Niall Ferguson, the conservative British historian now at Harvard, who has written extensively on the British empire, sets out to provide answers in his latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest (Allen Lane/Penguin, Special Indian Price: Rs 699) to what he says “is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve: the rise of the West as the preeminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the millennium after Christ”. In seeking his answers to the riddle – and that why Britain was the first from the traps – Ferguson says the West had “six killer applications”: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic. He suggests indirectly that the West should be flattered that the rise of the “rest” is due to adoption by them of these applications.
With this book, Ferguson joins the recent band of historians and social scientists who have propounded two broad schools of thought on why the West was the first to take off. Proponents of the Long Term theory such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial some critical factor — geography, climate, or culture perhaps — made the West and the East inalterably different, and determined that the Industrial Revolution would happen in the West and pushed further ahead than the East.
But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so the development couldn’t have been inevitable. So the proponents of the Short Term argue that the Western rule was an aberration that is now coming to an end with the rise of Japan, China and India. But the fact remains that the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, so it can’t be put down to a temporary aberration. We need to look at the scene differently, by providing a new theory based on a social scientist’s comparative methods that would make sense of the past, present and future.
Before we examine Ferguson’s “six killer apps”, what is important to bear in mind is that the facts of history never come to us “pure”, so they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history like Ferguson’s, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it. Therein lies the rub. Put it another way, the philosophy of history is concerned neither with “the past by itself nor with the historian’s thought about it by itself but with two things in their mutual relations”. This dictum reflects the two current meanings of “history”: the enquiry conducted by the historian and the series of past events into which he enquires. So the past that the historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which is in some sense still living with the present.
Of the six factors Ferguson has listed, it was science, medicine and the work ethic that were must crucial. Ferguson starts with the successes of European civilisation. In 1500, Europe controlled only 10 per cent of the world’s territories and generated around 40 per cent of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of the empire, the West controlled 60 per cent of the world’s territories and generated 80 per cent of the wealth.
This “stunning fact” is often lost on historians, but our concern is whether it was all because of the six ingredients. Science and its crucial applications held the key but this was because of the ideological contribution of the Renaissance, the notion of humanism that pervaded every aspect of life that was based primarily on a rejection of the domination of the Church. Without the Reformation that separated the Church from the affairs of the State, the Renaissance that led to the free inquiry of Thomas Hooke and Isaac Newton in the 17th century could not have taken place.
Whatever, it was the scientific enquiry that led the way for the West, as it was the lack of it that arrested the “rest” from continuing its early momentum. This is especially true of the Arab world that had notable successes in mathematical and medical sciences but was soon left behind.
But what of the other three factors? How did consumerism and competition contribute to the growth of western power? Many would argue that rampant consumerism, instead of austerity, contributed to the decline of the West. And what now? Will the West be able to face up to the challenges posed by China and India? Ferguson dodges a straight answer except by saying that civilisation is a highly complex system that has “a tendency to move quite suddenly from stability to instability”. This isn’t saying anything at all. But read it all the same for the sweeping generalisations on the turning points of history.
