Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

  A book that aims to cover 600 years of world history is necessarily a collaborative venture and I owe thanks to many people. I am grateful to the staff at the following archives, libraries and institutions: the AGI Archive, the musée départemental Albert Kahn, the Bridgeman Art Library, the British Library, the Charleston Library Society, the Zhongguo guojia tushuguan (National Library of China) in Beijing, Corbis, the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz at Berlin-Dahlem, Getty Images, the Greenwich Observatory, the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna, the Irish National Library, the Library of Congress, the Missouri History Museum, the musée du Chemin des Dames, the Museo de Oro in Lima, the National Archives in London, the National Maritime Museum, the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (Ottoman Archives) in Istanbul, PA Photos, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, the Archives Nationales du Sénégal in Dakar, the South Carolina Historical Society, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Sülemaniye Manuscript Library and of course Harvard’s incomparable Widener Library. It would be wrong not to add an additional line of thanks to Google, now an incomparable resource for speeding up historical research, as well as Questia and Wikipedia, which also make the historian’s work easier.

  I have had invaluable research assistance from Sarah Wallington, as well as from Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, Manny Rincon-Cruz, Jason Rockett and Jack Sun.

  As usual, this is a Penguin book on both sides of the Atlantic, edited with customary skill and verve by Simon Winder in London and Ann Godoff in New York. The peerless Peter James did more than copy-edit the text. Thanks are also due to Richard Duguid, Rosie Glaisher, Stefan McGrath, John Makinson and Pen Vogler, and many others too numerous to mention.

  Like four of my last five books, Civilization was from its earliest inception a television series as well as a book. At Channel 4 Ralph Lee has kept me from being abstruse or plain incomprehensible, with assistance from Simon Berthon. Neither series nor book could have been made without the extraordinary team of people assembled by Chimerica Media: Dewald Aukema, a prince among cinematographers, James Evans, our assistant producer for films 2 and 5, Alison McAllan, our archive researcher, Susannah Price, who produced film 4, James Runcie, who directed films 2 and 5, Vivienne Steel, our production manager, and Charlotte Wilkins, our assistant producer for films 3 and 4. A key role was also played in the early phase of the project by Joanna Potts. Chris Openshaw, Max Hug Williams, Grant Lawson and Harrik Maury deftly handled the filming in England and France. With their patience and generosity towards the author, my fellow Chimericans Melanie Fall and Adrian Pennink have ensured that we remain a pretty good advertisement for the triumvirate as a form of government. My friend Chris Wilson once again ensured that I missed no planes.

  Among the many people who helped us film the series, a number of fixers also helped with the research that went into the book. My thanks go to Manfred Anderson, Khadidiatou Ba, Lillian Chen, Tereza Horska, Petr Janda, Wolfgang Knoepfler, Deborah McLauchlan, Matias de Sa Moreira, Daisy Newton-Dunn, José Couto Nogueira, Levent Öztekin and Ernst Vogl.

  I would also like to thank the many people I interviewed as we roamed the world, in particular Gonzalo de Aliaga, Nihal Bengisu Karaca, Pastor John Lindell, Mick Rawson, Ryan Squibb, Ivan Touška, Stefan Wolle, Hanping Zhang and – last but by no means least – the pupils at Robert Clack School, Dagenham.

  I am extremely fortunate to have in Andrew Wylie the best literary agent in the world and in Sue Ayton his counterpart in the realm of British television. My thanks also go to Scott Moyers, James Pullen and all the other staff in the London and New York offices of the Wylie Agency.

  A number of eminent historians generously read all or part of the manuscript in draft, as did a number of friends as well as former and current students: Rawi Abdelal, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bryan Averbuch, Pierpaolo Barbieri, Jeremy Catto, J. C. D. Clark, James Esdaile, Campbell Ferguson, Martin Jacques, Harold James, Maya Jasanoff, Joanna Lewis, Charles Maier, Hassan Malik, Noel Maurer, Ian Morris, Charles Murray, Aldo Musacchio, Glen O’Hara, Steven Pinker, Ken Rogoff, Emma Rothschild, Alex Watson, Arne Westad, John Wong and Jeremy Yellen. Thanks are also due to Philip Hoffman, Andrew Roberts and Robert Wilkinson. All surviving errors are my fault alone.

  At Oxford University I would like to thank the Principal and Fellows of Jesus College, their counterparts at Oriel College and the librarians of the Bodleian. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford, I owe debts to John Raisian, the Director, and his excellent staff. This book has been finished at the London School of Economics IDEAS centre, where I have been very well looked after as the Philippe Roman Professor for the academic year 2010–11. My biggest debts, however, are to my colleagues at Harvard. It would take too long to thank every member of the Harvard History Department individually, so let me confine myself to a collective thank-you: this is not a book I could have written without your collegial support, encouragement and intellectual inspiration. The same goes for my colleagues at Harvard Business School, particularly the members of the Business and Government in the International Economy Unit, as well as for the faculty and staff at the Centre of European Studies. Thanks are also due to my friends at the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs, the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs, the Workshop in Economic History and Lowell House. But most of all I thank all my students on both sides of the Charles River, particularly those in my General Education class, Societies of the World 19. This book started life in your presence, and greatly benefited from your papers and feedback.

