As the Ice Age ended and the Earth warmed by 12700 BCE, humans were impacted in various ways. “The biggest beneficiaries of global warming” were the humans who inhabited regions that laid on the Lucky Latitudes, which were “20-35 degrees north in the Old World and 15 degrees south to 20 degrees north in the New” (85). In such areas, many humans gave up being nomadic foragers and hunters and started living in settled areas.

One such example was the region known as the Hilly Flanks, which encompassed the Jordan, Tigris, and Euphrates valleys, where humans began to establish permanent settlements in large numbers. Women, who usually were tasked with gathering plants, discovered that it was possible to gather and plant seeds and grow food, which made food easier to access. Over time, under the influence of being grown by humans, the plants began to evolve to leave bigger seeds and be easier to harvest, leading to domesticated plants that produced cereals and beans. Eventually, people also began to domesticate animals like oxen.

Changing geological and climate conditions resulted in what is termed the “Younger Dryas,” a period from 10800 to 9600 BCE when “the world slid back into ice age conditions” (92). Some humans abandoned their settlements and returned to foraging, but for other communities “the Younger Dryas actually speeded innovation up” (93). Archeological sites like a shrine discovered at Qermez Dere in Iraq and the hilltop structure Göbekli Tepe in Turkey suggest that, while societies before the end of the Younger Dryas were mostly just concerned with survival, after the Younger Dryas “people sank serious resources into religion” (96), which also suggests that these settlements were well-organized. Elsewhere, outside the Hilly Flanks and in places like South America, India, and China, the archaeological evidence indicates instead that people continued to live in nomadic groups.

Settled life also made it easier to have children and humans started “experimenting with a kind of protowriting, scratching images of snakes, birds, farm animals, and abstract signs on little stone tokens” (101). These communities also developed property that could be passed on to descendants and social structures to help prevent violence between a community’s inhabitants. However, the development of settled communities also led to “work, inequality, and war” (107), which raises the question of why so many people chose settled life over foraging, with farming and permanent settlements spreading across southern Europe and the Middle East.

There are two theories why farming eventually overtook foraging. One theory is that the more organized farming communities were able to defeat groups of foragers in violent conflict as farmers spread into their hunting and foraging grounds in search of new fertile land. The other theory suggests instead that foragers gradually adopted settled lifestyles and the negative aspects of farming “crept up on them” (110). Genetic studies hint that, while farmers from West Asia did settle in Europe, “three-quarters or more” (112) of farmers in Europe were natives who adopted settled life.

This leads Morris to question if the adaptation of farming in the West was inescapable. In one case, people in the Baltic region resisted farming for longer than foraging groups elsewhere. Morris asserts that he believes in “free will” (113), but that “the competition for resources meant that people who kept farming, or farmed even harder, captured more energy than those who did not” (114), which despite free will did make the triumph of farming inevitable.

Agriculture did begin to develop independently elsewhere in places like China and the Americas. Here, Morris defines the West as societies that adopted farming from its origins in the Lucky Latitudes and the East as the communities who took up farming in China. Still, agriculture began thousands of years earlier not because of an innate Western superiority, but because of geographical factors, such as the presence of easier-to-domesticate animals and better plants for farming in the West.

By 7000 BCE (122), settled communities in China began cultivating millet and rice. Archeological evidence covering the following centuries shows signs of religion, ancestor worship, elaborate rituals, and writing that all suggest a strong continuity with later Chinese culture. While Morris does agree that geography gave the West an earlier start on agriculture, he suggests this does not necessarily mean that this is the explanation for why the West flourished by the Industrial era.

Morris discusses the 19th-century philosopher Herbert Spencer’s theory of social evolution, which combined “geology, biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and ethics” (136). Specifically, his theory was that societies evolved through four stages: Simple (nomadic groups that have no leaders); compound (villages with leaders); doubly compound (societies with sophisticated labor divisions and political, educational, and religious structures); and trebly compound (advanced societies “like Rome and Victorian Britain” (136)).

Since archeology was a “young science” (137), there was not much archeological evidence to support or disprove Herbert’s theory. Once more information was known through archeology, a group emerged known as the “neo-evolutionists” (138). Rejecting Herbert’s theory of social evolution, they focused on scientific data instead of “narrative accounts” (139). However, in response to the social and political movements of the 1960s, archeologists began to become critical of the very idea of social progress, fearing that it justified racist and imperialist attitudes.

Criticisms of neo-evolutionists include that believing there can be a universal theory of societies is “hubris” (142) and that reducing anthropology to quantitative data overlooks “the peculiarities of different cultures” (142). Still, Morris counters that exploring a “comparative” topic like the rise of the West requires “an index of social development” (142), which Morris defines as “a group’s ability to master its physical and intellectual developments to get things done” (144).

Morris’s index follows six criteria: Relevance, freedom from cultural biases, “traits must be independent of each other” (147), the traits must have sufficient evidence, they must be “reliable, meaning that experts more or less agree on what the evidence says” (147), and there must be sufficient data and evidence for each trait. With all of these criteria in mind, Morris’s chosen traits are “energy capture” (147), which is the ability to harness and conserve energy through technology; urban development; ability to communicate information; and “capacity to make war” (149).

Morris explains that he will measure urbanism by “the size of the largest known settlement in East and West at each moment in time” (152). Energy capture will be measured by measuring consumption by the number of kilocalories estimated to be consumed in a day. To help measure this in eras before sociologists began gathering such data, Morris will use “a diagram […] showing best guesses at per-person energy consumption among hunter-gatherers, early agriculturalists […] advanced agriculturalists […] industrial folk […] and late-twentieth-century technological societies” (154-155) designed by the geoscientist Earl Cook, with Morris’s own adjustments, along with the relevant historical and archeological evidence. War-making and information technology will also be measured based on “the same principles” with “probably the same margins of error too” (157).

Elaborating further on the index, Morris explains that he will measure time in increments that will shorten as he gets closer to the present day. As for where he will base his measurements, Morris talks about the “core” (159) of the East and West, which changed over time. Morris argues the Western core shifted from the Middle East and Greece to the Mediterranean and then to northern Europe. Meanwhile, Morris asserts that the Eastern core shifted around China and then, by the 20th century, grew to include Japan.

Glancing at the overall social development scores of the Eastern and Western cores, Morris comes to two conclusions. The first is that rates of social development “have not differed very much” and the second is that, by the modern era, there was “the fastest and greatest transformation in history” (161).

Morris admits that quantitative data can be presented in biased ways, namely by emphasizing some data while ignoring or minimizing other data. Still, he argues that the sudden and dramatic rise in social development in the modern era for the West is undeniable. To address this, Morris proposes looking at why development increased across history, and then examining why the West was the first region of the world to reach such a level of development.

Based on various graphs of data, Morris suggests that, until the 18th century, “the dominant pattern in the last two thousand years of history has been one of long-term waves” (169) with empires rising and falling. Another possible conclusion is that both West and East might have been building toward some sort of “revolution” (169). Morris argues that the data suggests that both long-term lock-in and short-term accident theories are at least partially wrong because they ignore all the time between prehistory and the modern age. Finally, Morris finds that his data suggests that the East might surpass the West by the year 2150 (170).