Why the West Rules - For Now

I suggested that we might well ask the same about Figure 12.1, which shows that if Eastern and Western social development keep on rising at the same speed as in the twentieth century, the East will regain the lead in 2103. But since the pace at which social development has been rising has actually been accelerating since the seventeenth century, Figure 12.1 is really a conservative estimate; the graph might be best interpreted as saying that 2103 is probably the latest point at which the Western age will end.

I have tried to show in this book that historians are selling themselves short. We do not have to limit ourselves to the two hundred generations in which people have been writing documents. If we widen our perspective to encompass archaeology, genetics, and linguistics—the kinds of evidence that dominated my first few chapters—we get a whole lot more history. Enough, in fact, to take us back five hundred generations. From such a big chunk of time, I have argued, we really can extract some patterns; and now, like Seldon, I want to suggest that once we do this we really can use the past to foresee the future.

If China had escaped Jurchen and Mongol devastation, its renaissance culture might have blossomed into a scientific revolution instead of withering into complacency and footbinding. Internal demand from a hundred million Chinese subjects, trade between an agricultural south and an industrial north, and colonization in Southeast Asia might then have been enough to tip the balance. On the other hand, possibly not; until it had the kinds of guns and armies that could close the steppes, China remained open to devastating migrations.

I have stressed a two-way relationship between geography and social development: the physical environment shapes how social development changes, but changes in social development shape what the physical environment means. Living on top of a coalfield meant very little two thousand years ago, but two hundred years ago it began meaning a lot. Tapping into coal drove social development up faster than ever before—so fast, in fact, that soon after 1900 new fuels began to displace coal. Everything changes, including the meaning of geography.

People confront and solve such paradoxes every day, but once in a while the paradox creates tough ceilings that will yield only to truly transformative change. It is rarely obvious what to do, let alone how to do it, and as a society approaches one of these ceilings a kind of race begins between development and collapse. Societies rarely—perhaps never—simply get stuck at a ceiling and stagnate, their social development unchanging for centuries. Rather, if they do not figure out how to smash the ceiling, their problems spiral out of control. Some or all of what I have called the five horsemen of the apocalypse break loose, and famine, disease, migration, and state collapse—particularly if they coincide with an episode of climate change—will drive development down, sometimes for centuries, even into a dark age.

We have seen people constantly tinkering, making their lives easier or richer or struggling to hold on to what they already have as circumstances change, and, in the process, generally nudging social development upward. Yet none of the great transformations in social development—the origins of agriculture, the rise of cities and states, the creation of different kinds of empires, the industrial revolution—was a matter of mere tinkering; each was the result of desperate times calling for desperate measures.