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mostly took it for granted that social development was an unquestioned good. Development is progress (or evolution, or History), they implicitly and often explicitly said, and progress—whether toward God, affluence, or a people’s paradise—isthe point of life. These days that seems less obvious. Many people feel that the environmental degradation, wars, inequality, and disillusionment that social development brings in its train far outweigh any benefits it generates.
    Yet whatever moral charge we put on social development, its reality is undeniable. Almost all societies today are more developed (in the sense I defined that word in the previous paragraph) than they were a hundred years ago, and some societies today are more developed than others. In 1842 the hard truth was that Britain was more developed than China—so developed, in fact, that its reach had become global. There had been empires aplenty in the past, but their reach had always been regional. By 1842, however, British manufacturers could flood China with their products, British industrialists could build iron ships that outgunned any in the world, and British politicians could send an expedition halfway around the globe.
    Asking why the West rules really means asking two questions. We need to know both why the West is more developed—that is, more able to get things done—than any other region of the world, and why Western development rose so high in the last two hundred years that for the first time in history a few countries could dominate the entire planet.
    The only way to answer these questions, I believe, is by measuring social development to produce a graph that—literally—shows the shape of history. Once we do that, we will see that neither long-term lock-in nor short-term accident theories explain the shape of history very well at all. The answer to the first question—why Western social development is higher than that of any other part of the world—does not lie in any recent accident: the West has been the most developed region of the world for fourteen of the last fifteen millennia. But on the other hand, neither was the West’s lead locked in in the distant past. For more than a thousand years, from about 550 through 1775 CE, Eastern regions scored higher. Western rule was neither predetermined thousands of years ago nor a result of recent accidents.
    Nor can either long-term or short-term theories by themselves answer the second question, of why Western social development has risen so high compared to all earlier societies. As we will see, it was only around 1800 CE that Western scores began surging upward at astonishing rates; but this upturn was itself only the latest example of a verylong-term pattern of steadily accelerating social development. The long term and the short term work together.
    This is why we cannot explain Western rule just by looking at prehistory or just by looking at the last few hundred years. To answer the question we have to make sense of the whole sweep of the past. Yet while charting the rise and fall of social development reveals the shape of history and shows us what needs to be explained, it doesn’t actually do the explaining. For that we need to burrow into the details.
    SLOTH, FEAR, AND GREED
    “H ISTORY, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” It is sometimes hard to disagree with Ambrose Bierce’s comic definition: history can seem to be just one damned thing after another, a chaotic jumble of geniuses and dolts, tyrants and romantics, poets and thieves, accomplishing the extraordinary or scraping the barrel of depravity.
    Such people stud the pages that follow, which is as it should be. After all, it is flesh-and-blood individuals, not vast impersonal forces, who do all the living, dying, creating, and fighting in this world. Yet behind all the sound and fury, I will argue, the past nevertheless