Civilization: The West and the Rest

Niall Ferguson asks why a handful of western European states and their colonial offshoots came to dominate the world after 1500, and answers with six “killer applications” — competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic — that the West institutionalised earlier and more thoroughly than anywhere else. The second half of the argument is the uncomfortable one: those applications are downloadable, the rest of the world has been downloading them, and the West’s civilisational confidence may be the thing it is actually losing.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in Li Lu’s deep-history section as the institutional answer to the same question Morris answers with an index and Diamond answers with geography — which is why the section reads as a set of competing explanations rather than a single thesis.

Where I saw it: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 12 of section I, cited as Penguin Books, 2012. Full transcription: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Li Lu — the Himalaya Capital founder who assembled it.
• Niall Ferguson — the author.
• Guns, Germs, and Steel — the geographic explanation Ferguson’s institutional one competes with, also in section I.
• The Wealth and Poverty of Nations — Landes on the same divergence, which Li Lu lists in his value-investing section instead.