Rating: Not rated
Tags: Economic History, Lang:en
Summary
In the last 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. **