The west still rules—but this will change in the coming decades; indeed, geography may cease to matter
China’s Nanjing Greenland Financial Center, now the sixth tallest building in the world, is one of many recent building projects that advertise China’s growing power to the world. If the rate of global change keeps accelerating, we should expect eastern dominance by 2050. Photo: Jakob Montrasio
The west is still the “best”—if by that we mean richest, strongest, and most inventive. True, China now has the second biggest economy in the world and Japan the third; but Europe and north America still generate two thirds of the world’s wealth, own two thirds of its weapons, and spend more than two thirds of its R&D dollars—all despite having less than one-seventh of its population. The west still rules the roost.
But will this last? No. This much we know, because history tells us so. As Winston Churchill (no mean historian himself) put it: “The farther backwards you can look, the farther forwards you are likely to see.” If we look back far enough (to the last ice age), on a scale big enough (the whole planet), we can indeed identify the forces that drive history—and where they are taking us.
The west dominates the world not because its people are biologically superior, its culture better, or its leaders wiser, but simply because of geography. When the world warmed up at the end of the last ice age, making farming possible, it was towards the western end of Eurasia that plants and animals were first domesticated. Proto-westerners were no smarter or harder working than anyone else; they just lived in the region where geography had put the densest concentrations of potentially domesticable plants and animals. Another 2,000 years would pass before domestication began in other parts of the world, where resources were less abundant. Holding onto their early lead, westerners went on to be the first to build cities, create states, and conquer empires. Non-westerners followed suit everywhere from Persia to Peru, but only after further time lags.
Yet the west’s head start in agriculture some 12,000 years ago does not tell us everything we need to know. While geography does explain history’s shape, it does not do so in a straightforward way. Geography determines how societies develop; but, simultaneously, how societies develop determines what geography means.
Take the case of the hot, humid valleys of south China. In the days of the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), these lands beyond the Yangzi River seemed backward to China’s rulers, because they lacked the skills to make them productive. By 400AD, though, farmers migrating southwards to escape the chaos after the fall of the Han brought rice agriculture to a peak of perfection, building high-tech paddies in the wet south and extracting huge yields. They changed geography’s meaning: the south became the rice basket that fed a golden age of eastern culture. The west, which had no equivalent to this rice basket, lost its 10,000-year-old lead in development. So for more than a millennium, until at least 1700, China was the richest, strongest, and most inventive place on Earth.
As east Asia pulled ahead, its inventors came up with one breakthrough after another. By 1300 China had ships that could cross the oceans, magnetic compasses that could tell skippers where they were heading, and guns that could shoot the people they met when they arrived. But then, in the kind of paradox that fills the pages of history, the east’s breakthroughs changed the meaning of geography once again.
Up until that point, western Europe—thrust out into the cold north Atlantic, far from the centres of action—had been a backwater. But when, after a lag of a century or so, Europeans adapted the east’s oceangoing ships, compasses and cannons to their own needs, their location on the Atlantic abruptly became a huge geographical plus. When no one could cross oceans, it had not mattered that Europe was twice as close as China to the vast, rich lands of the Americas; but now that people could cross, it mattered very much indeed. Geography explains why it was western Europeans, rather than the 15th century’s finest sailors—the Chinese—who discovered, plundered, and colonised the Americas. Chinese sailors were just as daring as Spaniards and Chinese settlers, just as intrepid as Britons, but it was Christopher Columbus rather than the great Chinese admiral Zheng who discovered the Americas—simply because Columbus only had to go half as far.
And thanks to these new meanings of geography, Europeans (rather than Chinese) created an equally new kind of maritime market economy in the 17th century, exploiting comparative advantages between continents. It was European thinkers (again rather than Chinese) who saw what benefits could come from explaining how the winds and tides worked, measuring and counting in better ways, and cracking the codes of physics, chemistry, and biology. Europeans, not Chinese, hurled themselves at these tasks; Europe, not China, had a scientific revolution; and Europeans, not Chinese, applied science’s insights to society itself in the 18th century to set off what we now call the Enlightenment.
