André Gunder Frank wrote " ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age " to explain the anomaly that in the eighteenth century the West had managed to overtake East he was ahead. Ian Morris on "Why the West Rules" for now "says that the anomaly was that between 530 and 1725 East have advanced to the West. If Frank had receded enough in time, just until 14,000 BC, just after the last glaciation, would have seen that he has come to dominate 90% of the time was the West.
Morris has a very mechanistic view of history. It seems that everything depends on how the Earth orbits around the sun. Depending on how you do it, will more or less heat and rain more or less, and men will have to react to new weather conditions. For Morris, the men are moved by three things: laziness (how could get the same result with less effort?), Greed (I want more, more, more) and fear (how I can protect me from a hostile world like this?). To me that Morris is left out the incentive of sex, who know each capable of building one of the wonders of the world only to have a decent dust ...
The combination of climate change and ingenuity (not more than formula laziness laziness + greed + applied to the resolution of problems) makes the geography, which is decisive for the history, meaning continually changes. In 7000 BC could be very good stay in the mountains of the Fertile Crescent. Towards 3800 the climate cooled. Bad for the inhabitants of those mountains, but even worse for farmers in Mesopotamia, who watched the rains fell and became more irregular. The hills of the Fertile Crescent were already overcrowded, so the migration to them was not an option. Mesopotamian farmers came up with an original solution: build irrigation systems and water storage complex requiring a more complex social organization. This hard core of the West moved from the hills of the Fertile Crescent to the Mesopotamian valley. Because this is a landmark bill to Morris: East and West are being expanded, so yesterday was edge today may be hard core. The suburbs have an advantage: they are to exploit open borders, there can be applied and developed technologies in the core and refine or modify them to adapt to new conditions. While hard-core people who invented these technologies may have fallen into complacency and do not innovate, people in the periphery is more than willing to try new things. And so, unconsciously, the torch of progress gets on her hands.
mid twentieth century, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee was to examine world history to discover the laws that moved. I do not know if Morris will read Toynbee, but part of what he says reminds me of it. For Toynbee, human history is moved by the challenge-response principle. When a civilization suspended one of those challenges, he had screwed up and I could be packing their bags because he was on the way out. Toynbee also peripheries the center had the advantage that they were more prepared to innovate.
The first thing Morris, after having established what are the engines of history, is to define what is the West, which is like a fine powder, which we all believe that know what it is until someone asks us thoroughly. There are seven regions in the world where the domestication of animals and plants evolved independently between 11,000 and 5,000 BC: Oaxaca, Peru, Western Sahara, the Fertile Crescent, Indus Valley, the valleys of Yangtze and Yellow River and New Guinea. West to Morris, are the cultures that go back to the early farmers of the Fertile Crescent. East, dating back to the first farmers in the region of the Yangtze, Yellow River. This leaves out of the East to India, which comes from the earliest farmers of the Indus Valley. It seems that around 7000 BC the Indus Valley was a strong influence of the Fertile Crescent. It is possible that the contributions from the West would have continued later. There are archaeologists who believe that there were contacts between the Sumerian and Indus Valley culture. In any case, in its analysis does not consider Morris to India. We may or may not agree, but makes things easier.
second thing Morris does is set some parameters as objective as possible to measure the degree of development of East and West. The four parameters that help determine the degree of development of a society are
1) The degree of urbanization, to measure which draws on the city's population most densely populated in each of the two sites.
2) The use of energy. This is more difficult to measure. Morris to measure it is based on the work of Earl Cook, who calculated the energy use in various societies.
3) information technology. Grading at this point is achieved taking into account: the literacy levels of society and technology for the dissemination of information (quantity and speed with which it can transmit).
4) military capabilities. It is a convenient indicator. To start we have more information on the military capabilities of societies throughout history than any other activity. Neolithic tombs found in which the dead were buried with their weapons and skeletons have died violently and we can determine what kind of weapons were killed. We have nothing seemed to determine, for example, what were their specific religious beliefs. Warfighting capabilities of a society we say, well, many things about their economic power and its level of technological development and its position relative to other companies.
Morris takes as a starting point for their measurements in 2000 and assigned a maximum value for each parameter of 250. Thus, the most advanced society on the planet could to achieve in 2000 up to 1000 points. To see how the system works in practice, take the example of town planning. In 2000 the most populous city in the East (and also in the world) was Tokyo with 26,700,000 million. East receives 250 points on this measure. In the West the most populous city is New York with 16,700,000. If Tokyo gets 250 points with 26,700,000, we can establish a scale in which every 106,800 inhabitants equal one point. Thus, in 2000 the urban West score (using New York as a reference) would be 156 points. In year 1, the most populous city of the West was Rome with an estimated population of one million inhabitants. Thus, the score of the West for this purpose at that time was 9. In the East's most populous city Chang'an was then half a million people, then 4.5 points.
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