Abstract:
The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed?
In Civilization: The West and the Rest, bestselling author Niall Ferguson argues that, beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts that the Rest lacked: competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic. These were the "killer applications" that allowed the West to leap ahead of the Rest, opening global trade routes, exploiting newly discovered scientific laws, evolving a system of representative government, more than doubling life expectancy, unleashing the Industrial Revolution, and embracing a dynamic work ethic. Civilization shows just how fewer than a dozen Western empires came to control more than half of humanity and four fifths of the world economy.
Yet now, Ferguson argues, the days of Western predominance are numbered-not because of clashes with rival civilizations, but simply because the Rest have now downloaded the six killer apps we once monopolized-while the West has literally lost faith in itself.
Civilization does more than tell the gripping story of the West's slow rise and sudden demise; it also explains world history with verve, clarity, and wit. Controversial but cogent and compelling, Civilization is Ferguson at his very best.
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson – review
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/25/civilization-west-rest-niall-ferguson-review
Niall Ferguson's rightwing paean to western values is unsuited to being taught in schools
Bernard Porter Fri 25 Mar 2011
Niall Ferguson has written this, his latest book, largely for teenagers. "The book is partly designed so a 17-year-old boy or girl will get a lot of history in a very digestible way, and be able to relate to it," he told the Observer recently. Some of them appear at the beginning of the Channel 4 series accompanying the book. That will account for his use here of terms such as "killer apps". In the film the youngsters clearly understood this. (They smiled weakly.) I still don't (the "killer" part, that is).
Ferguson also has two other agendas. One is to put over his view of world history, which he sees as having been dominated by "western" civilization (here generally just called "civilization") for 500 years. It's important for our sense of cultural identity, he believes, and consequently our ability to defend that identity against external threats, not to lose sight of this. Otherwise "civilization" could very quickly collapse. Now there's a challenge! The second is to correct deficiencies in the way he claims that history is currently taught in British schools. The two are connected. How can this identity-preserving knowledge – the "big story" – be inculcated in the young, "given our educational theorists' aversion to formal knowledge and rote-learning", their preference for "everyone's history but our own", usually in "chunks", and their obsession with study skills and textual analysis?
He has said this sort of thing before, in support of his new friend Michael Gove's reforming ambitions for the school history syllabus. The implication is that this book, or something like it, could serve as a textbook for any new Goveian syllabus. But in fact it furnishes an almost perfect illustration of why children need to be taught analytical skills, more than "big stories" or facts.
There are anyway problems with using history to teach "identity". The demand usually comes from politicians; but surely this is their job, which they could do much better – by preserving the institutions the British are most proud of, for example (the BBC and the NHS come to mind), or by making the country something we can be (even) prouder of in the future. History is too important and valuable in other ways – helping us to understand "other histories than our own", for one – to be prostituted to this end.
And then there's the vexed question of which "identity" should be taught. The favoured one is usually British, in order to inculcate "Britishness" – "Our island story", as Gove likes to put it. But which island story? Kings, queens and battles? The old Whig one – how Britain has got freer and better over time? A radical one – from the peasants' revolt to today's TUC march for the alternative? An island story that includes the backgrounds of all our immigrants over the centuries? A Daily Telegraph readers' one, perhaps: how Britain has gone to the dogs? How about one that gives as much attention to women as to men? Well, I'm sure one could strike some kind of balance among all these; but it would be bound to confuse students (rightly), which is why they would still need analytical skills to sort out the strands.
And "British" isn't the only "identity" in the running. Europeanists will prefer a wider focus. And now we have Ferguson's plea for history education that takes in the whole of "civilization" as he conceives it. Which will Gove choose? (Of course, if he makes enough time for history in the school syllabus, he can choose more than one.)
If world history comes into it, Ferguson's new book shows how difficult it will be to teach it as "formal knowledge", rote-learned. In many ways it's an engaging book: uneven, yes, and ill-ordered, probably as a result of its derivation from the TV series, and of the ideological framework – the "six apps" – that Ferguson feels he needs to force his "facts" into. There are huge holes in the argument – selective evidence, non-sequiturs, and so on – that alone would make it a very poor model of true historical method for any schoolboy or girl. One assumes they would see through the more obvious sillinesses – such as the statement that the "true aim" of the student revolutions of 1968 was "male access to the female dorms". (Ferguson should watch out that he doesn't turn into history's Jeremy Clarkson.) But it's well written, with something quotable on nearly every page, and some terrific ideas.
It reads very assuredly on high finance – Ferguson's true field. (He came into imperial history accidentally – invited, again, by TV.) For anyone expecting an imperialist rant – Ferguson has a certain reputation along these lines – the chapter that covers colonial Africa will come as a surprise. Africa "brought out the destructive worst in Europeans . . . The rapid dissolution of the European empires in the postwar years appeared to be a just enough sentence". He seems to have learned something, then – perhaps developed some empathy – since the publication of his rather more celebratory Empire in 2003.
But he must know that his is only one way of looking at modern world history, idiosyncratic in many ways, far to the right – or one of the rights – of the political spectrum, and consequently highly unsuited to be taught to children as their only "big story", for "identity" purposes. It reads like propaganda. The book's subtitle is highly problematical (just as Empire's was: "How Britain Made the Modern World", for goodness sake). "The West and the Rest" sets up a dichotomy that is profoundly false in many ways, and of course patronising to the people he lumps together as (his word) "resterners". That's quite apart from his appropriation – in his main title – of the word "civilization" to cover only the (mainly) capitalist world and the materialist values associated with it. And – lastly, so far as these big issues are concerned – there's his claim, repeated throughout the book, that "western" predominance in the world has lasted 500 years, no less. Readers, and viewers of the TV series, must be warned that this is emphatically not what most imperial historians believe. A mere 150-200 years is their usual estimate. (See, for example, John Darwin's excellent After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405.) But even if they're all wrong, this at least shows that there can be no agreement about the "facts" of even the grandest narrative. That's why schoolchildren need to be taught to be critical, before anything else.
