【2010.11.10 BBC】Location, location and how the West was won

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Location, location and how the West was won
By Ian Morris

Professor, Stanford University
On his current visit to Beijing, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has said China will soon reclaim its position as the world's biggest economy - a role it has held for 18 of the past 20 centuries. But how did the US, Britain and the rest of Europe interrupt this reign of supremacy? It comes down to location.

Why does the West dominate the world?

Europeans have been asking this question since the 18th Century, and Africans and Asians since the 19th. But there is still not much agreement on the answers.

People once claimed Westerners were simply biologically superior. Others have argued Western religion, culture, ethics, or institutions are uniquely excellent, or that the West has had better leaders. Others still reject all these ideas, insisting that Western domination is just an accident.

But in the last few years, a new kind of theory has gained ground.
People, it suggests, are much the same all over the world. The reason why some groups stuck with hunting and gathering while others built empires and had industrial revolutions has nothing to do with genetics, beliefs, attitudes, or great men: it was simply a matter of geography.

China and India are, of course poised to pick up the baton of global superpowers, but to explain why the West rules, we have to plunge back 15,000 years to the point when the world warmed up at the end of the last ice age.

Geography then dictated that there were only a few regions on the planet where farming was possible, because only they had the kinds of climate and landscape which allowed the evolution of wild plants and animals that could potentially be domesticated.

The densest concentrations of these plants and animals lay towards the western end of Eurasia, around the headwaters of the Euphrates, Tigris, and Jordan Rivers in what we now call south-west Asia. It was therefore here, around 9000 BC, that farming began, spreading outwards across Europe.

Farming also started independently in other areas, from China to Mexico; but because plants and animals that could be domesticated were somewhat less common in these zones than in the West, the process took thousands of years longer to get going. These other zones of complex agricultural societies also expanded, but the West long retained its early lead, producing the world's first cities, states, and empires.

But if this were all that there was to the story - that the West got an early lead and held onto it - there would be no controversy over why the West rules. In reality, when we look back across history, we see that things were more complicated. Geography determined how societies developed; but how societies developed simultaneously determined what geography meant.

In the earliest days of agriculture, having the right temperatures, rainfall, and topography was all-important. But as villages grew into cities, these geographical facts became less important than living on a great river like the Nile, which made irrigation possible.

As states turned into empires, being on a river began mattering less than access to a navigable sea like the Mediterranean, which was what allowed Rome to move its food, armies, and taxes around.

As the ancient world's empires expanded further, though, they changed the meanings of geography again. The long bands of steppes from Mongolia to Hungary turned into a kind of highway along which nomads moved at will, undermining the empires themselves.

In the first five centuries AD, the Old World's great empires - from Rome in the West to Han China in the East - all came apart; but the political changes transformed geography once again. China recreated a unified empire in the 6th Century AD, while the West never did so.

For more than a millennium, until at least 1700, China was the richest, strongest, and most inventive place on earth, and the East pulled ahead of the West.

East Asian inventors came up with one breakthrough after another. By 1300 their ships could cross the oceans and their crude guns could shoot the people on the other side. But then, in the kind of paradox that fills human history, the East's breakthroughs changed the meaning of geography once again.

Western Europe - sticking out into the cold North Atlantic, far from the centres of action - had always been a backwater. But when Europeans learned of the East's ocean-going ships and guns, their location on the Atlantic abruptly became a huge geographical plus.

Before people could cross the oceans, it had not mattered that Europe was twice as close as China to the vast, rich lands of the Americas. But now that people could cross the oceans, this became the most important geographical fact in the world.

The Atlantic, 3,000 miles across, became a kind of Goldilocks Ocean, neither too big nor too small. It was just big enough that very different kinds of goods were produced around its shores in Europe, Africa, and America; and just small enough that the ships of Shakespeare's age could cross it quite easily.

The Pacific, by contrast, was much too big. Following the prevailing tides and winds, it was an 8,000-mile trip from China to California - just about possible 500 years ago, but too far to make trade profitable.

Geography determined that it was western Europeans, rather than the 15th Century's finest sailors - the Chinese - who discovered, plundered, and colonised the Americas. Chinese sailors were just as daring as Spaniards; Chinese settlers just as intrepid as Britons; but Europeans, not Chinese, seized the Americas because Europeans only had to go half as far.

Europeans went on in the 17th Century to create a new market economy around the shores of the Atlantic, exploiting comparative advantages between continents. This forced European thinkers to confront new questions about how the winds and tides worked. They learned to measure and count in better ways, and cracked the codes of physics, chemistry, and biology.

