Civilization: The West and the Rest
Niall Ferguson
Civilization: The West and the Rest
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.
2.9 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
History |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
432 |
| RRP |
£25.00 |
| Date of Publication |
March 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-1846142734 |
| Publisher |
Allen Lane |
| |
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.
Interview with Niall Ferguson | The Observer (20/2/11)
Reviews
The Sunday Times
Dominic Lawson
“...I must disappoint his jealous rivals by reporting that Civilisation is another masterpiece... What Ferguson’s analysis lacks in provocativeness or originality, it more than makes up for in rigour and empirical soundness.”
27/02/2011
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The Financial Times
Andrew Marr
“Ferguson, with a properly financially literate mind, twists his knife with great literary brio ... This reviewer’s main niggle is that we could have done with more politics.”
25/02/2011
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The Times
David Aaronovitch
“It's a great read ... There are terrific sections on the rise of Prussia ... and on the contrast between the colonisations of North and South America. After this, it seems to me, the book sometimes loses sight of its themes and begins to digress into material that either interests Ferguson or that he felt was needed to pad out the TV series.”
19/03/2011
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The Spectator
Sam Leith
“Ferguson is no fool, God knows, and he tells a story ably and with splendid clarity. But in this book-of-the-TV-series you get the sense of a brand being stretched just a bit thin. This is a minor work.”
26/02/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Noel Malcolm
“The patient testing of evidence must give way to startling statistics, gripping anecdotes and snappy phrase-making ... Students may find this an intriguing introduction to a wide range of human history; but they will get an odd idea of how historical argument is to be conducted, if they learn it from this book.”
13/03/2011
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The New Statesman
Jonathan Derbyshire
“Civilization raises the important question of the extent to which China's apparently irresistible rise can be explained by the adoption of what Ferguson calls a "template for the way the rest of the world aspire[s] to organise itself" … If China is changing, it is in the direction not of western liberal democracies, but rather that of authoritarian civil societies of the sort that exist in Singapore or Taiwan ... This is something that Ferguson himself recognises.”
17/03/2011
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The Independent
Piers Brendon
“It tackles a large and complex subject in a way that could hardly be more accessible. Its argument, supported by a wealth of evidence, is expounded in a challenging fashion. The trouble is that the populist form vitiates the academic substance. To emphasise the role of his third killer app, for example, Ferguson asserts that the American Revolution was "all about property", whereas its prime motivation was the establishment of political liberty.”
11/03/2011
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The Scotsman
Michael Pye
“By "civilisation" he seems to mean the way you and I live, or at least the way he lives. His definitions make Kenneth Clark's Civilisation look positively multicultural (Clark did, after all, mention Italians quite a lot).”
26/02/2011
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The Evening Standard
Alex von Tunzelman
“Professor Ferguson has a right-wing agenda so large that it can probably be seen from space. Still, you don't have to be Karl Marx (whom he calls "an odious individual") to think that the foundations of British power in the East were oppression and domination ... Civilization is imperial history without the nasty bits; a comforting bedtime story for neoconservatives to indoctrinate into their children.”
10/03/2011
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