By 1800 this combination of science and the Atlantic market economy provided incentives and opportunities for western Europeans to mechanise production and tap the awesome power of fossil fuels. Therefore Britain, not China or Japan, had an industrial revolution, and by the mid-19th century Britain bestrode the world like a colossus.
Europeans liked to think that their own superiority accounted for all this, but a rude shock was coming. The hidden laws of history kept on working, and by 1900 geography had changed its meaning once again. The British-dominated global economy drew in the resources of north America, converting the US from a rather backward periphery (like Europe had been half a millennium earlier) into a new global core. Nor did things stop there: in the 20th century the American-dominated global economy, in turn, drew in the resources of Asia, transforming Japan, then the “Asian Tigers,” and eventually China and India from rather backward peripheries into even newer global cores. The “rise of the east,” so shocking to so many westerners, was entirely predictable.
So what does all this mean for our future? Extrapolating from these historical patterns, we can certainly make some predictions. If the processes of change continue across the 21st century at the same rate as in the 20th century, the east will overtake the west by 2100. But if the rate of change keeps accelerating—as it has been doing since the 15th century—we should expect eastern global dominance as soon as 2050.
However, that is not all that will change. As can see from the past, while geography shapes the development of societies, development also shapes what geography means—and all the signs are that, in the 21st century, the meanings of geography are changing faster than ever. Geography is, we might even say, losing meaning. The world is shrinking, and the greatest challenges we face—nuclear weapons, climate change, mass migration, epidemics, food and water shortages—are all global problems. Perhaps the real lesson of history, then, is that by the time the west is no longer the best, the question may have ceased to matter very much.
Ian Morris is Willard Professor of Classics, History and Archaeology at Stanford University, and author of “Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What they Reveal About the Future” (Profile). He will be speaking in a number of the Prospect-sponsored debates entitled “The Battle for the Past” in London on 31st October.
WilliamCB
The basic theory here sounds a lot like what I read in “Guns, Germs and Steel”. It’s interesting and provocative. But when you say “Geography determines how societies develop” I think you’ve just fallen off the edge. What happened to history?
Jakob Montrasio
Thank you for choosing my photo for this article, looks great, and very interesting topic!
Mark
An unhelpful, inaccurate oversimplification, I fear.
Morris is motivated by his worship of political correctness – he is adamantly unwilling to attest to any cultural prowess for fear of promoting nationalism/cultural elitism.
The anti-imperial pop-movement that began in the liberal upper-classes of British society around the end of the 19thC (Think:’Heart of Darkness’ etc.) has always tried to find reasons to excuse Africa from the more pejorative connotations of the label ‘backward’. Suggestions of agricultural/ geographical misfortune are not new in this regard.
Call me a cultural imperialist or no, but the Judeo/Christian legacy that undergirds Western society has stood us in good stead for many generations. The Chinese will no doubt influence us more before the end of this century: let us be ready to learn from them, but keep those values which have served us well.
jim evans
Very good analysis of the sort that makes far more sense of the world as it really is than the farcical party politics we have to endure in the West.
Wall Street`s gradual takeover of the world in the twentieth century was largely a reworking of the piratical western european model using usury and fraud (and violence/regime change if those failed).
Modern China/India has been created by the West on much the same lines and without the fraudulent party politics that has been the West`s undoing.
The internet is quickly exposing this picture and pointing out
It`s going to be interesting to see whether the the organisational model of the “nation state” can survive now that mass migration and so-called human rights are being used to ethnically/culturally cleanse the indigenous peoples of Western Europe.
Will there be another genocide….and if so …which genes will get “disappeared”?
M Schwartz
***Humans may all be much the same, wherever we find them, but the places we find them in are not. Geography is unfair and can make all the difference in the world. ***
I wonder if Morris has read any of UC Davis economist, Gregory Clark’s material?
“In my recent book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World I argue two things. First that all societies remained in a state I label the “Malthusian economy” up until the onset of the Industrial Revolution around 1800. In that state crucially the economic laws governing all human societies before 1800 were those that govern all animal societies. Second that was thus subject to natural selection throughout the Malthusian era, even after the arrival of settled agrarian societies with the Neolithic Revolution.
