Civilization: The West and the Rest

“Yet any history of the world’s civilizations that underplays the degree of their gradual subordination to the West after 1500 is missing the essential point—the thing most in need of explanation. The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history. It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve. And we should solve it not merely to satisfy our curiosity. For it is only by identifying the true causes of Western ascendancy that we can hope to estimate with any degree of accuracy the imminence of our decline and fall.”

Ferguson traces the rise of the West to the 16th century in contrast to other scholars who do so closer to the 1800s. He also considers Western dominance a focal point of the past two millennia. Yet, in his view, this level of success has not been adequately explained—which is his purpose for writing this book.

“Another argument, popular in the twentieth century, was that Confucian philosophy inhibited innovation. Yet these contemporary explanations for Oriental underachievement were mistaken. The first of the six distinct killer applications that the West had but the East lacked was not commercial, nor climatic, nor technological, nor philosophical. It was, as [Adam] Smith discerned, above all institutional.”

Ferguson considers competition to be the first of his “killer apps” that gave the West an edge over other parts of the world. He provides a comparative study of Europe and China in the late Medieval and Early Modern periods. Initially, China surpassed Europe in many ways such as technological development, city size, and maritime exploration. In Ferguson’s view, what made China stagnate after the 17th century and made Europe surge forward was competition. This competition was between countries, city-states, individuals, explorers, and the first joint-stock enterprises like the Dutch East India Company. Competition was encouraged by appropriate institutions. In contrast, in Ferguson’s view, China stagnated because it relied on a top-down, complex bureaucracy without much variation.

“English life in this period truly was, as the political theorist Thomas Hobbes later observed (of what he called ‘the state of nature’), ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’”

In the late Middle Ages, life was difficult in the West (here, Ferguson refers specifically to Britain). Life expectancy was low, especially in the cities, violence was prevalent, and sanitation was poor leading to many preventable diseases. In the author’s view, it is no surprise that some thinkers like Thomas Hobbes were inspired by real-world conditions when he proposed their social contract theory. Ferguson also presents this bleak view in order to emphasize the emergence of the West as a “superior” civilization in just a few hundred years.

“Above all, generations of internecine conflict ensured that no one European monarch ever grew strong enough to be able to prohibit overseas exploration. Even when the Turks advanced into Eastern Europe, as they did repeatedly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was no pan-European emperor to order the Portuguese to suspend their maritime explorations and focus on the enemy to the east. On the contrary, the European monarchs all encouraged commerce, conquest and colonization as part of their competition with one another.”

Ferguson considers European disunity to be a significant factor in fostering competition that eventually gave the West a civilizational edge. He compares European in-fighting between the monarchies, lacking a single overarching authority such as an Emperor, to China’s top-down bureaucracy ruling over the entire country. It was this political context that provided the optimal institutional conditions for competition in commerce and exploration.

“As Confucius himself said: ‘A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace.’ But there was too much that was commonplace in the way Ming China worked, and too little that was new.”

The Chinese bureaucracy of the Ming Dynasty was based on Confucian principles and a complex civil-servant examination. Ferguson argues that the homogenizing effect that this type of rule had on China was a major contributing factor to its stagnation, and suppression of innovation, in the Early Modern period. As a result, China lost its superiority over the West in a number of categories such as technology.

“The West owes a debt to the medieval Muslim world, for both its custodianship of classical wisdom and its generation of new knowledge in cartography, medicine and philosophy as well as in mathematics and optics. The English thinker Roger Bacon acknowledged it: ‘Philosophy is drawn from the Muslims.’”

Ferguson presents a comparative study of the West, represented by Europe, and the Islamic World, represented primarily by the Ottoman Empire. His criterion is the scientific developments—and their practical applications—in the Early Modern period. Similar to his comparison to China in Chapter 1, Ferguson portrays the initial superiority of the Islamic world, in some categories, which preserved ancient knowledge and passed it onto Medieval Europe or developed new knowledge. Later, he argues, Europe surged ahead of the Ottoman Empire as a result of scientific and technological developments.

“Europe’s path to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was very far from straight and narrow; rather, it was long and tortuous. It had its origins in the fundamental Christian tenet that Church and state should be separate.”

Modern science is one of the author’s “killer apps” that led to the West’s advancement. However, the development of modern science from the 16th century onward did not have a simple, linear trajectory. One of the key aspects of its development was the institutional separation of the Church and the state which limited the Church’s ability from imposing its religious dogma onto scientific research.

“Those who decry ‘Eurocentrism’ as if it were some distasteful prejudice have a problem: the Scientific Revolution was, by any scientific measure, wholly Eurocentric. An astonishingly high proportion of the key figures—around 80 percent—originated in a hexagon bounded by Glasgow, Copenhagen, Kraków, Naples, Marseille and Plymouth, and nearly all the rest were born within a hundred miles of that area.”

