Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future (review)

An appreciation of Ian Morris's magisterially synthesized Why the West Rules requires attention to a short roll of other "grand narrative" historiographical hybrids that, like West, join erudition and polemic. With Morris's book as a wonderfully illuminated representative, this recent crop of books may be the most useful ever in reporting the advanced and promising and precarious state of social order in the world: Prestigious titles are Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Vintage, 1987), Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (Free Press, 1991) and The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (Penguin Press, 2011), William H. McNeill's The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes, and Community (Princeton University Press, 1992), Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton, 1997) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2004), Ray Kurtweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005), Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007), Harm de Blij's Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2007) and The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2009), Melvin Konner's Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind (Harvard University Press, 2010), Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order, vol. 1: From Pre-human Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Joseph Nye Jr.'s The Future of Power (Public Affairs, 2011), Tim Flannery's Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011), Robert N. Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Harvard University Press, 2011), David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Viking, 2011), and the special issue "Population" of the journal Science (July 29, 2011). The harvest of the special research of others that these books accomplish is breathtaking. Their resectioning of many and vast archives of information is Herculean. West expertly surfs and represents this genre, which acquired formidable mass in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Morris auditioned for his new book in his more traditional vertical studies of the luminal era between prehistory and history in such works as Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archeologies (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and, with Walter Scheidel, The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 2009). West's three parts include twelve chapters: Part 1 presents (1) the "biological basis of the story in the evolution and dispersal of humans over the planet," (2) "the formation and growth of the original Eastern and Western 'cores' [geographical locations of highest habitation] after the Ice Age," and (3) Morris's explanation of his social development index (SDI) used throughout the book to "measure the relative progress of East and West." Part 2 presents (4) the origins of the earliest states and the disruptions that wracked the Western core [before] . . . 1200 BCE"; (5) "the first great Eastern and Western empires and how their social development rose toward the limits of what was possible in agricultural economies"; (6) "the great collapse that swept Eurasia after about 150 CE"; (7) "a turning point, with the Eastern core opening a new frontier and taking the lead in social development," only to reach again by "about 1100 CE . . . the limits of what was possible in an agricultural world...