Morris begins this chapter with a metaphor from a speech given by President John F. Kennedy: “‘A rising tide lifts all the boats’” (434). An example of this is Europeans introducing American crops like “corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts” (435) to East Asia, which helped against a population boom that took place from “1450 to 1600” (437), although famine did take place. Along with this, both Europe and China experienced cultural flowerings and workers’ wages grew. However, in both East and West there was also a growing underclass of the poor, which governments in both areas reacted to by imposing draconian laws that outlawed begging and placed homeless individuals in workhouses. At the same time, more members of the nobility and gentry were becoming merchants.

Japan presented an “extreme case” (440) of the political consequences of the massive population growth. It saw a period of civil war, fueled by the introduction of guns from Portugal, and the rise to power of the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who centralized the state and attempted to address Japan’s problems through military expansion in China.

Similarly, the Ming emperors attempted to reform China through taking censuses and engaging in military expansion. However, conservatives in the government resisted this, telling the emperors “that ideal rulers sat quietly (and inexpensively) at the center, leading by moral example” (441). China wound down its once-massive navy, allowing a black market bringing goods into China from the sea. In the 1570s, a court official, Zhang Zhuzheng, reformed the government and “modernized the army” (442), but after his death court conservatives purged the government of reformers. Despite China’s weaknesses, Hideyoshi’s invasion of China failed, although he may have succeeded if he had not died in 1598.

Just as the Ming Empire dominated the East, the Ottoman Empire was the central power in Europe by the 16th century, with a thriving culture and a strong, centralized government. The only power able to resist the Ottomans alone was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. His dynasty, the Habsburgs, rose to prominence from a series of lucky dynastic marriages, giving them Spain, Austria, and much of Germany and the Netherlands.

Charles V came close enough to unifying Europe to his rule that he frightened the other European monarchs and republics into a series of devastating wars against him. Over time, Europe only became more divided, especially with the Protestant Reformation, which saw the birth of a new branch of Christianity that rejected the authority of the Catholic Church.

Another factor was that Eurasia became cooler from 1645 to 1715. This had the effect of driving colonists to new lands and toward practices like deforestation. Political unrest also broke out, leading to monarchies adopting absolutism, the theory that the authority of monarchs was granted by God and superseded the authority of clergy and representative bodies. In turn, this led to violent resistance, especially in the 1640s, like the rise of the Leveller movement in England, who rejected all social distinctions (452). Vicious religious wars broke out in Europe and the plague reemerged in England. In China, revolts brought down the Ming. Despite these calamities, “there was no seventeenth-century collapse” (455).

Steppe nomads riding out and conquering settled societies had often been a major cause of societal collapse. With the use of guns, Russia and China under the rule of a new dynasty, the Qing, were able to crush what was left of the steppe nomads. Europeans took over the Americas, gaining mass profit from new techniques for silver mining, with China being a major importer of the silver taken from the Americas. The populations of Indigenous Americans were decimated by diseases brought over from Europe and the violence brought by the settlers.

Northwestern European states, namely England and the Dutch Republic, also enjoyed the advantages of backwardness they gained from neighboring France and Spain. In those countries, people increasingly worked for wages and, by 1750, “the world’s first consumer culture” (468) emerged. Changes in the society and the economy encouraged a “clockwork model of nature” (469), with scientists and other scholars turning from the ancient classics like Aristotle to scientific observation of the natural world.

The concept of using reason to understand nature also encouraged the view that political and social institutions could also be approached scientifically. Nor were these discussions restricted to elites, but instead they also spread to an increasingly literate public enjoying a growing print media of newspapers. Some monarchs who embraced this movement, the Enlightenment, became “enlightened despots” (472). Philosophers including Voltaire in France looked at China as an admirable model, namely the idea of a “truly wise despot, ruling in consultation with a rational civil service, abstaining from pointless wars and religious persecution” (472).

