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Loading... Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They… (2010)by Ian Morris
   No current Talk conversations about this book. Interminable detail, way too granular for me. I ended up putting it down ~ page 200. (  )  btbell_lt | Aug 1, 2022 |  A good attempt to quantify global social evolution. (  ) johnclaydon | Jun 2, 2022 | Wonderful book. Well argued. Backed up with evidence. Best overview of history of China I have read in a pop-history book. In school and in most overviews, I get the Fertile Crescent->Greece->Rome->Franks->Norman Invasion->England->Pilgrims->America track with China being mentioned because of the Silk Trade with Rome, Marco Polo and then the Opium Wars. This gives a nice overview of the rise and expansion of various proto-states in China, then Empires, Dynasties and the ebb and flow of history there. I am sure a China specific book would be more detailed but this overview is the best I have read up until now. I also liked the references to writers like Heinlein, Asimov, Tom Friedman and others that I have read. They were both appropriate and familiar. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in History, Economy, Archaeology or the broad sweep of civilizations. (  ) mgplavin | Oct 3, 2021 | My thoughts on Why the West Rules for Now: The Patterns of History and What they Reveal about the Future http://meganeasleywalshauthor.blogspot.ie/2015/02/writer-wednesday-why-west-rule... (  ) Megan.Easley-Walsh | Dec 9, 2016 | Way too much information. Okay, I got it, geography is significant in determining history, but do we have make the book that long? (  ) zhoud2005 | Jul 8, 2016 |
 A British-born archaeologist, classicist and historian now at Stanford University, Morris is the historians’ equivalent of those physicists who search for a still elusive unified field theory. In his new book, he sets out to discover broad patterns, “the overall ‘shape’ of history,” by sifting through the world’s long development process. Following the oscillating forces from prehistory to the present, he shows how both the East and West managed to catalyze themselves at different times and in different ways to progressively new heights of development. But his ultimate challenge is to make sense of all these cycles of rise and fall, the better to judge whether either side was in possession of any innate superiority. His answer to that question is an emphatic no. East and West, he tells us, are just “geographical labels, not value judgments.”  Morris’s attempt to tackle the history of the world, while refreshing, might be dismissed as the exercise of a 19th-century generalist fraught with 21st-century specialist perils.
Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West's rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last? Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process. Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules—for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines—from ancient history to neuroscience—not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)909.09821 — History and Geography History World history Other Geographic Classifications Other Classifications Ocean And Sea Basins AtlanticLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.05)
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