Why The West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (2010), is a non-fiction world history by Ian Morris, beginning in prehistory and concluding with a hypothetical exploration of the future. Across this vast time span, Morris argues that by using data measuring social development over the course of millennia, he can show why and how Western countries essentially took over the world in the 19th century and why China, despite its own technological advances, did not experience anything like the Industrial Revolution.

His answer is that both “the East” and “the West” reacted to geographical circumstances through social and technological adaptations. Such situations and reactions—especially the changes the West embraced in its colonization of the Americas—made the West more likely to develop the world’s first industrialized economy and society, which allowed the West to pull ahead of the East. Key themes include The Role of Geography in Social Development, Longue Durée Patterns of Human History, Critiques of Cultural and Racial Explanations for Dominance, and The Interplay of Innovation, Environment, and Power.

While the book was and still is controversial, especially for its focus on Chinese history over other regions outside of Europe and for neglecting cultural explanations for historical change, Why The West Rules—For Now was well-received in many academic and media circles. It also won the 2011 GetAbstract International Book Award and the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction.

This guide uses the 2010 paperback edition published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Summary

Beginning with the evolution of early hominids in Africa, Ian Morris examines contemporary archeological and biological theories about human evolution. While it is true that early homo sapiens in what would become Europe and the Middle East interbred with their cousin species, Neanderthals, there is no proof that humans in the West are genetically different from other groups. Instead, the evidence proves the “biological unity of humanity” (61). Nor does Morris agree with theories of innate cultural superiority. Instead, he argues that, from the very beginning, humanity sought only to make life easier, an impulse that also unites humans.

Beneficial changes in the world climate and the fact that “history is made by lazy, greedy, frightened people […] looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things” (89) led to agriculture first developing in what modern archeologists call the Hilly Flanks, a highland region stretching across modern Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. From there, wandering groups of hunter-gatherers around West Asia, North Africa, and Europe began to adopt agriculture and live in permanent settlements. Agriculture was also developed independently elsewhere in places like East Asia and South America, but only centuries after it was invented in the Hilly Flanks.

The spread of agriculture and urbanism started a process that Morris argues has driven history, whereby new social and technological developments merge in one area, a core, and then spread to a periphery at the edge of the core. The people in the periphery develop the innovations further as well as add their own, surpassing the social development in the original core. This was how agricultural villages became city-states, and city-states became kingdoms and empires. 

The dark side of this process was that social development always hit a “hard ceiling” (394), referring to the fact that agricultural societies can only develop to a certain point before they reach the limits of how much energy people in a pre-industrial society can consume. When this happens, societies can be overcome by conquest and migration from other groups on the peripheries, the collapse of their states, and/or the inability to adapt to changing circumstances like disease, famine, and climate change. This is what happened to the Roman Empire and the Song dynasty of China, which Morris believes was the most likely government in pre-modern Chinese history that could have experienced the Industrial Revolution before Europe.

Morris asserts that these factors shaped the histories of all human societies, including the West (which Morris defines as Europe, its colonies, and the Middle East or West Asia and North Africa) and the East (East and Southeast Asia, but primarily China). What finally broke the pattern was the birth of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. This was made possible “because of geography” (557). Specifically, Britain industrialized because of a series of developments starting with the expansion of European colonies into the Americas, which was made likely by a number of circumstances including the fact that it is easier to cross to the Americas from Europe than from China. With industrialization, the West was able to develop and change rapidly, practically taking over the world with unprecedented historical speed.

However, according to Morris’s own model of social development, China will overtake the West by the 22nd century. Morris speculates that there are two likely future outcomes. One is that rapid, exponential technological progress will lead to revolutionary, fundamental change that will make the distinction between the West and the East, and even the reality of human biology, irrelevant. The other is that a global nuclear war or man-made climate change, and the economic and social instability it causes, will bring about an apocalypse. Morris ends with the hope that, by learning from the past, humanity can avoid a doomsday scenario.