Like in Europe, the technology of printing led to the spread of ideas in China. For example, the scholar Gu Yanwu “tried […] to understand the world by observing the physical things that real people actually did” (473). Still, Yanwu and other Chinese intellectuals turned to Han-era classics more than observation. Morris argues this led to a “Second Renaissance” (474) instead of something like the Enlightenment in Europe.

This leads Morris to addressing “Needham’s Problem” (475). Named for the scientist Joseph Needham, it is a historical question asking why Europe became more scientifically advanced than China despite centuries of Chinese scientific progress. Morris’s own answer is that societies develop the knowledge that is necessary to address their own social development. Since Europeans needed new technology and knowledge to address their colonization of the Americas, they developed advancements like two-handed clocks, which in turn motivated questions and analysis about the natural world. Chinese intellectuals were motivated by the Qing government and the civil service exam to remain conservative in order to enjoy “profitable niches as state servants” (477).

The Qing emperor Kangxi spoke with the Jesuits, a group of learned Catholic missionaries, and learned from them Western mathematical and technological principles. Still, he determined, not incorrectly, that the Chinese were still ahead of them. Justified fears that European missionaries were politically subversive led China and Japan to cut ties with the West. In the meantime, although Chinese scholars did make new discoveries, they “always grounded” their “arguments in ancient texts” (481).

China and Japan greatly restricted Western trade, finding that they needed to avoid exporting resources to deal with their own large populations. In the West, England and the Dutch Republic developed national banks, which allowed the already-bellicose European nations to pay for war more easily. Unfortunately, reliance on credit led to the British demanding “the American colonists to pick up part of the check” (488), leading to the American War of Independence. The trend also started a series of economic and political crises in France that eventually culminated in the French Revolution. Morris argues this age of intense warfare did not change society much, but it did shift Western power away from the Ottoman Empire to western Europe.

According to Morris’s social score system, by the 18th century the East and West were on an equal level. Further, Morris says that “Western social development had clawed its way just forty-five points since Ice Age hunter-gatherers had prowled the tundra in search of a meal; within the next hundred years it soared another hundred points” (491). This was due to one “breakthrough” (493), the Industrial Revolution.

Devices powered by coal had been used before for processes like ironmaking or draining water from mines, but only in limited ways. In 1765, the scientist James Watt developed a more efficient steam engine for devices used to pump water out of mines. Cotton cloth manufacturers then adopted Watts’s engine. Britain’s cloth industry greatly benefited from the circumstance that large amounts of cheap cotton were being produced in North American plantations. Over time, Watts’s engine became applied to other industries like ironmaking, The way the steam engine improved energy capture was “the biggest and fastest transformation in the history of the world” and it “shattered the hard ceiling” (497).

At first the Industrial Revolution was “very like the upswings in earlier history” (498) and it may have stalled like social development in the Roman Empire and Song China. However, Europe had the cumulative knowledge of previous societies, the problem of migrating nomads disrupting advanced settled societies was no longer an issue because of the conquest of the steppes, and technology had advanced enough that ships could sail anywhere, “allowing western Europeans to create an Atlantic economy unlike anything seen before” (500).

The Industrial Revolution dawned in Britain because Britain benefited from having a relatively large, commercial middle-class with access to political and social institutions and a relatively weak monarchy. The Industrial Revolution might have instead happened in the Netherlands or France, but if it had occurred without Britain’s geographical advantages, it would have taken longer to unfold. In that case of a slower-moving Industrial Revolution, Morris poses the question of if China could have still had its own Industrial Revolution while Europe was still developing. Morris determines that because incentives “to invest in machinery were weak” (501), it would not have.

As industrialization took hold, further change was driven by the emergence “of a new, steam-powered class of iron chieftains” (503). Social critics like the communists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the novelist Charles Dickens attacked this class of disrupting old cultural and social ties that encouraged compassion for the downtrodden and caring only about their own wealth. Others praised the industrialists for making former luxuries more widely available. 

Morris agrees that, while wealth and wider availability of goods were made possible, “the workers who made the money saw precious little of it” (504). Morris also argues that, by the 1830s, industrialists were beginning to find it more profitable to raise workers’ wages and compromise with them than let them be hired by competitors. This was accompanied by middle-class reformers taking a “revolutionary” (506) interest in improving the lives of the poor.

