Ian Morris (1) (1960–)

This is actually a review of the Blinkist summary of Supercommunicators so not entirely fair to the original author. However, it's a way for me to get through a large number of books and identify those where I would really like to read the original. What’s in it for me? Well maybe learning how the West became the West. Normally the story is that building on the legacyy of the Greeks then Christianity and subsequently the industrial revolution the West achieved dominance in the world. There are other ways to explain current Western rule...To uncover this, we have to go back thousands of years to the birth of two civilizations: one in Mesopotamia and one in China. The birth of these two civilizations was the beginning of the West-East divide. Since then, each has had its own respective golden age. The West is currently outpacing the East, but for how long will it last?
Common theories for today’s Western dominance are easily debunked....The West still dominates global politics and development. The explanations for how this came about are varied, but they broadly fall into two schools of thought....There are what have been termed “short-term accident” theories....In contrast, “long-term lock-in” theories advocate that some sort of critical factor exists in the foundations of the West,.....many proponents of lock-in theories favour arguments for Western genetic or cultural superiority.
Eastern and Western historical development has barely differed.
The author is precise. For him, the West began in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East and Egypt and expanded westward from there. The East encompasses civilizations that developed between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China.
The author created a social development index for 14,000 BCE onward. It is based on four fundamental characteristics.
• The first is energy capture, a measure of consumption per person in kilocalories per day.
• Urbanism is the second trait.
• The third trait is information processing. This is society’s ability to communicate and transfer knowledge.
• The fourth trait is a society’s capacity to wage war. It’s one thing to extract energy, organize and communicate knowledge. But it’s quite another to harness these three traits for destruction.
The social development index shows there’s little difference between the East and West. Similar patterns are traced in both, though the West slightly outscores the East. The scores both resemble an exponential curve. They rise slowly for thousands of years, then skyrocket at the start of the eighteenth century, once the Industrial Revolution begins operating at full steam.
“Scientists are often criticized for taking the wonder out of the world, but they generally do so in the hope of putting truth in its place.”
The West got a running start after the last Ice Age thanks to geography.
About 100,000 years ago the world slid into a long glacial period. Ice covered large portions of the Northern hemisphere....But, by 11,700 BCE, the world was warming, and the Ice Age came to an end. Change was in the air. It is from about this time that we can distinguish between Eastern and Western geographical “cores.” Agriculture was the distinction between what became the essential territories of East and West; it developed some 1,500 to 2,000 years earlier in the West.....From the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates in southern Iraq to the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. By 7000 BCE, farming was pervasive in the region, and the agricultural societies there spearheaded civilization.
Most modern cereals, like wheat, corn, rice and barley, evolved from grasses that were concentrated in the Hilly Flanks. That’s equally true for domesticable species like sheep, goats, cows, and pigs. These too were species native to the Hilly Flanks.
By first millennium BCE, Eastern and Western social development were almost level.
In 1200 BCE, Eastern development was a thousand years behind. However, the West's sudden crisis in the Mediterranean meant that Eastern social development could begin to catch up. This crisis is known as the Late Bronze Age collapse.....Archaeologists still aren’t sure how the Western crisis and collapse came about. Most likely it occurred because of the destructive interaction of climate change, famine, state structure disintegration, migration and maybe even disease between 1200 and 1000 BCE.
The West’s implosion effectively reduced its lead over the East by six centuries. By 1000 BCE, the East's social development score stood only a few hundred years behind the West’s.
High-end states centralized power and built bureaucratic apparatuses for collecting taxes.
Both the East and West laid the foundations of high-end states during the tenth century BCE. However, it was in the West that the first extensive high-end states emerged. Just think of the Assyrian empire, which reached its zenith around 660 BCE.
The start of the first millennium saw the rise and fall of great empires.
The arrival of centrally organized high-end states meant the age of empires had arrived.
In the West, the Assyrian and Persian empires were the first fully-fledged high-end states. In the East, it was the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) that blazed the trail.
By 201 BCE, the Romans had essentially defeated their great rival in the Mediterranean, the Carthaginian Empire, which was based on the North African coast. The Romans now controlled huge portions of the Mediterranean coastline, a quite remarkable achievement.
In the Far East, the Han dynasty dominated China. Their empire existed between 206 BCE and 220 CE and was one of the largest ever to have existed.
Nonetheless, Eastern and Western empires disintegrated in the first centuries of the Common Era.
The reasons for their downfalls were similar in both East and West. The outer frontiers were under constant attack from nomadic barbarians, while the central administrations broke apart. They simply couldn’t hold themselves together.
In 1100 CE Eastern social development peaked, but the West split.
It was only when the western half of the Roman Empire began its decline that the Chinese Eastern empire hit its stride. For starters, the East recovered more quickly from the downfall of its early empire....It was the Sui dynasty that reunified China’s north and south. Wendi, the first Sui emperor, conquered southern China and did so without devastating its economy.
China’s farmers were also greatly assisted by the Medieval Warm Period....Greater yields from the fields meant that China’s population could grow to 100 million in 1100 CE.
Much of the West, including Spain, Northern Africa and the Middle East, was conquered and largely united by Muslim Arabs,
In the West, too, the Medieval Warm Period was transformative. There it resulted in the devastation of dry Arab heartlands in southwest Asia. The Western centre, therefore, gravitated toward the Mediterranean. Trade became concentrated in cities like Muslim Palermo and Cairo, and Christian Venice and Genoa.
From 1000 to 1500 Western social development leaped due to new trading routes.
By the late thirteenth century, Eastern social development had plummeted. China was fighting interminable wars against the Mongols on their northern frontiers. In the wake of the Mongol advance, China’s complex infrastructure collapsed. Instead of an expected industrial advance, China was faced with destruction, famine and disease....For all their military might, the Mongols never made it to Western Europe. The West was therefore free to undergo its own resurrection: the Renaissance began in Italy around 1300.
Columbus’s 1492 journey to America was an early indicator that the West would go on to turn the oceans into commercial highways. The West was out in front again. And moreover, it was geography that had once more been the deciding factor. Most likely, fifteenth-century Chinese vessels could theoretically have reached America. But geography always favored the West.
The Industrial Revolution signalled the start of Western rule.
By the late eighteenth century, the West had finally managed to overtake the East.
Thanks to the discovery of the New World, Western trade was booming. Furthermore, the new modern sciences of Europe began to make an impact. Nothing represented this progress better than Scotland’s James Watt developing the first practical design for the steam engine. It was this steam engine that powered the Industrial Revolution in the West.
In about 1750, East and West were still strikingly similar. But, by 1850, steam power had blown the East out of the water. Communication also improved: the telegraph was revolutionary in its time.
Despite major wars, the twentieth century was a high point for the West.
The twentieth century was grim. The three wars resulted in a hundred million deaths and threatened human survival itself....World War One was destructive, but it reduced the power of Europe’s archaic dynasties and allowed democracy to spread across the continent. But the East was closing in fast. In the 1990s, China opened its markets to economic reforms, including large-scale privatization. Consequently, China’s economy skyrocketed.
In 1970, 22 percent of the world’s goods were produced in the United States, while China made only 5 percent. American workers were 20 times more productive than the Chinese.
But by 2000, Americans were just seven times more productive, and China’s share of global production had risen to 14 percent. America’s had stagnated at 21 percent.
The East is expected to regain its lead by 2103, but there are many unknowns.
So the West rules–for now. But how long will it last?...The author has extrapolated Eastern and Western social development indices and calculated that the East will regain its lead by 2103....Additionally, the significant majority of recent scientific and technological advancements–such as genetic research or modern computing technology–have been made in the West. This too might be indicative of its continued rule....We can’t be certain that Eastern development will overtake the West. But events are trending decidedly in that direction.
Final summary
The key message in this book: Today’s Western rule is neither due to long-term lock-in nor is it a short-term accident. Racist genetic theories or ideas of cultural superiority don’t hold weight and certainly can’t explain history. The East has been more advanced than the West in the past, and it is likely that East will one day dominate again.… (more)

