Read Why the West Rules--For Now for Free Online

History of Western Civilization program, ranging from ancient Athens to (eventually) the fall of communism. To stay even one day ahead of my students I had to read medieval and modern European history much more seriously than before, and I could not help noticing that for long stretches of time the freedom, reason, and inventiveness that Greece supposedly bequeathed to the West were more honored in the breach than the observance. Trying to make sense of this, I found myself looking at broader and broader slices of the human past. I was surprised how strong the parallels were between the supposedly unique Western experience and the history of other parts of the world, above all the great civilizations of China, India, and Iran.
    Professors enjoy nothing more than complaining about their administrative burdens, but when I moved to Stanford University in 1995 I quickly learned that serving on committees could be an excellent way to find out what was going on outside my own little field. Since then I have directed the university’s Social Science History Institute and Archaeology Center, served as chair of the Classics department and senior associate dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and run a large archaeological excavation—which all meant plenty of paperwork and headaches, but which also let me meet specialists in every field, from genetics to literary criticism, that might be relevant to working out why the West rules.
    I learned one big thing: to answer this question we need a broad approach, combining the historian’s focus on context, the archaeologist’s awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist’s comparativemethods. We could get this combination by assembling a multidisciplinary team of specialists, pooling deep expertise across a range of fields, and that is in fact just what I did when I started directing an archaeological excavation on Sicily. I knew nowhere near enough about botany to analyze the carbonized seeds we found, about zoology to identify the animal bones, about chemistry to make sense of the residues in storage vessels, about geology to reconstruct the landscape’s formation processes, or about a host of other indispensable specialties, so I found specialists who did. An excavation director is a kind of academic impresario, bringing together talented artists who put on the show.
    That is a good way to produce an excavation report, where the goal is to pile up data for others to use, but books-by-committee tend to be less good at developing unified answers to big questions. As a result, in the book you are reading now I take an inter- rather than multi disciplinary approach. Instead of riding shotgun over a herd of specialists, I strike off on my own to draw together and interpret the findings of experts in numerous fields.
    This courts all kinds of dangers (superficiality, disciplinary bias, and just general error). I will never have the same subtle grasp of Chinese culture as someone who has spent a lifetime reading medieval manuscripts, or be as up-to-date on human evolution as a geneticist (I am told that the journal Science updates its website on average every thirteen seconds; while typing this sentence I have probably fallen behind again). But on the other hand, those who stay within the boundaries of their own disciplines will never see the big picture. The interdisciplinary, single-author model probably is the worst way to write a book like this—except for all the other ways. To me it certainly seems the least bad way to proceed, but you will have to judge from the results whether I am right.
    So what are the results? I argue in this book that asking why the West rules is really a question about what I will call social development. By this I basically mean societies’ abilities to get things done—to shape their physical, economic, social, and intellectual environments to their own ends. Back in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Western observers