The Darwinian struggle that shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution but continued right up until the Industrial Revolution. But the arrival of settled agriculture and stable property rights set natural selection on a very different course. It created an accelerated period of evolution, rewarding with reproductive success a new repertoire of human behaviors – patience, self-control, passivity, and hard work – which consequently spread widely.
And we see in England, from at least 1250, that the kind of people who succeeded in the economic system – who accumulated assets, got skills, got literacy – increased their representation in each generation. Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world. Modern people are thus in part a creation of the market economies that emerged with the Neolithic Revolution. Just as people shaped economies, the pre-industrial economy shaped people. This has left the people of long settled agrarian societies substantially different now from our hunter gatherer ancestors, in terms of culture, and likely also in terms of biology. We are also presumably equivalently different from groups like Australian Aboriginals that never experience the Neolithic Revolution before the arrival of the English settlers in 1788.”
The Domestication of Man: The Social Implications of Darwin
M Schwartz
***However, that is not all that will change. As can see from the past, while geography shapes the development of societies, development also shapes what geography means***
Geography & culture also affect selection. As Geoffrey Miller noted last year in the Economist:
“We will also identify the many genes that create physical and mental differences across populations, and we will be able to estimate when those genes arose. Some of those differences probably occurred very recently, within recorded history. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in “The 10,000 Year Explosion” that some human groups experienced a vastly accelerated rate of evolutionary change within the past few thousand years, benefiting from the new genetic diversity created within far larger populations, and in response to the new survival, social and reproductive challenges of agriculture, cities, divisions of labour and social classes. Others did not experience these changes until the past few hundred years when they were subject to contact, colonisation and, all too often, extermination.
If the shift from GWAS to sequencing studies finds evidence of such politically awkward and morally perplexing facts, we can expect the usual range of ideological reactions, including nationalistic retro-racism from conservatives and outraged denial from blank-slate liberals. The few who really understand the genetics will gain a more enlightened, live-and-let-live recognition of the biodiversity within our extraordinary species—including a clearer view of likely comparative advantages between the world’s different economies.”
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14742737
jim evans
Could Ms Swartz please explain what we are meant to conclude or question after reading his/her posts?
M Schwartz
***Could Ms Swartz please explain what we are meant to conclude or question after reading his/her posts?***
That Morris is correct that geographic features may be relevant, but he assumes there are no relevant biological factors. However, recent studies show that genetic changes accompanied geographic & cultural changes. Humans become somewhat adapted to their homelands through natural selection.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26human.html
Clark’s argument is that selection was relevant to the development of modern economies (see below). Also see ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion’ by Harpending & Cochran.
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/capitalism%20genes.pdf
jim evans
So there are master races after all?I don`t think so.
If you bring a baby from say an African or Roma family and raise the child in a wealthy and educated and nurturing family you will not be able to distinguish it from its peers here in the West.
But perhaps I am misunderstanding you?
A Mistake
“westerners went on to be the first to build cities, create states, and conquer empires.”
I presume when your’e talking about westerners you mean the Mesopotamians and the Ancient Egyptians who were the first to build cities create states and conquer empires. These pioneers also worked out writing while at it. Then slowly these progresses spread to the west which gave rise to Greece and then to the Roman Empire, also by the same definition Persia these two civilisations then gave rise to the Judeo-Christian Civilisation but also by the same definition to the Islamic Civilisation. Are you suggesting Mr Morris That Islamic world is part of that “west” an oxymoron that is isn’t it?
M Schwartz
***
If you bring a baby from say an African or Roma family and raise the child in a wealthy and educated and nurturing family you will not be able to distinguish it from its peers here in the West.
But perhaps I am misunderstanding you?***
What I’m saying is that groups differ in their distribution of traits. This has been a taboo subject, particularly since WWII. However, science is continuing to show group differences that have arisen from divergent evolution. University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn & Lanny Ebenstein wrote about this last year in Nature & how we need to develop a better moral framework to deal with it. Princeton Bio-ethicist Peter Singer (‘A Darwinian Left’) & Steven Pinker have also written about this dilemma.
