New Statesman - Why the West Rules - For Now: the Patterns of History and What They Rev... - 0 views
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East and west have always been geopolitical constructions whose shifting cultural meanings - from the conflict between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in the early Middle Ages to the current obsession with China - reflect changing patterns of power. A classical archaeologist by training, Ian Morris begins this highly ambitious volume by returning to prehistoric times, when east and west were geographical expressions. For Morris, "the west" means the societies that expanded "from the original core in south-west Asia to encompass the Mediterranean Basin and Europe, and in the last few centuries America and Australasia, too", while "the east expanded from its original core between China's Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and today stretches from Japan in the north into the countries of Indochina in the south".
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he offers a materialist explanation, with the aim of developing nothing less than a law-governed science of history.
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In Morris's account, the ultimate origin of the west's primacy is to be found in the domestication of plants and animals that occurred in the western core around 9500BC, some 2,000 years before it did in the east. He is far from claiming that geography is destiny in any simple sense. As he points out, the meaning of geography changes along with technological and social development. Five thousand years ago, society was developing most rapidly in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the geographical location of Portugal, Spain, France and Britain - "stuck out from Europe into the Atlantic" - was a great disadvantage. But when, 500 years ago, new kinds of ships appeared that could cross what had always been impassable oceans, sticking out into the Atlantic became highly advantageous
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