Morris has written an engaging long-term history of what we call the United Kingdom and its place in the world.

He says he did that because he had to tell all the old stories so that we could understand the story of Brexit. The recent referendum and follow-on departure certainly echo earlier instances of insularity in the British isles, but I'm not really convinced you need to read the whole thing to understand the current chaos.

The next-to-last chapter, Keep Calm and Carry On (1992-2013), is an engaging read just on the events that led directly to the referendum that forced the UK to Leave. It's good on its own. The very short chapter that follows it, Can't Go Home Again (2017), where Morris returns to his hometown of Stoke on Trent and hangs out with regular folks, is likewise thought-provoking.

But the professional historian and Stanford professor does a good job with the big topic. I'd read his earlier book, Why the West Rules -- For Now, some years ago, and very much enjoyed it. This one is better, I think. Both make the point that China is already a global force, and that this century will see a remaking of the world order to accommodate that country.

I hope that Morris will write about that, too, in the next decade or so.… (more)

This was a very intriguing book -an intriguing argument- that is well put together and argued. It is a disturbing thought that wars, of a certain kind anyway, might be ultimately useful and ultimately responsible for modern societies with all their goods. It isn't a theory that can, in my mind, ever be really tested (we can't rerun human history), but it does serve as a very enlightening alternative view. Perhaps war is not *solely* terrible and perhaps war does not serve 'no purpose'.

Of course, one can easily see how this same argument could be used to justify almost anything... as long as a government does't jail and/or execute too many protesters, apostates, minorities, etc. then it is arguably a 'good' government as long as it delivers lower violence and increased wealth and health to everyone else. Basically, a version of the argument/though experiment leveled against Utilitarianism (or, at least, naive Utilitarianism.)

But still very interesting. Five stars.… (more)