  Finally, I offer my deepest thanks to my family, particularly my parents and my oft-neglected children, Felix, Freya and Lachlan, not forgetting their mother Susan and our extended kinship group. In many ways, I have written this book for you, children.

  It is dedicated, however, to someone who understands better than anyone I know what Western civilization really means – and what it still has to offer the world.

  London December 2010

  Introduction: Rasselas’s Question

  He would not admit civilization [to the fourth edition of his dictionary], but only civility. With great deference to him, I thought civilization, from to civilize, better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility.

  James Boswell

  All definitions of civilization … belong to a conjugation which goes: ‘I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian.’

  Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  When Kenneth Clark defined civilization in his television series of that name, he left viewers in no doubt that he meant the civilization of the West – and primarily the art and architecture of Western Europe from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. The first of the thirteen films he made for the BBC was politely but firmly dismissive of Byzantine Ravenna, the Celtic Hebrides, Viking Norway and even Charlemagne’s Aachen. The Dark Ages between the fall of Rome and the twelfth-century Renaissance simply did not qualify as civilization in Clark’s sense of the word. That only revived with the building of Chartres cathedral, dedicated though not completed in 1260, and was showing signs of fatigue with the Manhattan skyscrapers of his own time.

  Clark’s hugely successful series, which was first broadcast in Britain when I was five years old, defined civilization for a generation in the English-speaking world. Civilization was the chateaux of the Loire. It was the palazzi of Florence. It was the Sistine Chapel. It was Versailles. From the sober interiors of the Dutch Republic to the ebullient façades of the baroque, Clark played to his strength as an historian of art. Music and literature made their appearances; politics and even economics occasionally peeked in. But the essence of Clark’s civilization was clearly High Visual Culture. His heroes were Michelangelo, da Vinci, Dürer, Constable, Turner, Delacroix.1

  In fairness to Clark, his series was subtitled A Personal View. And he was not unaware of the implication – problematic already in 1969 – that ‘the pre-Christi
an era and the East’ were in some sense uncivilized. Nevertheless, with the passage of four decades, it has become steadily harder to live with Clark’s view, personal or otherwise (to say nothing of his now slightly grating de haut en bas manner). In this book I take a broader, more comparative view, and I aim to be more down and dirty than high and mighty. My idea of civilization is as much about sewage pipes as flying buttresses, if not more so, because without efficient public plumbing cities are death-traps, turning rivers and wells into havens for the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. I am, unapologetically, as interested in the price of a work of art as in its cultural value. To my mind, a civilization is much more than just the contents of a few first-rate art galleries. It is a highly complex human organization. Its paintings, statues and buildings may well be its most eye-catching achievements, but they are unintelligible without some understanding of the economic, social and political institutions which devised them, paid for them, executed them – and preserved them for our gaze.

  ‘Civilisation’ is a French word, first used by the French economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in 1752, and first published by Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, father of the great revolutionary, four years later.2 Samuel Johnson, as the first epigraph to this Introduction makes clear, would not accept the neologism, preferring ‘civility’. If barbarism had an antonym for Johnson, it was the polite (though sometimes also downright rude) urban life he enjoyed so much in London. A civilization, as the etymology of the word suggests, revolves around its cities, and in many ways it is cities that are the heroes of this book.3 But a city’s laws (civil or otherwise) are as important as its walls; its constitution and customs – its inhabitants’ manners (civil or otherwise) – as important as its palaces.4 Civilization is as much about scientists’ laboratories as it is about artists’ garrets. It is as much about forms of land tenure as it is about landscapes. The success of a civilization is measured not just in its aesthetic achievements but also, and surely more importantly, in the duration and quality of life of its citizens. And that quality of life has many dimensions, not all easily quantified. We may be able to estimate the per-capita income of people around the world in the fifteenth century, or their average life expectancy at birth. But what about their comfort? Cleanliness? Happiness? How many garments did they own? How many hours did they have to work? What food could they buy with their wages? Artworks by themselves can offer hints, but they cannot answer such questions.