In Ferguson’s view, the 21st-century criticism of the West’s superiority is, at times, unreasonable. One example is the assertion that the Scientific Revolution was Eurocentric. Ferguson provides statistical evidence to challenge this claim that shows that most scientists lived in Europe.

“Christianity, the King remarked sardonically, was ‘stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it.’ Here was the very essence of that movement we know as the Enlightenment, which was in many—though not all—ways an extension of the Scientific Revolution.”

Frederick the Great of Prussia is one of Ferguson’s personifications of the positive changes that occurred in the West, in part, because of the Scientific Revolution. Frederick was a follower of enlightened absolutism like many other European monarchs during the Enlightenment. One key aspect of the Enlightenment was questioning authority, including that of the Church. Here, Frederick’s quotation about Christianity displays that very spirit.

“Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West’s winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government?”

One of Ferguson’s overarching arguments in this book is that not only did his six “killer apps” translate into Western superiority after 1500, but that these features were also universal and, therefore, exportable to other parts of the world. However, he questions whether some of these “apps,” such as science and technology, could be fully utilized if those that use them do not subscribe to other Western values. Yet, if they did absorb these values, what would be left of their own cultures?

“Without the New World, it has been asserted, ‘Western Europe would have remained a small, backward region of Eurasia, dependent on the East for transfusions of technology, transmissions of culture, and transfers of wealth. Without American ‘ghost acres’ and the African slaves who worked them, there could have been no ‘European Miracle,’ no Industrial Revolution.”

Imperial expansion is an overarching theme in this book. Ferguson’s six “killer apps” were tested and disseminated around the world during the European Age of Discovery and Conquest starting from the late 1400s. The Americas, was one crucial testing ground for this imperial project.

“The crux of the matter is the relative importance in the historical process of, on the one hand, initial resource endowments in the colonized territories of the New World and, on the other hand, the institutional blueprints the colonizers brought with them from Europe.”

Property rights are one of Ferguson’s “killer apps.” But they did not arise out of nowhere in the Americas during the period of European colonization. The settlers brought with them the “blueprints” of establishing institutions from their home countries and replicated them abroad. Spain and Britain differed, so the development of North and South America is different, according to the author.

“As we have seen, it was John Locke who had made private property the foundation of political life in Carolina. But it was not only landed property he had in mind. In article 110 of his ‘Fundamental Constitutions’, he had stated clearly: ‘Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.’ For Locke, the ownership of human beings was as much a part of the colonial project as the ownership of land. And these human beings would be neither landowners nor voters.”

Ferguson claims that property rights and the rule of law within a democracy were a prerequisite for the rise of the West. He chooses North America as an example of this development. However, property did not just include land but also enslaved people who provided work to the landowners. Using humans as property was not only done in practice but had philosophical backing like that of John Locke. This feature is a contradiction to human rights and the way democracy is understood today.

“On the contrary, North America was better off than South America purely and simply because the British model of widely distributed private property rights and democracy worked better than the Spanish model of concentrated wealth and authoritarianism.”

The author provides a comparative analysis of the British and Spanish colonization of North and South America, respectively. He argues that the institutional framework from the “Old World” carried over to settlements in the Americas. Ultimately, Ferguson considers the British model superior because of its property rights and the institutional framework such as democracy and the rule of law.

“Empire could also have a political function, sublimating the social conflicts of the industrial age in a gung-ho mood of patriotic pride, or generating placatory pay-offs for powerful interest groups. But it also meant the spread of civilization, a term used with increasing frequency to describe the whole complex of distinctly Western institutions we have already encountered in the preceding chapters: the market economy, the Scientific Revolution, the nexus of private property rights and representative government.”

By the middle of the 19th century, Western empires controlled much of the outside world. In Ferguson’s view, empire generally had a positive effect both on the domestic population and on the colonial subjects abroad. These benefits could be summarized by his six “killer apps” along with patriotic distraction from socioeconomic inequalities. The author generally does not question the extent to which colonial subjects consented to the so-called spread of civilization.

“These victories were not confined to the imperialists but also benefited their colonial subjects. The twist in the tale is that even the medical science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had its dark side. The fight against pathogens coincided with a pseudo-scientific fight against the illusory threat of racial degeneration. Finally, in 1914, a war between the rival Western empires, billed as ‘the great war for civilization’, would reveal that Africa was not, after all, the world’s darkest continent.”

In Ferguson’s view, European colonies benefitted the colonial subjects in many ways—from infrastructural development to medical advancements. However, some of the Europeans did not only engage in researching and combatting deadly diseases but also in a race-based pseudo-science. All of these developments occurred against the backdrop of imperialist competition between the European powers which led to the first global conflict of the 20th century, World War I.

“Yet there was a shadow side to this extraordinary scientific success. Lurking within the real science was a pseudo-science, which asserted that science, which asserted that mankind was not a single more or less homogeneous species but was subdivided and ranked from an Aryan ‘master race’ down to a black race unworthy of the designation Homo sapiens.”

