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Civilization: The West and the Rest
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IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary: “Rasselas’ Question”
In his introduction, Ferguson aims to define “civilization” and set the parameters for this book. He examines the different ways in which this term had been defined by other scholars. For example, British art historian and television personality Kenneth Mackenzie Clark perceived civilization by focusing on its artistic production. His version of “Western civilization” was “firmly dismissive of Byzantine Ravenna” (1) In historian Carroll Quigley’s view, there were 12 civilizations in the past 2000 years. In contrast, the scholar Adda Bozeman believed that only China, India, Byzantium, Islam, and the West were worth discussing.
Ferguson’s definition is more inclusive; he believes that art and architecture are as important as plumbing. He contends, however, that civilizations usually focus on cities, as implied by the Latin origin of the term “civilization” (“civis”—”citizen” and “civitas”—”state” or “city-state”). He also seeks to examine civilization from a comparative perspective.
Ferguson then explores the definition of the “West.” For example, political scientist Samuel Huntington excluded all Orthodox Christian countries from his definition of the West in his civilizational theory. In Ferguson’s view, the West comprises a “set of norms, behaviours, and institutions” rather than simply geography (15).
Next, Ferguson proposes that the West has dominated the world for approximately 500 years, noting that by 1912, “eleven Western empires controlled nearly three-fifths of all territory and population (4). Not only has the West been dominant, but no “previous civilization had ever achieved such dominance as the West achieved over the Rest” (4). Ferguson challenges what he perceives as “relativism” of perceiving all cultures as equal which he calls “absurd” (4). At the onset of Western civilization, however, Europe “would have struck you as a miserable backwater” in the wake of the Black Death, war, and poor sanitation (4).
Next, Ferguson uses economic data from the 20th century to demonstrate the dominance of Western civilization. For example, “in 1990, the average American was seventy-three times richer than the average Chinese” (6). Ferguson also argues that all ideologies of Modernity that were exported elsewhere came from Europe: liberal capitalism, Communism, and National Socialism (fascism). He also suggests that Western science and medicine had a tremendous impact on the world.
He acknowledges that the West dominated “the Rest” by using imperialism, and he differentiates between different types of colonization which he divides into “settlement versus extraction” categories (8). Ferguson also notes that the gap between “the West and the Rest” did not come about at the same time on all continents (9).
To explain the difference between the West and other civilizations, Ferguson introduces what he calls six “killer apps,” which also serve as chapter themes: “Competition, Science, Property rights, Medicine, The consumer society, The work ethic” (12). In his view, it is these categories that gave the West an edge over others. For clarity, the author defines these terms for the reader. For instance, competition is “a decentralization of both political and economic life, which create the launch-pad for both nation-states and capitalism” (13). In general, he argues, it is institutions that stifled development in Asia and propelled them forward in the West.
The author concludes the introduction by pondering whether the West is set to decline like it once did with the collapse of the Roman Empire. He lists its problems in the 21st century from financial crises to the West losing “confidence in itself” (17).
Introduction Analysis
The introduction is subtitled “Rasselas’ Question” in reference to The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), a novella anonymously published by the English author Samuel Johnson. The question is:
By what means…are the Europeans thus powerful? Or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade and conquest, cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither (10).
The answer to that question in the novella is knowledge.
Using the question as a starting point, Ferguson seeks to explore perceived European supremacy further. He frames civilization not just as an expression of culture (for instance, through art), but also as one in which the quality of life of an average citizen is important. Throughout this study, Ferguson examines the way in which the lives of ordinary people improved by using applied science and innovating urban infrastructure during the Industrial Revolution, while medical advancements extended life expectancy. This social-history trajectory is an important supplement to another style of history writing, the so-called great man in history style that presents historical narratives as focused on one individual (though Ferguson also engages in this style by focusing on political, military, and thought leaders).
The Introduction highlights two central issues with the text which Ferguson tries to resolve. First are the parameters used to define civilizations. Ferguson reviews several models and highlights some of the problems, such as whether to include or exclude certain contested parts of the world. For example, Samuel Huntington assigns Orthodox Christianity its own category and excludes European Orthodox countries from the West. Other definitions of the West include all of geographic Europe but exclude Russia, which geographically spans both Europe and Asia.
Ferguson tries to address this problem by focusing on what he portrays as universal and transferrable ideas linked to the West such as private property rights or the rule of law. At the same time, he implicitly relies on an older definition of the West—Western Christendom and North America—because his “killer apps” developed there. He also makes his idea-based definition broad by suggesting that places like ancient Mesopotamia should also be included in the “original” West:
Finally, it is worth remembering that Western civilization has declined and fallen once before. The Roman ruins scattered all over Europe, North Africa and the Near East serve as potent reminders of that. The first version of the West—Western Civilization 1.0—arose in the so-called Fertile Crescent stretching from the Nile Valley to the confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and reached its twin peaks with Athenian democracy and the Roman Empire (16).
It would be more accurate to define these advanced ancient civilizations not as the West but as the civilizations that arose around the Mediterranean basin at different points before the Common Era and which facilitated significant development due to various factors such as a temperate climate, fertile soil, geography, and communication.
The second issue is how to carry out a truly comparative study of civilizations. After defining a civilizational model, one would have to create the parameters for comparison of all civilizational groups and account for major changes in each group, such as wars, revolutions, and epidemics. Such a comparison would be necessarily imperfect and messy. Ferguson instead selects one non-Western civilization and compares it to the West in one category, such as competition or science. He appears to make these selections in a way that benefits his narrative about the rise of the West while leaving “the Rest” behind. For example, China seems to have been selected solely because it was technologically advanced before Europe, whereas the Ottoman Empire seems to represent the entire Islamic civilization because of its military power in the 16th-18th centuries. Moreover, the author does not spend a significant amount of time defining these civilizations the way he defined the West.
Ferguson is dismissive of one important feature that came with the West’s rise: colonialism and imperialism. He writes that “Western ascendancy cannot be therefore explained in the tired old terms of imperialism” (9) without mentioning the economic benefits of the monopolization of trade routes and the extraction of foreign resources.
Overall, the author considers the emergence of the powerful, modern West to be a crucial historical development. He writes: “It is not ‘Eurocentrism’ or (anti-) Orientalism to say that the rise of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ” (8). Presumably, the latter is important for two reasons: the West’s domination of “the Rest” for a time, and the ability to transmit its “killer apps” to other cultures. Throughout the book, Ferguson views civilizational success through the prism of dominance.
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