Lahn & Ebenstein write:
“The current moral position is a sort of ‘biological egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave historical injustices, including genocide, that were committed with the support of pseudoscientific understandings of group diversity. ..
We believe that this position, although well intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous, as it implies that if significant group diversity were established, discrimination might thereby be justified. We reject this position. Equality of opportunity and respect for human dignity should be humankind’s common aspirations, notwithstanding human differences no matter how big or small. We also think that biological egalitarianism may not remain viable in light of the growing body of empirical data….
Several studies have shown that many genes in the human genome may have undergone recent episodes of positive selection — that is, selection for advantageous biological traits. This is contrary to the position advocated by some scholars that humans effectively stopped evolving 50,000–40,000 years ago. In general, positive selection can increase the prevalence of functional polymorphisms and create geographic differentiation of allele frequencies.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7265/full/461726a.html
M Schwartz
***So there are master races after all?I don`t think so.***
This is just a silly strawman. Steve Hsu explains the point that population distributions can overlap but you get a significant difference at the upper end of the distribution:
“On the other hand, for most phenotypes (examples: height or IQ, which are both fairly heritable, except in cases of extreme environmental deprivation), there is significant overlap between different population distributions. That is, Swedes might be taller than Vietnamese on average, but the range of heights within each group is larger than the difference in the averages. Nevertheless, at the tails of the distribution one would find very large discrepancies: for example the percentage of the Swedish population that is over 2 meters tall (6″7) might be 5 or 10 times as large as the percentage of the Vietnamese population. If two groups differed by, say, 10 points in average IQ (2/3 of a standard deviation), the respective distributions would overlap quite a bit (more in-group than between-group variation), but the fraction of people with IQ above some threshold (e.g., >140) would be radically different…
There is no strong evidence yet for specific gene variants (alleles) that lead to group differences (differences between clusters) in behavior or intelligence, but progress on the genomic side of this question will be rapid in coming years, as the price to sequence a genome is dropping at an exponential rate.
What seems to be true (from preliminary studies) is that the gene variants that were under strong selection (reached fixation) over the last 10k years are different in different clusters. That is, the way that modern people in each cluster differ, due to natural selection, from their own ancestors 10k years ago is not the same in each cluster — we have been, at least at the genetic level, experiencing divergent evolution.
In fact, recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters (“races”) during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance).”
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html
jim evans
Can we address my question about babies born into cultures not traditionally thought to produce conentionally “bright” people?
Is there any good evidence that a baby originating from such an environment can be nurtured into brightness in a favourable environment?
Or does their genetic inheritance always/frequently impede their capacity to benefit from that favourable environment?
jim evans
In my fairly long life I have known people from a variety of backgrounds and societies.
I am now predisposed to think that rather as victors write history cultures frame the criteria for judging IQ/intelligence around their own areas of success/ability.
For example, if you talk to clever Chinese or Jewish people one can easily form the impression that their cultures produce significantly cleverer people compared with my examples of the Roma and African people…..but is that genetic or culturally determined….and if there is a higher IQ in one culture have we been sufficiently rigorous in setting the criteria for IQ to come to worthwhile conclusion about our expectations of how babies will benefit from a change of culture?
jim evans
And I ask because I think there is nothing more unjust than expecting achievments of a person constitutionally incapable of “delivering” them.
But also because I think black children in Britain are “educated” to fail ….and give every appearance of inherited stupidity because they are living living in a transplanted African Voodoo or American ghetto “culture” where the most dangerous behaviour they can exhibit is to be articulate and clever.
Damilola Taylor may have died because he expressed a maladaptive interest in going to the library rather than doing drugs!
Victoria Climbie`s “carers” interpreted her intelligence as demonic possession.
