A groundbreaking look at Western and Eastern social development from
the end of the ice age to today
In the past 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.
