Civilization
Book

Civilization

The West and the Rest

Niall Ferguson
Penguin Press, 2011
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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Eye Opening
  • Visionary

Recommendation

Europeans and Americans have taken some shots in recent decades. Even the most patriotic Westerner feels some self-doubt about a history that includes slavery and imperialism. But here comes Harvard professor and historian Niall Ferguson to offer a bracing pep talk, shouting: “We’re the best thing that ever happened to the world!” Ferguson argues that European and North American dominance was a gift to the globe, particularly when the alternatives were the then-stagnant cultures of China, Japan and the Muslim-dominated Middle East. While acknowledging the two great sins of the Western world – slavery and Nazism – he puts a brave face on everything else. Even the 20th-century Western invention of “total war” produced progress because it spawned so many medical advances. Ferguson is deliberately provocative and sometimes rambles, but he is always compelling. getAbstract recommends his fresh perspective on history and his entertaining rebuke of political correctness about the “West and the Rest.”

Summary

The Mystery of Economic Development

According to conventional wisdom, “colonialism” is responsible for all that ails the world. Authors, historians, politicians, professors, activists and the citizenry of former colonies blame European ruthlessness for everything from African poverty to Middle Eastern conflict. Academics fashionably dismiss the accomplishments of half a millennium of Western dominance to focus on the bad – slavery, the Nazis, the slaughter of indigenous peoples and destructive wars – while ignoring the good – democracy, affluence, better health and longer lives. Such pejorative analysis crops up in Western universities and in the palaces of dictators like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Even Gandhi said European civilizations had no redeeming qualities. Populist theory claims that Europeans followed their greedy, brutal instincts to impose misery on all humanity. This sweeping denunciation is demonstrably wrong. European imperialism had its ugly aspects, but advances in the quality of human life and in longer life spans worldwide have offset them.

Western primacy in modern history is striking, in part, because six centuries ago, the Black Death (1347-1351...

About the Author

Harvard University historian and professor Niall Ferguson’s numerous previous books include Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Cash Nexus, Empire and The Ascent of Money.

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