M Schwartz
***Or does their genetic inheritance always/frequently impede their capacity to benefit from that favourable environment?***
The Scarr Weinberg transracial adoption study looked at this. Adoptees tended to end up averaging around their group average. There is an overview & debate here.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/
jim evans
Thank you M Swartz…the very extensiveness and comprehensiveness of that literature is a little intimidating but very interesting.
My personal experience suggests that wealthy people from several racial/cultural/national backgrounds seemed remarkably similar to British white people if they spent years receiving a good education in my country.
No doubt some would object that wealthy people are the clever ones in a society….though my experience suggest they are more likely to be dishonest and determinedly persistent!
I suspect the mathematical academic outlook that underlies our belief in the significance of IQ tests probably began in the East and spread to Europe ….but less so to Africa.
Maybe over many generations Indian culture rewarded that behaviour in ways that somehow seeped into successive generations and became indistinguishable from a purely genetic inheritance?My contact with Africans not raised in my culture suggests that formal education and a belief in the importance of being clever in the way we see things is simply alien to them to the same degree that Africans and Afghans cannot really grasp our ideas of what corruption means in our society.
It is also unfair to expect that one or two generations of contact with our culture will place them on a comparable footing with us.
“Nurture” involves deep seated long standing parental/ancestral atitudes and values that may take many generations to change.
How clever are the Roma ….who set out from India centuries ago?
Naval Langa
The west has ruled the earth due to three reasons: there was more talented scientists in west, there was good educational reforms, and they have guns to shoot any face they disliked.
jim evans
In Metapedia under the title “Gypsies” there is a claim that numerous studies of the gypsy population…including the Roma (who originated from Rajasthan India)….registered an average adult IQ of 70-80….significantly lower than the Indian IQ which we are otherwise led to believe is the highest in the world.
My guess is that the cultural habit of marrying cousins may lead to lower IQ.I am told that the Pakistani population in Britain come from the same area of the world and experience similar problems….but this being Britain it`s not something we are allowed to know or discuss!
jim evans
In fact the low IQ in aboriginal communities may be the result of having a limited gene pool and marraige within family groups…..but this is a hot potato!
B.A. Shay
In my armchair opinion culture and value systems are largely responsible for IQ* (*whatever that means) variations among racial/ethnic groups. However geography, invention, random world changing events, and sheer accident are capable of overriding any of it. It’s where this “lag” time is concerned that the culture/value machine is able to leap across gaps and put one group ahead of another that was previously a backwater. Biology is a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. What traits are valuable in an area with time become the dominant traits but human adaptability, coupled with time and effort, knows no bounds, all things being equal, it’s wrong to pin biology on a master/lesser race. That said the differences are plain to see as a result of the different courses various groups have taken (again culture/value) but biology is the illusion, evolution, adaptation, and environment is the reality. What sort of cultural traits are now entering their golden age? and which are eroding/weakening? well that is plain to see…
Ivor Tymchak
Just geography? Nothing to do with the fact that the Chinese did not invent glass because ceramics satisfied their needs?
Without glass, whole industries, expertise and other inventions were lost to the Chinese economy.
I guess history is like clouds in the sky – different people see different patterns in the clouds.
A Newton
No mention of Zhu Di’s tribute gifts to Pope Gregory of so many technological marvels like, navigation, calculus, mechanics and so many more. Nor of the mention of the Church’s rush to capture the new world before the Chinese did. Nor of flourishing vibrancy of the enlightenment and renaissance from these gifts. Hmmm!
Rooster Dreams
Dream on – the West has taken the rub from under its own feet…
Beta adjusted
To those who say the argument above is over simplified/politically correct, you must read the book! its 450+ pages long and spends much of its time addressing precisely these points. The above article is simply a summary of his conclusions but to criticize you really need to read his full arguments (I’m reading it and disagree with you and agree with him
).
Katakolon
The civilization of ancient Greece has been immensely influential on language, politics, educational systems, philosophy, science, and the arts.
Also, Ancient Greek philosophy had an important influence on modern philosophy, as well as modern science.
The foundation of many things in the Western world come from Ancient Greek civilization.