These technologies drove globalization. This especially became true as industrialization spread from Britain to Belgium, northern France, Germany, and the United States. Industrialized transportation “annihilated distance” (507) and facilitated colonial expansion, while new technologies like the telegraph made communication between continents much faster.

Government policies turned to free trade (trade with few or no tariffs), and it improved industrial and financial development. The rising movement of “liberalization” saw enslavement, serfdom, and “legal restrictions on movement and occupation” (513) come to an end in much of the world. From the perspective of those who experienced it, the Victorian era was one of rapid social and cultural change, not a period of conservatism.

This was especially true as the economic and social forces unleashed by industrialization spread outside the West. By the 1830s, British merchants profited from trading opium grown in India to China in exchange for Chinese tea. Concerned about an epidemic of opium dependency in the country, the government of the Chinese emperor Daoguang tried to crack down on the opium trade. When a large supply of opium held by the British was confiscated by government officials, it triggered a war between Britain and France. Steam-powered iron ships gave the British navy a decisive victory. Afterward, Britain and other Western powers were able to force devastating concessions out of China, and yet more violent clashes between the West and China followed.

In 1853, the United States forced Japan to allow access to their ships, with Britain and Russia soon following in making similar demands. With the help of their new advanced ships, Europeans were able to easily colonize faraway places like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. By 1900, almost all of Africa was controlled by Western powers. Atrocities took place in the African country of Congo under the colonial rule of King Leopold of Belgium, demands for food exported to the West worsened drought and famine in South Asia, and in “North America and Australia, white settlers almost exterminated the natives” (520). While some Westerners were disgusted by colonialism, many came to believe that the West’s dominance was natural and inevitable.

Morris argues that Western supremacy began to be undone by “the logic of their own market-driven imperialism” (521) as Easterners were incentivized to emulate the West. Japan successfully imitated the technology and institutions of the West, embraced liberalization, and became a major imperialist power of its own. Regions that were not colonized and had high social development like Japan had the least difficulty industrializing, while China, which was somewhat colonized but also had high social development, took longer to industrialize.

The outbreak of World War I further changed societies. Morris suggests that the demands of 20th-century warfare led both West and East to eventually reject “dynastic empires,” which had been “history’s most enduring form of government” (528), in favor of liberal democracies. This era saw the emergence of the United States as a “subcontinental empire” (529) and the Soviet Union which combined modernity with a non-democratic, illiberal government and a centralized economy.

In response to the economic pressures of the Great Depression, Japan, Germany, and other countries likewise abandoned liberalism for more authoritarian and militaristic governments. However, World War II ended both many authoritarian and colonial governments while leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as the world’s great powers. At the same time, World War II did not significantly damage social development long-term “because the core was by now so big that not even the greatest war ever fought could wreck all of it” (533).

The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States quickly followed World War II. While the United States lost several proxy wars fought against governments ideologically aligned with the Soviet Union, it won through its massive cultural and economic influence, sustained by vast consumerism. Morris writes, “The twentieth century was the age of everything, of material abundance beyond the dreams of avarice” (537). The world population expanded massively and people began living longer lives even in Africa, which was inflicted with AIDS and malaria. The greater life flexibility afforded by technology and medical advances helped women find economic independence by the 1960s.

The Soviet Union fell behind the United States in terms of both cultural influence and technological convenience. The West especially benefited from the new technology of computers by the late 1970s. Japan likewise thrived through adopting Western-style entertainment and technology.

For China, the Communist leader Mao Zedong sought to “sweep away the ‘Four Olds’—old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking” (544). These efforts backfired, especially by causing a famine that killed 20 million people (545). After Mao’s death in 1976, the new leader Deng Xiaoping changed course and sought to integrate China into the global economy and allowed some liberalization. Similarly, the premier of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, reformed his government to allow more liberalization and reform. Despite his efforts, the Soviet Union dissolved, meaning that the “United States had won the War of the West” (550).