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If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe, you would have been most impressed by the dazzling civilizations of the Orient. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing; in the Near East, the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople.
By contrast, England would have struck you as a miserable backwater ravaged by plague, bad sanitation and incessant war. The other quarrelsome kingdoms of Western Europe – Aragon, Castile, France, Portugal and Scotland – would have seemed little better. As for fifteenth-century North America, it was an anarchic wilderness compared with the realms of the Aztecs and Incas. The idea that the West would come to dominate the Rest for most of the next half millennium would have struck you as wildly fanciful. And yet it happened. What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient?
The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, was that the West developed six “killer applications” that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six things. If so, Ferguson warns, we may be living through the end of Western ascendancy. Civilization takes readers on their own extraordinary journey around the world – from the Grand Canal at Nanjing to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul; from Machu Picchu in the Andes to Shark Island, Namibia; from the proud towers of Prague to the secret churches of Wenzhou. It is the story of sailboats, missiles, land deeds, vaccines, blue jeans and Chinese Bibles. It is the defining narrative of modern world history.May 1st Update: Just finished watching the full six-part television series, which you can view for a few more days here. It was excellent and I highly recommended it.
I did spot one perhaps small nit: in episode six on 'Work', Ferguson describes American inventor Thomas Edison as the "alternating current (AC) king" of electricity. Whether or not this was another nickname for the "The Wizard of Menlo Park", it was fellow inventor Nikola Tesla (along with perhaps George Westinghouse) who can lay proper claim to being the true AC King. Edison was a fierce opponent of AC in favor of his own alternative (and inferior) direct current (DC) system.
To associate Edison with AC as Ferguson does is at best historically incomplete, or worse perhaps misleading.
In case you missed this Ferguson piece:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0406.wallace-wells.html
Hadn't read that one before. A good read, thank you for posting it.
ReplyDeleteFerguson is brilliant. He is missing the seventh and most important app that makes all other apps possible. And that is the rise of protestantism. Lamar. Austin tx
ReplyDeleteCorrection. Niall does address protestantism in the work ethic app. Lamar. Austin
ReplyDeleteThe six-part series based on the book premiered tonight on Channel 4 (U.K.). Here's a link to the video on demand:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.channel4.com/programmes/civilization-is-the-west-history
It is not Nikola Testa, it is Nikola TESLA! And Westinghouse was merely a financier.
ReplyDeleteThanks for catching that, correction made.
ReplyDeleteThe overview of his views in a recent interview on this book seemed singularly anti Catholic and anti philosophical...he completely discounts[he never mentioned it]the Aristotelian/Thomian roots upon which the Renaissance of the west took hold...the reason the arabs were so civilized, was because they had adopted Aristotle's philosophy, which was learned from us via St Albertus Magnus, who translated it into latin and who then taught it to St Thomas Aquinas, who in turn adopted it and integrated it to Catholic Theology...it is the Catholic Church, therefore, that is at the root of western civilization and still today, it's greatest defender...
ReplyDeleteInteresting and correct note about Edison actively fighting alternating current. And this Ferguson jerk is a professor of HISTORY at Harvard? Makes you wonder about American educational institutions and the political appointments of professors.
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