Why, the energetic historian Niall Ferguson asks in his new book, did a minority of people stuck out on the extreme western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the world in cultural, political and economic terms for more than half a millennium? This, he says, ‘seems to me the most interesting question a historian of the modern era can ask’. Its supplementary — to which he only tentatively suggests answers — is ‘is it all over?’
Make no mistake [he writes], this is not another self-satisfied version of ‘the triumph of the West’. I want to show that it was not just Western superiority that led to the conquest and colonisation of so much of the rest of the world; it was also the fortuitous weakness of the West’s rivals.
In other words, it’s not just that we were great; everyone else was rubbish, too.
In the pages that follow, Ferguson races through a history of civilisation, explaining the hows and arguing the whys. Or, I should say, a history of civilisations: according to one count there have been two dozen in the last ten millennia. Currently, there are five (or six, depending on whether you include Jewry as a separate civilisation): Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, Western.
Ferguson’s book gives an answer to its central question in six chapters, a shape presumably dictated by the television series that is intended to accompany it. Each chapter relates to one of the six ‘killer apps’ — vital structural and/or psychological innovations — that allowed Western civilisation to conquer the world without having actually to conquer the world. They are: Competition, Science, Property Rights, Medicine, the Consumer Society, and the Work Ethic.
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