In many ways Ferguson is a creature of his time, and of the place he has chosen (for now) to live. The time, of course, is represented by his pretty extreme neo-liberalism, though that is becoming less fashionable now than it was. He chose to live in America, he states in his preface, because he was interested in money and power, and that was where "the money and power actually were". It's also where most of the "big history" comes from, in the sense of simple, over-arching themes that are supposed to explain everything, usually with big titles: The Clash of Civilisations, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The End of History, Empire, Colossus (the last two both Ferguson's).
It probably has something to do with America's status as the dominant power in the world. Big countries; big histories. Britain produced similar over-arching theories when she was dominant. Indeed, I was reminded of Sir John Seeley's famous The Expansion of England (1883) when I read Ferguson's book. Nowadays we littler Britons come up with this sort of thing less often. Most of us realise that the more you stretch a theory, the more holes tend to appear in it. Civilization, with its "six killer apps", is the latest in that older, grander, holey-er tradition. It may also be the last, if Ferguson's warnings about the sudden end of western domination come true. (The schools, of course, will be to blame.) Then the next Seeley, or Ferguson, may be Chinese.
ABOUT
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/civilization-west-and-rest/about/
Civilization: The West and the Rest with Niall Feruguson
For the past five centuries, Western civilizations have prevailed around the world. More people have been influenced by Western food, clothing, medicine, government and religion worldwide than by any other civilization. How did that happen? What led the West to be so influential and powerful? And how long will the West sustain its supremacy? As America approaches the 2012 presidential election in the midst of a geopolitical paradigm shift, acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson returns to public television with a timely look at the reasons behind the West’s economic ascendancy and why Eastern civilizations may now be taking the lead.
Accompanied by a major new book, Civilization: The West and the Rest (Penguin Press), the series explores the West’s epic and surprising rise to global dominance. Applying essential economic and political insights, Niall Ferguson identifies what he calls “the six killer applications” that “the Rest” lacked, but which enabled the West to become an economic and political superpower. Yet no civilization lasts forever, and Ferguson speculates that perhaps “The Rest” can overtake the West by “downloading” and upgrading these “apps” too.
Each two-hour episode focuses on three of these factors: competition; science; modern medicine; democracy; consumerism; and the (Protestant) work ethic. Spanning theories on the rise and fall of empires past and present, Ferguson explains how the West taught others its ideas and institutions.
Ferguson argues that competition, science and property-oriented government put the West ahead of Asia, the Muslim world, and South America and proposes that modern medicine, consumerism and work ethic supported the West’s expansion into Africa, its mastery of mass marketing and consumption, and promotion of its work culture.
Before the space race, Ferguson asserts, there was the spice race. In the 15th century, competition, both economic and political, fostered capitalism and spread the wealth from royal courts to a fragmented European state system. European kingdoms enlisted explorers such as Portugal’s Vasco da Gama to map and conquer the world with trading posts. Soon, Europe’s combined economy overtook the wealthy but monolithic empire of China to the East.
After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1683, Prussian King Frederick separated church and state and fostered an education system based on scientific inquiry. By contrast, the Ottoman Sultan Osman III ushered in an era of religious laws that forbade the study of science. As a result, scientific progress was hindered by religious rules in the East, while it flourished in the West. With modern science, the West pushed the frontiers of artillery warfare and established its position as the world’s military master.
Ferguson suggests that the practice of property-owning democracy, established in America, fundamentally altered the distribution of power by giving landowners a voice in the government. Spain and England competed for New World riches. In the beginning, it seemed that South America with its abundance of gold and other natural resources, controlled by a small ruling class of conquistadors, would become the greater, more prosperous empire. However, North America, with its hardworking indentured servants and devolved land-ownership paved the way for a profitable democratic society.
The West’s “civilization” of Africa relied heavily on modern medicine. At best, medicine cured diseases and prolonged the lives of both colonists and Africans.
After the destruction of two World Wars threatened to destroy Western civilization, consumerism unified and accelerated Western influences during the Cold War. Ferguson explains how, as socialism faced off with capitalism, a sartorial revolution fueled the first wave of globalization in the 20th century. Jeans and T-shirts became the “must-have” fashion around the world. Popularized by the entertainment industry, mainly Hollywood and rock ‘n’ roll, denim was cultural currency with mass appeal and a mass message about American industrialism and capitalism.
The final “app,” the Protestant work ethic, was also critical to the West’s success. Outlined in 1904 by Max Weber, the work ethic encapsulates the spirit of capitalism. Hard work, savings, and deferred consumption were seen as the means to glorify God. As the episode closes, Ferguson returns to China, where Christianity has flourished in spite of communism. And as the popularity of Christianity rises ever more rapidly in China, so too does the country’s economic success.
With the inexorable rise of China and Islam re-energized, is the West history? Ferguson believes it doesn’t have to be. The West still has an edge in political pluralism, commercial competition, scientific development, and medical advances. Most of all, the West maintains the freedom and creativity to write the next chapter in Western civilization.
Civilization: The West and the Rest is a co-production of Chimerica Media Limited, BBC and THIRTEEN in association with WNET.
Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.
