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Civilization: The West and the Rest - Softcover

Ferguson, Niall

 
9780143122067: Civilization: The West and the Rest
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143122061 ISBN 13: 9780143122067
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower

“A dazzling history of Western ideas.” —The Economist

“Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the felicitous phrase.” —Wall Street Journal

“[W]ritten with vitality and verve . . . a tour de force.” —Boston Globe

Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries.

How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic—that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors.

Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Niall Ferguson is one of the world's most renowned historians. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, High Financier, Civilization, The Great Degeneration, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, and The Square and the Tower. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His many awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013).

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China seems to have been long stationary, and had probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is con- sistent with the nature of its laws and institutions. But this complement may be much inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil, climate, and situation might admit of. A country which neglects or despises foreign commerce, and which admits the vessels of foreign nations into one or two of its ports only, cannot transact the same quantity of business which it might do with different laws and institutions . . . A more extensive foreign trade . . . could scarce fail to increase very much the manufactures of China, and to improve very much the productive powers of its manufactur- ing industry. By a more extensive navigation, the Chinese would naturally learn the art of using and constructing them- selves all the different machines made use of in other countries, as well as the other improvements of art and industry which are practised in all the different parts of the world.
Adam Smith
 
Why are they small and yet strong? Why are we large and yet weak? . . . What we have to learn from the barbarians is only . . . solid ships and effective guns.
Feng Guifen

Civilization
 
Two rivers The Forbidden City (Gugong) was built in the heart of Beijing by more than a million workers, using materials from all over the Chin- ese Empire. With nearly a thousand buildings arranged, constructed and decorated to symbolize the might of the Ming dynasty, the For- bidden City is not only a relic of what was once the greatest civilization in the world; it is also a reminder that no civilization lasts for ever. As late as 1776 Adam Smith could still refer to China as ‘one of the rich- est, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world . . . a much richer country than any part of Europe’. Yet Smith also identified China as ‘long sta- tionary’ or ‘standing still’.1 In this he was surely right. Within less than a century of the Forbidden City’s construction between 1406 and 1420, the relative decline of the East may be said to have begun. The impoverished, strife-torn petty states of Western Europe embarked on half a millennium of almost unstoppable expansion. The great empires of the Orient meanwhile stagnated and latterly succumbed to Western dominance.

Why did China founder while Europe forged ahead? Smith’s main answer was that the Chinese had failed to ‘encourage foreign com- merce’, and had therefore missed out on the benefits of comparative advantage and the international division of labour. But other explana- tions were possible. Writing in the 1740s, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, blamed the ‘settled plan of tyranny’, which he traced back to China’s exceptionally large population, which in turn was due to the East Asian weather: I reason thus: Asia has properly no temperate zone, as the places situ- ated in a very cold climate immediately touch upon those which are exceedingly hot, that is, Turkey, Persia, India, China, Korea, and Japan. In Europe, on the contrary, the temperate zone is very extensive . . . it thence follows that each [country] resembles the country joining it; that there is no very extraordinary difference between them . . . Hence it comes that in Asia, the strong nations are opposed to the weak; the war- like, brave, and active people touch immediately upon those who are indolent, effeminate, and timorous; the one must, therefore, conquer, and the other be conquered. In Europe, on the contrary, strong nations are opposed to the strong; and those who join each other have nearly the same courage. This is the grand reason of the weakness of Asia, and of the strength of Europe; of the liberty of Europe, and of the slavery of Asia: a cause that I do not recollect ever to have seen remarked.2


Later European writers believed that it was Western technology that trumped the East – in particular, the technology that went on to pro- duce the Industrial Revolution. That was certainly how it appeared to the Earl Macartney after his distinctly disappointing mission to the Chinese imperial court in 1793 (see below). Another argument, popular in the twentieth century, was that Confucian philosophy inhibited innovation. Yet these contemporary explanations for Oriental under- achievement 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 Smith discerned, above all institutional.
 
If, in the year 1420, you had taken two trips along two rivers – the Thames and the Yangzi – you would have been struck by the contrast. The Yangzi was part of a vast waterway complex that linked Nanjing to Beijing, more than 500 miles to the north, and Hangzhou to the south. At the core of this system was the Grand Canal, which at its maximum extent stretched for more than a thousand miles. Dat- ing back as far as the seventh century BC, with pound locks introduced as early as the tenth century AD and exquisite bridges like the multi- arched Precious Belt, the Canal was substantially restored and improved in the reign of the Ming Emperor Yongle (1402–24). By the time his chief engineer Bai Ying had finished damming and diverting the flow of the Yellow River, it was possible for nearly 12,000 grain barges to sail up and down the Canal every year.3 Nearly 50,000 men were employed in maintaining it. In the West, of course, the grandest of grand canals will always be Venice’s. But when the intrepid Ven- etian traveller Marco Polo had visited China in the 1270s, even he had been impressed by the volume of traffic on the Yangzi:
The multitude of vessels that invest this great river is so great that no one who should read or hear would believe it. The quantity of merchandise carried up and down is past all belief. In fact it is so big, that it seems  to be a sea rather than a river.
 
China’s Grand Canal not only served as the principal artery of internal trade. It also enabled the imperial government to smooth the price of grain through the five state granaries, which bought when grain was cheap and sold when it was dear.4
Nanjing was probably the largest city in the world in 1420, with a population of between half a million and a million. For centuries it had been a thriving centre of the silk and cotton industries. Under the Yongle Emperor it also became a centre of learning. The name Yongle means ‘perpetual happiness’; perpetual motion would perhaps have been a better description. The greatest of the Ming emperors did noth- ing by halves. The compendium of Chinese learning he commissioned took the labour of more than 2,000 scholars to complete and filled more than 11,000 volumes. It was surpassed as the world’s largest encyclopaedia only in 2007, after a reign of almost exactly 600 years, by Wikipedia.
But Yongle was not content with Nanjing. Shortly after his acces- sion, he had resolved to build a new and more spectacular capital to the north: Beijing. By 1420, when the Forbidden City was completed, Ming China had an incontrovertible claim to be the most advanced civilization in the world.
 
By comparison with the Yangzi, the Thames in the early fifteenth cen- tury was a veritable backwater. True, London was a busy port, the main hub for England’s trade with the continent. The city’s most fam- ous Lord Mayor, Richard Whittington, was a leading cloth merchant who had made his fortune from England’s growing exports of wool. And the English capital’s shipbuilding industry was boosted by the need to transport men and supplies for England’s...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143122061
ISBN 13 
9780143122067
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
464
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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