Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Book

This book is drivel, plain and simple. Hanson selects nine battles from history and pairs them with what he imagines to be the characteristics of Western civilization that, when combined in a test tube, have proved to be an elixir of invincibility, carrying the world before them.

The Greeks defeated the Persians in 480 B.C. The lesson? A free citizenry was decisive in the conflict. Unfortunately, the slave laborers and women who were considered little more than property and who underpinned the ancient Greek economy would probably beg to differ with Hanson's definition of "free". Perhaps he only had men in mind?

Hanson's choice of battles is quite arbitrary, and, echoing the Downing Street Memos, he has selected the facts to fit his thesis. If Alexander's victory at Gaugamela illustrates the West's penchant for annihilation, and Charles Martel's victory at Tours shows the superiority of the West's traditional dependence on fortified infantry, what of the obliteration of nearly the entire Roman army by an all-cavalry force at Adrianople in 378?

Perhaps the Goths who destroyed Valens and his army were not Eastern enough for Hanson's thesis. How about the Huns in the fifth century? What of the Mongol empire of the 13th century (rulers of the largest land empire the world has known)? Genghis Khan's troops were all cavalry, they were not capitalists, they were very low-tech, not concerned with reason or philosophical discourse--in short, they were lacking just about all of the classically liberal virtues that Mr. Hanson seems to think essential for conquest. Of course, they possessed a knack for annihilation and great discipline, but then, hasn't every great army throughout history had those same qualities?

Hanson's use of the Battles of Rorke's Drift (1879) and Tenochtitlan (1521) as examples of Western superiority is particularly illuminating. When a relatively technologically advanced civilization comes into contact with spear-throwing primitives with no biological immunity to say, smallpox, is that really evidence of the inherent superiority of Western civilization, or merely circumstances working out in our favor?

The fact that no civilization, Western or otherwise, has been able to truly subdue China (without itself being assimilated by the Chinese), which hasn't (and doesn't) possess many of Mr. Hanson's proposed Western virtues, seems to argue against his thesis. The fact that the coming centuries will likely be Sino-centric merits understanding and an explanation, one that Mr. Hanson is politically incapable of delivering, but that Mr. Darwin's thinking anticipated long ago.