European colonizers brought medical advancements to Africa limiting or eradicating serious or deadly diseases on the continent. At the same time, some medical treatment was administered without consent. Worse, certain medical pursuits took on the form of “racial-biological research” as part of a eugenic pseudo-science in an attempt to demonstrate the hierarchic differences between the races (180). This information was later built upon by the Nazis.

“Yet the disturbing question remains. Was South-West Africa the testing site of future, much larger genocides? Was it, as Conrad suggested in his novel Heart of Darkness, a case of Africa turning Europeans into savages, rather than Europeans civilizing Africa?”

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) takes place in the Congo, then the Congo Free State, controlled by Belgium’s King Leopold II as his private colony. The Congo Free State was arguably the worst and most brutal example of European colonialism in Africa. At this time, many Europeans, like the French, explicitly set out to “civilize” the Africans. Yet, in reality, forced medical treatment, and even the “racial-biological” experiments of the German colonizers, show that it was the Europeans that acted inhumanely. Ferguson describes the direct trajectory from these late 19th-early 20th-century medical experiments to the Nazi counterparts just a few decades later. The Nazis explicitly perceived Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as the “living space” open for colonization based on earlier European colonizing experiences elsewhere.

“Unlike modern medicine, which (as we saw in the previous chapter) was often imposed by force on Western colonies, the consumer society is a killer application the rest of the world has generally yearned to download. Even those social orders explicitly intended to be anti-capitalist—most obviously the various derivatives of the doctrine of Karl Marx—have been unable to exclude it. The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.”

Ferguson considers Western empires to generally be positive vehicles of progress. Here, however, he acknowledges that medical advancements in the colonies were perpetuated without considering the agency or consent of Europe’s colonial subjects. At the same time, he asserts that consumer society was accepted by non-Western cultures willingly. Hollywood-style propaganda and other types of soft power made consumerism and all its trappings attractive outside the West. However, this argument does not account for the fact that even the West was not homogenous, and American-style consumerism came to Europe from the US. Furthermore, after World War II, US military bases in Europe, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere, supported the American ability to dictate its will, develop its institutions, starting with the Marshall Plan, and arrive at economic arrangements that benefitted the US first and foremost.

“In the post-war United States the consumer society became a phenomenon of the masses, significantly diminishing the sartorial differences between the social classes.”

Consumer society is one of Ferguson’s key features of perceived Western superiority. This society produced homogenization of style, especially clothing, not just in the US but around the world. The author suggests that on the surface, this development erased the many visible differences between social strata. Of course, these surface-based similarities do not reflect the actual existing socioeconomic inequalities.

“Yet somehow the communist bloc failed to understand the appeal of a garment that could equally well have symbolized the virtues of the hard-working Soviet worker. Instead, blue jeans, and the pop music with which they were soon inextricably linked, became the quintessential symbols of Western superiority.”

Several key neoliberal intellectuals, including Ferguson himself and Francis Fukuyama, view blue jeans and other aspects of American pop culture such as the television as symbols of Western capitalist superiority over socialist countries. One could say, however, that while socialist countries like the USSR provided universal healthcare and free university education to their citizens, the US lacked both but was able to disseminate blue jeans. The global spread of consumer culture and its symbols may have had more to do with the temporary success of Hollywood propaganda rather than the tangible prosperity and well-being that they are seen to represent.

“The trouble with all the theories about the death of Protestantism in Europe is that, whatever they may explain about Europe’s de-Christianization, they explain nothing whatsoever about America’s continued Christian faith. Americans have experienced more or less the same social and cultural changes as Europeans. They have become richer. Their knowledge of science has increased. And they are even more exposed to psychoanalysis and pornography than Europeans. But Protestantism in America has suffered nothing like the decline it has experienced in Europe. On the contrary, God is in some ways as big in America today as He was forty years ago.”

Ferguson attempts to locate the reasons for the differences between the two parts of the West, Europe, and the US In Europe, Christianity generally declined, but it continues to thrive in the US, as church attendance shows. Since religion was part of the work ethic, its decline in Europe also led to the decline in the working hours. One possible answer to this complex question, he argues, could be the business-like competition between the Protestant churches in the US.

“Capitalist competition has been disgraced by the recent financial crisis and the rampant greed of the bankers. Science is studied by too few of our children at school and university. Private property rights are repeatedly violated by governments that seem to have an insatiable appetite for taxing our incomes and our wealth and wasting a large portion of the proceeds. Empire has become a dirty word, despite the benefits conferred on the rest of the world by the European imperialists. All we risk being left with are a vacuous consumer society and a culture of relativism—a culture that says any theory or opinion, no matter how outlandish, is just as good as whatever it was we used to believe in.”

Here, Ferguson discusses how he believes the West lost confidence in itself. Consequently, his six “killer apps” are being misused. He does not go as far as addressing the issues systemically, such as the nature of capitalism, nor does he consider that these developments are the logical consequences of the ideology from which they came. However, Ferguson does question whether all of these negative developments may mean the decline of the West.