As a result, Europe, not China, had a scientific revolution. Europeans, not Chinese, turned science's insights onto society itself in the 18th Century in what we now call the Enlightenment
By 1800, science and the Atlantic market economy pushed western Europeans into mechanising production and tapping the power of fossil fuels. Britain had the world's first industrial revolution, and by 1850 bestrode the world like a colossus.

But the transforming power of geography did not stop there. By 1900 the British-dominated global economy had drawn in the resources of North America, changing the meaning of geography once again. The US, until recently a rather backward periphery, became the new global core.

And still the process did not stop. In the 20th Century, the American-dominated global economy in turn drew in the resources of Asia. As container ships and jet airliners turned even the vast Pacific Ocean into a puddle, the apparently backward peripheries of Japan, then the "Asian Tigers", and eventually China and India turned into even newer global cores.

The "rise of the East", so shocking to so many Westerners, was entirely predictable to those who understood that geography determines how societies develop, and that how societies develop simultaneously determines what geography means.

When power and wealth shifted across the Atlantic from Europe to America in the mid-20th Century, the process was horrifyingly violent. As we move into the mid-21st century, power and wealth will shift across the Pacific from America to China.

The great challenge for the next generation is not how to stop geography from working; it is how to manage its effects without a Third World War.

Why the West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History, and What they Reveal About the Future is published by Profile.

评论：
A charming post-hoc story, spoilt only by the claim that anyone skilled in the art could have predicted the "rise of Asia" - which has hardly been homogeneous in any case and probably should not be considered a single phenomenon. I'm old enough to remember when geographers and historians were writing off Asia because it was mired in Communism and instead predicting an African renaissance.

Ian Kemmish, Biggleswade, UK

An amusing post-prandial idea to kick around with the brandy and cigars but hardly history. To assign one cause as the determinant for any historical event is rather a crude approach to the development of societies. Indeed it reminds me of AJP Taylor's assertions in one lecture about the Germans being aggressive because they lived on the North German plain and so obviously they were going to invade Belgium - only he was joking.

Mike Tittensor, Cambridge

Is it not more realistic that in a world that will inevitably have to move away from oil towards renewables like solar power, or towards nuclear power, that places like Australia with its vast, uninhabitable, but solar gathering-friendly deserts and massive uranium reserves, or Africa with it's remaining untapped sources of minerals, oil, gas, and again a very conducive environment for renewable energy production?

Ian, Leeds

This overview does not take into account the impact of social change that has occurred. For example, re: China, I am sure the lack of drive and change in the 18th and 19th centuries was due to an all-controlling aristocracy and ruling family. That plus the dramatic move to communism in the 20th century which resulted in control being vested solely in a small group of people unwilling to share has meant that China took a backward step. Now that they seem to be embracing free market forces more and more and allowing a more democratic approach with an increasingly open mind means that exciting times are ahead for them and worrying times are ahead for the west.

Aidan Brand, London, England

In the Rise and Fall of the Great Powers 1500-2000, Paul Kennedy considered the question of why Europe, one of several roughly equal power groups at the time (China, Mogul Empire in India, Ottoman Empire) came to dominate. If I remember it rightly, he argued that it was the fact that Europe was divided into waring states (war is the mother of invention) that led them to create greater inventions (e.g. better firearms - I use the word "great" loosely). The others were all bloated empires, and remained static by comparison.

James, London

When the time comes that "geography" will shift wealth and economic power to Africa, my guess is scholars in the West and East will be in for a shocking surprise...

Kierin Ombu, Lagos, Nigeria

I always thought that the introduction of Confucianism parralysed advancement and fossilised society in China as it taught that people should be content with what they had and not strive for improvement through science and travel. Progress had stopped in China a long time before European explorerers and armies got there.

Richard Freeman, Farnham, Surrey

Most of the ideas here were put very eloquently by Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel.

Neil, Marlborough, UK

Utter nonsense. China and India are growing because the US Corporations decide to offshore manufacturing. If Africa can eventually do it cheaper, then China and India will collapse.

Leeroy, Stroud

The industrial revolution could only have happened in Europe because personal freedoms and property rights were protected, allowing individuals to benefit from innovation. Legally protected private corporations allowed great numbers of early capitalists to pour money and resource into risky projects, in the hope of future deferred rewards. The Egyptians, Mayans and Chinese may have enjoyed the early geographical advantage, but the real explanations as to why they "stopped" whilst the West advanced are social and economic, not geographical.

Steve, London, UK

原文链接：http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11721671

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过去一个世纪西方统治世界就像蒙元统治中国、五胡乱华、满清统治中国一样，文明被野蛮打败的例子在世界上太多太多了，但这种打败的最终结果是野蛮被文明所同化，就像蒙元和满清最后统融进中华民族一样，野蛮的西方也即将融入以东方文明为根本的世界先进文明中。