“Civilisation: The West and the Rest” by Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is just great. His books are always so well-written, learned and engaging. A public intellectual of the finest variety. This is no exception, being a lengthy and extraordinarily well-informed analysis of the various factors which came together in Europe (for good and ill) from the sixteenth century onwards to create our wealthy, modern, industrial world.

The book starts with this general observation which is one that we in the West perhaps do not tend to appreciate or give consideration to as much as we should:

“Only a few societies continue to resist the encroachment of Western patterns of marketing and consumption, as well as the Western lifestyle itself. More and more human beings eat a Western diet, wear Western clothes and live in Western housing. Even the peculiarly Western way of work - five or six days a week from 9 until 5, with two or three weeks' holiday - is becoming a kind of universal standard. Meanwhile, the religion that Western missionaries sought to export to the rest of the world is followed by a third of mankind - as well as making remarkable gains in the world's most populous country. Even the atheism pioneered in the West is making impressive headway.

With every passing year, more and more human beings shop like us, study like us, stay healthy (or unhealthy) like us and pray (or don't pray) like us. Burgers, Bunsen Burners, Band-Aids, baseball caps and bibles: you cannot easily get away from them, wherever you may go. Only in the realm of political institutions does there remain significant global diversity, with a range of governments around the world resisting the idea of the rule of law, with its protection of individual rights, as the foundation for meaningful representative government.”

The book rattles along at pace, all manner of stories and examples being harnessed to explore what Niall Ferguson calls ‘the six killer apps’ which explain why after years of very gradual human development all around the world, the western countries saw their economies ‘take off’ as the industrial revolution was launched and come to dominate the world politically, economically and culturally in the twentieth century. The six are competitive nation states and markets, the scientific revolution, property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and a strong work ethic. Each is fascinating and leads to all kinds of different observations and examples from numerous countries.

This is the best kind of sweeping, provocative history-writing. The book is a touch dated now (it was published in 2011) when focused on the big debates and concerns of that time, but the sections at the end reflecting on the future and the likely relative decline of Western dominance are very prescient indeed. He is excellent on contemporary China and Japan particularly. If only our political leaders would take heed about what he says about how the building up over time of unsustainable national debts having, throughout history, presaged the collapse of civilisations.