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Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West’s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last?

Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.

Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules—for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines—from ancient history to neuroscience—not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.

"Remarkable ... Anyone who does not believe there are lessons to be learned from history should start here.” --The Economist

“A path-breaking work that lays out what modern history should look like.” -- Financial Times

“Morris’ new book illustrates perfectly why one really scholarly book about the past is worth a hundred fanciful works of futurology. Morris is the world’s most talented ancient historian, a man as much at home with state-of-the-art archaeology as with the classics as they used to be studied . . . He has brilliantly pulled off what few modern academics would dare to attempt: a single-volume history of the world that offers a bold and original answer to the question, Why did the societies that make up 'the West' pull ahead of 'the Rest' not once but twice, and most spectacularly in the modern era after around 1500? Wearing his impressive erudition lightly — indeed, writing with a wit and clarity that will delight the lay reader — Morris uses his own ingenious index of social development as the basis for his answer.” —Niall Ferguson, Foreign Affairs

Ian Morris

Ian Morris is the Willard Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. He has served as associate dean of Humanities and Sciences, chair of the Classics Department, and director of the Social Science History Institute. Morris is founder and former director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. 

He is a prolific scholar who is best known for his work on early Iron Age Greece. Morris is the author of Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future; Burial and Ancient Society; and Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity.

From 2000 through 2006, he directed Stanford University's excavation at Monte Polizzo, a native Sicilian town of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE.

Morris has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Research in the Humanities at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Личен сайт: http://www.ianmorris.org/