  Clearly, however, one city does not make a civilization. A civilization is the single largest unit of human organization, higher though more amorphous than even an empire. Civilizations are partly a practical response by human populations to their environments – the challenges of feeding, watering, sheltering and defending themselves – but they are also cultural in character; often, though not always, religious; often, though not always, communities of language.5 They are few, but not far between. Carroll Quigley counted two dozen in the last ten millennia.6 In the pre-modern world, Adda Bozeman saw just five: the West, India, China, Byzantium and Islam.7 Matthew Melko made the total twelve, seven of which have vanished (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Cretan, Classical, Byzantine, Middle American, Andean) and five of which still remain (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, Western).8 Shmuel Eisenstadt counted six by adding Jewish civilization to the club.9 The interaction of these few civilizations with one another, as much as with their own environments, has been among the most important drivers of historical change.10 The striking thing about these interactions is that authentic civilizations seem to remain true unto themselves for very long periods, despite outside influences. As Fernand Braudel put it: ‘Civilization is in fact the longest story of all … A civilization … can persist through a series of economies or societies.’11

  If, in the year 1411, you had been able to circumnavigate the globe, you would probably have been most impressed by the quality of life in Oriental civilizations. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing, while work had begun on reopening and improving the Grand Canal; in the Near East, the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople, which they would finally capture in 1453. The Byzantine Empire was breathing its last. The death of the warlord Timur (Tamerlane) in 1405 had removed the recurrent threat of murderous invading hordes from Central Asia – the antithesis of civilization. For the Yongle Emperor in China and the Ottoman Sultan Murad II, the future was bright.

  By contrast, Western Europe in 1411 would have struck you as a miserable backwater, recuperating from the ravages of the Black Death – which had reduced population by as much as half as it swept eastwards between 1347 and 1351 – and still plagued by bad sanitation and seemingly incessant war. In England the leper king Henry IV was on the throne, having successfully overthrown and murdered the ill-starred Richard II. France was in the grip of internecine warfare between the followers of the Duke of Burgundy and those of the assassinated Duke of Orléans. The Anglo-French Hundred Years’ War was just about to resume. The other quarrelsome kingdoms of Western Europe – Aragon, Castile, Navarre, Portugal and Scotland – would have seemed little better. A Muslim still ruled in Granada. The Scottish King, James I, was a prisoner in England, having been captured by English pirates. The most prosperous parts of Europe were in fact the North Italian city-states: Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Siena and Venice. As for fifteenth-century North America, it was an anarchic wilderness compared with the realms of the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas in Central and South America, with their towering temples and skyscraping roads. By the end of your world tour, the notion that the West might come to dominate the Rest for most of the next half-millennium would have come to seem wildly fanciful.

  And yet it happened.

  For some reason, beginning in the late fifteenth century, the little states of Western Europe, with their bastardized linguistic borrowings from Latin (and a little Greek), their religion derived from the teachings of a Jew from Nazareth and their intellectual debts to Oriental mathematics, astronomy and technology, produced a civilization capable not only of conquering the great Oriental empires and subjugating Africa, the Americas and Australasia, but also of converting peoples all over the world to the Western way of life – a conversion achieved ultimately more by the word than by the sword.

  There are those who dispute that, claiming that all civilizations are in some sense equal, and that the West cannot claim superiority over, say, the East of Eurasia.12 But such relativism is demonstrably absurd. No previous civilization had ever achieved such dominance as the West achieved over the Rest.13 In 1500 the future imperial powers of Europe accounted for about 10 per cent of the world’s land surface and at most 16 per cent of its population. By 1913, eleven Western empires* controlled nearly three-fifths of all territory and population and more than three-quarters (a staggering 79 per cent) of global economic output.14 Average life expectancy in England was nearly twice what it was in India. Higher living standards in the West were also reflected in a better diet, even for agricultural labourers, and taller stature, even for ordinary soldiers and convicts.15 Civilization, as we have seen, is about cities. By this measure, too, the West had come out on top. In 1500, as far as we can work out, the biggest city in the world was Beijing, with a population of between 600,000 and 700,000. Of the ten largest cities in the world by that time only one – Paris – was European, and its population numbered fewer than 200,000. London had perhaps 50,000 inhabitants. Urbanization rates were also higher in North Africa and South America than in Europe. Yet by 1900 there had been an astonishing reversal. Only one of the world’s ten largest cities at that time was Asian and that was Tokyo. With a population of around 6.5 million, London was the global megalopolis.16 Nor did Western dominance end with the decline and fall of the European empires. The rise of the United States saw the gap between West and East widen still further. By 1990 the average American was seventy-three times richer than the average Chinese.17

  Moreover, it became clear in the second half of the twentieth century that the only way to close that y
awning gap in income was for Eastern societies to follow Japan’s example in adopting some (though not all) of the West’s institutions and modes of operation. As a result, Western civilization became a kind of template for the way the rest of the world aspired to organize itself. Prior to 1945, of course, there was a variety of developmental models – or operating systems, to draw a metaphor from computing – that could be adopted by non-Western societies. But the most attractive were all of European origin: liberal capitalism, national socialism, Soviet communism. The Second World War killed the second in Europe, though it lived on under assumed names in many developing countries. The collapse of the Soviet empire between 1989 and 1991 killed the third.