The Rise of Western Power: A Comparative History of Western Civilization by Jonathan Daly (review)

Professional historians who are ambitious enough to embark upon a gargantuan and solitary effort of summarizing nearly one thousand years of history are very rare specimens. Yet Jonathan Daly has undertaken such a task. This is by no means an ordinary history book for advanced undergraduate students. The entire work revolves specifically around the issue of answering the conundrum of why the West rose at a particular moment in time. This requires an introductory chapter (twentyseven pages) overviewing innovation in world civilization, breezing through several continents, and summarizing several thousands of years of developments. Daly does not really bother covering Roman or Greek history (or any other ancient history) as he considers it irrelevant to the puzzle he is trying to solve. For him, the solution starts with the Middle Ages, and it is fair to say that the book looks at processes over the last one thousand years (only) to analyze the socalled Great Divergence between the West and the “Rest.” For Daly, the urban revolutions (chapter 2), the papal revolutions (chapter 3) coinciding with “stubborn political fragmentation” (p. 80), and the military revolutions (chapter 4) of the medieval era were all crucial to later developments, such as the European “discovery of the world” (chapter 5), the printing revolution (chapter 6), which is closely intertwined with the emergence of the Reformation (chapter 7), and the subsequent scientific revolution (chapter 8). Interestingly, colonization during the early modern period is subsumed under a chapter entitled “Commercial Revolutions” (chapter 9), which is followed by more mainstream interpretations of political revolutions from Britain in the seventeenth century to the Napoleonic era in the early nineteenth century (chapter 10) and subsequent industrial (chapter 11) and technological revolutions (chapter 12). The book closes with a chapter (chapter 13) on crises of the West, with a focus on the two World Wars as well as the Cold War, and another chapter on the emergence of social revolutions (“Explosions of Rights”) (chapter 14). It includes 120 pages of endnotes referring the reader to more specialized studies, an impressive seventypage bibliography, and a useful fiftypage index.

Although Daly is to be strongly commended for his use of a wide range of secondary sources to support his overall argument, some of his statements can raise eyebrows, especially when not followed up by specific references to back up his claims. Some examples: “The violence of Islam’s early expansion contrasts with that of Buddhism and Christianity” (p. 17). I for one believe that many Jews, Persians, and pagans would have been surprised by that claim. “Of all the regions in the world during the medieval era, Europe witnessed the most ferocious combat” (p. 87). Given the Mongol slaughter (unless one somehow separates slaughter from combat), this reviewer found that claim puzzling, along with assertions that knights descended from bellicose Germanic warriors “displayed a furiousness in battle unusual on the world scene” (p. 91) and that Europeans “tended to fight with more indiscriminate violence than most of their adversaries” (p.133), especially since Daly at the same time notes their sociability (pp. 139, 369). In addition, he also claims that a “passionate curiosity about the wider world gradually became a peculiarly European phenomenon” (p. 123); by contrast, other polities such as the Ottoman Empire “never displayed a profound curiosity about the wider world” (p. 127) or “the willingness to try new things, bordering on recklessness, that characterized European societies” (p. 222). For Daly, the latter are unique in that in the early modern period “in no other region of the world could one find anything like the European ferment, institutionalized scholarly research, abundance of philosophical approaches, interconnectedness of learned men and women, crossfertilization of applied and theoretical sciences, or profusion of means and venues for sharing the fruits of research” (p. 198). This largely Whiggish institutionalist argument celebrating the genius of Western values and civilization (p. 370) does not pay a lot...