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The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations
In the past thirty years, there have been fierce debates over how civilizations develop and why the West became so powerful. The Measure of Civilization presents a brand-new way of investigating these questions and provides new tools for assessing the long-term growth of societies. Using a groundbreaking numerical index of social development that compares societies in different times and places, award-winning author Ian Morris sets forth a sweeping examination of Eastern and Western development across 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He offers surprising conclusions about when and why the West came to dominate the world and fresh perspectives for thinking about the twenty-first century.
Adapting the United Nations' approach for measuring human development, Morris's index breaks social development into four traits—energy capture per capita, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity—and he uses archaeological, historical, and current government data to quantify patterns. Morris reveals that for 90 percent of the time since the last ice age, the world's most advanced region has been at the western end of Eurasia, but contrary to what many historians once believed, there were roughly 1,200 years—from about 550 to 1750 CE—when an East Asian region was more advanced. Only in the late eighteenth century CE, when northwest Europeans tapped into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, did the West leap ahead.
Resolving some of the biggest debates in global history, The Measure of Civilization puts forth innovative tools for determining past, present, and future economic and social trends.
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: QUANTIFYING SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT (pp. 1-24)
A quarter of a millennium ago, intellectuals in Western Europe discovered that they had a problem. As problems went, theirs was not a bad one: they appeared to be taking over the world, but did not know why. The explanations that eighteenth-century theorists came up with varied wildly, although the most popular ideas all held that since time immemorial, something had made the West different from the rest and determined that Europe would one day dominate the world.
In the early twenty-first century, these ideas are still with us, albeit in heavily modified forms. The most influential argument, now as...
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CHAPTER 2 METHODS AND ASSUMPTIONS (pp. 25-52)
IN CHAPTER 1, I SUGGESTED THAT THE BEST WAY TO REsolve the two-century-old debate about why the West rules is by building a social development index, because this will allow us to compare Western with non-Western development over long periods. Only when we have identified the shape of the history that needs to be accounted for will we be able to come up with better explanations for why the West rules.
I then looked at research on social evolution since the 1850s and the criticisms leveled against the most recent version, neo-evolutionism, since the 1970s. In this chapter, I describe...
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CHAPTER 3 ENERGY CAPTURE (pp. 53-143)
LESLIE WHITE ARGUED SEVENTY YEARS AGO THAT ENERGY capture has to be the foundation of any attempt to understand social development.¹ Complex arrangements of matter persist through time only if they are able to capture free energy from their environment and put it to work, and humans and their societies are no exceptions.²
Deprived of oxygen, the complex arrangements of matter that constitute our bodies begin to break down after a few minutes. Deprived of water, we break down after a few days; deprived of food, we break down after a few weeks. To create superorganisms bringing together multiple people,...
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CHAPTER 4 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION (pp. 144-172)
A long tradition of research in the social sciences, and particularly in archaeology, anthropology, economics, and urban studies, has demonstrated the strong relationships between the size of the largest settlements within a society and the complexity of its social organization.¹ The correlation is far from perfect, but it works well enough at the coarse-grained level of an index of social development spanning sixteen thousand years.
City size also has the great advantage of being, in principle, conceptually simple. All we need to do is (a) establish the size of the largest settlements in East and West at each point in...
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CHAPTER 5 WAR-MAKING CAPACITY (pp. 173-217)
Nothing made Western domination of the world quite so clear as the First Opium War of 1840–42 CE, when a small British fleet shot its way into China, threatened to close the Grand Canal that brought food to Beijing, and extracted humiliating concessions from the Qing government. According to Lord Robert Jocelyn, who accompanied the fleet, “The ships opened their broadsides upon the town [of Tinghai], and the crashing of timber, falling houses, and groans of men resounded from the shore. The firing lasted form our side for nine minutes. … We landed on a deserted beach, a few...
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CHAPTER 6 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (pp. 218-237)
With only trivial exceptions, humans differ from all other animals in being able to evolve culturally by accumulating information, ideas, and best practices over time. Proto-humans may have had something resembling modern speech as far back asHomo ergaster, 1.8 million years ago, and Heidelberg Man—the shared ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans—had hyoid bones that could produce speech sounds and inner ears that could probably have distinguished the sounds of conversational speech.¹ However, the evolution of modernHomo sapiensin the past 150,000 years represents a revolution in this regard.
For tens of thousands of years, the...
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CHAPTER 7 DISCUSSION: THE LIMITS AND POTENTIAL OF MEASURING DEVELOPMENT (pp. 238-264)
IN THIS BOOK I HAVE PRESENTED THE EVIDENCE AND methods behind an analytical tool, the social development index. It therefore seems sensible to close not with a set of conclusions but with a more open-ended discussion of what this tool can, and cannot, do.
I start with two sections discussing possible problems with the index. First, I offer a few comments on margins of error and falsification. One of the greatest drawbacks of the neo-evolutionist indices was that because they were not really built to answer specific questions, it was very difficult for their designers to say exactly how they...
