Timur Kuran
In the 1940s,
Although Needham failed to resolve this great mystery, he made it impossible for other historians to continue to ignore questions about why some societies pull ahead and some fall behind. At a time when most Western, and even many non-Western, intellectuals believed in the intrinsic superiority of the West, Needham showed that both
Broader analogues to the Needham question exist around the world. In the Middle Ages, the
ACCIDENTALLY SUPERIOR
Students of civilizational development have tended to approach disparities between the development of regions in two ways. The first, called "long-term lock-in," asserts that some essential advantage, such as a location with an abundance of natural resources, efficient governance, or values conducive to innovation, makes a civilization fundamentally and inevitably superior. For example, in explaining the rise of
The second approach identifies some short-term accident as the cause of a temporary gap or reversal of fortune. When
In Why the West Rules
-- For Now, the classicist
Morris gives the term "the West" an elastic and curiously broad meaning. The West, he writes, first included those societies that originated in the "Hilly Flanks," an arc-shaped area now split among
," surely this poses a major problem -- one that it neglects to confront.
Having defined "the East" and "the West" -- however problematically -- Morris turns to comparing the relative development of the two civilizations across the centuries. He uses his own index of social development to quantify social progress. The index takes into account energy capture, or the amount of calories the typical individual consumes per day; urbanization, a proxy for organizational capability, as determined by the size of the largest city; war-making capability, measured by the quality and quantity of weapons systems; and information technology, based on how easily people can communicate. In terms of his index, Morris finds that the West led the East continuously from 14,000 BC, when the earliest known pottery was produced, to around AD 541, when the East jumped ahead. By 1100, the East's score was about 40 percent higher than the West's. The gap narrowed thereafter, and the West regained the lead around 1773 -- a lead it has maintained since. Some may criticize Morris' index as simplistic, and much of his data for premodern times are based on guesswork. Nonetheless, he manages to capture something real about the relative performances of the East and the West. THE GOOD NEW DAYS
Early in the book, Morris notes that only the latest reversal, when the West started to pull ahead, allowed one side to colonize and subjugate the other. This point fades from view as he turns to interpreting historical events. But it is no small matter. Until the 1700s, the East and the West remained politically independent of each other, regardless of which side was ahead, and neither side enjoyed unchallenged military supremacy. The last reversal, moreover, had another unique trait: self-reinforcing growth. In both regions, the level of development had been constrained for millennia by the limitations of agrarian life. Since 1700, when world trade fell under European control, the West has developed at a dramatically accelerating rate. Today, its development, as measured by Morris, is over 20 times as high as its 1700 level. The East, with some lag, has also developed to unprecedented heights: Morris calculates its level of development to be about 13 times as high as its record level before 1700.
Modern growth is not a replay, or even a faster version, of earlier episodes. The organizational and technological innovations that are driving modern growth are continually evolving, keeping societies and the global political and economic order perpetually in flux. In turn, societies must continuously adjust their economic expectations, relationships, and routines. In Morris' telling, the difference between premodern and modern life is lost. Someone born in the age of
The lack of a unifying theory to explain why the present growth spurt is so different is the book's key shortcoming. According to Morris, whereas geography defines opportunities, sociology and human motivations determine how those opportunities are exploited. But the sociological side of the book's narrative is weak. Morris describes history as the formation and fall of dynasties, political centralization and decentralization, spurts of creativity followed by inertia, and the evolution of beliefs. Yet he does not weave these stories together within an overarching theory of history. Once geography has defined opportunities, history is just "one damned thing after another" -- to use Arnold Toynbee's characterization of inadequately theorized historical narratives.
By itself, of course, the lucky geography of the West and the resources it generated through global exploration cannot explain the explosive growth of modern times. Morris' index has the East ahead of the West until the eve of the Industrial Revolution. But for centuries,
As they grew, these supercompanies faced coordination, communication, and enforcement problems, which induced experimentation with ever more complex organizational structures and business techniques. By the sixteenth century, profit-making European enterprises were already using a corporate form of organization. Comparably complex private enterprises could be found nowhere else, not even in the rest of what Morris defines as the West. Thus, by the time
INFERTILE EAST
The regions that failed to keep up with
Some believe that
As it happened, modern economic institutions failed to emerge organically in the East. After colonization, Eastern leaders tried to overcome this deficiency by adopting Western institutions so as to achieve, in short order, the transformation that
FOR NOW?
As the book's title suggests, Morris' purpose is not only to interpret the past but also to identify what the future holds for the East-West development gap. By extrapolating from present trends, Morris predicts that, according to his index, the East will probably have regained the lead over the West by 2103. If
Although it is possible that
Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
.
By Ian Morris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, 750 pp.
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2011
TIMUR KURAN is Professor of Economics and Political Science and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University
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