Why The West Rules—For Now is a world history, trying to cover historical trends and events from a global perspective. Further, it belongs to a subset of world histories that have sought to explain how the West was able to quickly industrialize and gain a political and economic hegemony over the rest of the world. These include William H. McNeil’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), Eric Jones’s The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (1981), Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), and David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998). Such histories drew from different subfields within history, such as economic, social, and cultural history. Like Why the West Rules—For Now, they also tended to be interdisciplinary, meaning they drew from traditional fields of study besides history, such as archaeology, geography, economics, sociology, and biology.

Morris’s approach to history is more quantitative, meaning that he uses data drawn from statistical measurements, than it is qualitative (i.e., interpretations of specific items of evidence like text, visual, or material resources).