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

Wow, all those four- and five-star reviews. I disagree.

First up, it should be called Why China Hasn't Ruled the World Up Till Now, But Will After 2103.¹

The book opens with an AU, in which the Chinese navy forces Queen Victoria to swear fealty, and takes Albert hostage to ensure her co-operation. Morris asks, "Why did British boats shoot their way up the Yangzi in 1842, rather than Chinese ones up the Thames?" (p. 11) This is an exciting and interesting question. Morris finally answers it 546 rather wearisome pages later: "The West rules because of geography."

His next statement will be somewhat surprising to sociologists: "Sociology provide[s] universal laws, applying to all humans in all times and places; geography explains differences" (p. 557).

Well, I think that's complete crap. Sadly a review space is not the place to go into why it's complete crap, nor is it a space in which I can convince anyone who agrees with Morris.

The second key reason that Morris and I can't agree is that he thinks 900 years is a long time (p. 575). Morris and I actually agree that if you rewind history to 1100 it's anyone's ball game. To Morris, that's a vast swathe of history. But if we start where Morris starts, with Homo habilis, 2,500,000 years ago, (p. 43) 900 years is nothing.

The third reason is that Morris doesn't think the "what-if game" changes that basic fact that "whether the West would rule by 2000 [is] a matter of probabilities, not of . . . accidents"; but it's all a what-if game. Geographically, nothing changed in those last 900 years (ok, the Little Ice Age, but that's a cyclical climate blip, you know?) So, with Morris acknowledging that if we start again in 1100 it could "plausibly lead to Eastern rule by 2000" (p. 575) it's not geographical, is it? It's all a "wild-card." Morris argues that without "guns and armies that could close the steppes" it was "never very likely . . . 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." Really? What if K'ung-fu-tzu dies in infancy and Confucianism never gets developed, gains prominence, and causes the Han dynasty to look down on merchants? One of the tasks of Zheng He's voyages is therefore to open trading routes, and his ships don't stop with the Indian Ocean. Han merchants and diplomats push on into Europe, while they also cross the Pacific, beat both France and England to Australia, and colonize South America before Portugal gets there.

Fourthly, Morris presents "rule" as a binary choice: either the West rules or the East rules. What if Timur Lenk,² who was certainly in diplomatic contact with Charles VI of France, proposed an alliance, and with the support of European troops as well, took on the Ming dynasty in a late Spring campaign, avoiding both winter troop movements, and the plague, thereby winning, and creating a single unified alliance spanning the entire distance from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

It's all luck, innit. And uncharacteristic tactical missteps. It's all a game of what-if, and Morris presents it as entirely the most probable and logical outcome. That's a lot like arguing that intelligent bipeds with binocular color vision are the most probable outcome for evolution.

What I really hoped to find in this book was an understanding of the more complex reasons why China hasn't "ruled" before now (and I do agree with Morris that after 2103 it's China all the way, baby. I don't think that's shockingly new information.) And no, "geography" does not provide us with the answer. Example: a Western economic paradigm does not necessarily apply to China, and compared to other aspects of culture, economics at least gives you hard data to work with.

In 1788 hail destroys French crops: in 1789 8,000 starving people storm the Bastille, 7,000 (mainly women) surround Versailles.
Between 1958-1962, Mao's Great Leap Forward, 20 million people starved to death³ (p. 545): rather than revolt, "parents would allow their children to starve to death . . . they stopped giving the girl-children food."(4)
Why the difference?

Morris calls it "the West's corrosive, liberal acid" that "[eats] away the barriers within societies and those between them" and "geography" does not explain this. I'm going to have to find some good contextualizing histories written by Chinese authors.

Aside from all this (and it's a big aside) I didn't find the book particularly readable. Morris wisely starts the journey by telling us that to answer the titular (implied) question, we must "confront the most basic issues: What is the West? . . . What do we mean by rule?" (p. 35). Well, I hope you packed provisions, folks. History should be a hike through fields and forests, stopping to admire both panoramic vistas and the tiny delicate indigo stripes on a pansy, sometimes meandering, other times running and leaping like fools. Morris leads us on a forced march across a vast plain. "Forward, fellows!" he cries. "I swear there's a point here somewhere, just a bit further." Onwards we slog, for 518 pages. I whined a lot. Morris kept me going with tales of bloodthirsty uppity women who had their son's eyes plucked out, or imprisoned (the whole son, not just the eyes) so they could rule. Sometimes I'd heard the story before: "Wait a minute," I'd say. "Are you sure that's how it goes?" It mattered not - Morris was off, gone, striding over the centuries like a colossus in his own mind.

The text is occasionally broken by graphs. I'm going to let one speak for itself here *cough x-axis cough*



If you like history this is not a book I'd recommend. While the scope is impressive, it achieves that by leaving charm in the bedside drawer at home: it's MREs all the way and there is no room for personal extras on this journey. If you don't like history, for the gods' sake, don't make this your first book.

Not recommended.




¹ The whole premise of the book is to present a Europe-China binary, contrasting and comparing developments in both. The idea that anywhere else could have come to "rule" isn't even considered. That the Shona, for example, constructing Great Zimbabwe in the 11th century, could have spread their civilization through to North Africa, Spain, and then across the Med to pre-Renaissance Europe . . . well, Zimbabwe isn't even in the book. Film director Robert Zemekis is, but not Zimbabwe. Equally, forget India, or Russia, and let's reduce the 1258 sacking of Bagdhad to a single paragraph on page 391.

Morris doesn't actually equate the "West" with Europe when it doesn't suit him, rather defining it sometimes as everything literally "west" of China e.g. "Cairo . . . remained the West's biggest and richest city" (p. 392). Nevertheless he refers to a "core," or "center of gravity," meaning European technology/economics/paradigms etc.

² Morris's tone pissed me off throughout the book. He calls Timur Lenk "Tamerlane," because military geniuses would much rather be called by the title of a romantic 1827 poem than, I don't know, their actual name. And he insists on using the term "ape-man" because it's "less of a mouthful." Gah!

At one point Morris writes, "you would be hard-pressed to avoid concluding that the West was more developed than the East" (p.60), and my friend Camille said, "Oh. It's gonna be that book, is it? Employing that tone... " Yes. This.

³ 20 million is at the very lower end of estimates. Frank Dikotter puts the death toll at 45 million, including 2.5 million tortured to death.

(4) Please note, this is a secondary source, these are not Morris's words - however he hasn't referenced it more than "another informant" so I can't cite the source. Also, I never knew till now you only get three footnotes to play with in GR's html. Huh.