark age before a Second Empire rises. The emperor promotes Seldon to first minister, from which illustrious position he plans a think tank called the Foundation. While gathering all knowledge into an Encyclopedia Galactica its scholars will mastermind a secret plan to restore the empire after just one thousand years.
The Foundation novels have delighted science fiction fans for half a century, but Hari Seldon is a standing joke among those professional historians who have heard of him. Only in Asimov’s feverish imagination, they maintain, could knowing what has already happened tell you what is going to happen. Many historians deny that there are any big patterns to find in the past, while those who do think there may be such patterns nevertheless tend to feel that detecting them is beyond our powers. Geoffrey Elton, for instance, who held not only the Regius Chair in Modern History at Cambridge University but also famously strong opinions on all matters historical, perhaps spoke for the majority: “Recorded history,” he insisted, “amounts to no more than about two hundred generations. Even if there is a larger purpose in history, it must be said that we cannot really expect so far to be able to extract it from the little bit of history we have.”
I have tried to show in this book that historians are selling themselves short. We do not have to limit ourselves to the two hundred generations in which people have been writing documents. If we widen our perspective to encompass archaeology, genetics, and linguistics—the kinds of evidence that dominated my first few chapters—we get a whole lot more history. Enough, in fact, to take us back five hundred generations. From such a big chunk of time, I have argued, we really can extract some patterns; and now, like Seldon, I want to suggest that once we do this we really can use the past to foresee the future.