A success that looks like failure

[Marcus Bryant]

http://www.economist.com/node/18329626

THE two great issues of the age, Niall Ferguson believes, are how a handful of Western countries came to dominate the world, and whether their domination is now threatened by the rise of Asia. Not one to shrink from epic questions, Mr Ferguson, a British historian, has written a dazzling history of Western ideas that sets out to provide the reader with epic answers. Broadly speaking, he is more successful in explaining the West’s triumph than in forecasting its fate.

Mr Ferguson starts with the overwhelming success of European civilisation. In 1500 Europe’s future imperial powers controlled 10% of the world’s territories and generated just over 40% of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of empire, the West controlled almost 60% of the territories, which together generated almost 80% of the wealth. This stunning fact is lost, he regrets, on a generation that has supplanted history’s sweep with a feeble-minded relativism that holds “all civilisations as somehow equal”.

After that swipe, the book goes on to devote a chapter to each of the six ingredients that Mr Ferguson thinks together explain Western success (try not to be put off when he calls them the West’s “killer apps”). Science, medicine and the protestant work ethic are familiar characters in this drama. More unusual are the grubby commercial trio that Marxist historians often underestimate: compe ion, property rights and the consumer society.

[Marcus Bryant]

Unless Asia has any exclusive “killer apps” of its own, it is hard to see how such a triumph could alone condemn the West to disaster. Whereas a handful of Western countries were once at it, a whole planet has started to join in. More likely than the end of civilisation—and more boring—is that the West will just cease to be special.