Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson

Audio CD

Published November 1, 2011

About the author

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC.

The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which--Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist--was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg.

Ferguson's six-part PBS television series, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," based on his best-seller, won an International Emmy for best documentary in 2009. Civilization was also made into a documentary series. Ferguson is a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service as well as other honors. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks on Power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).

(Source: Amazon)

Reviews

[Bruce Bean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson's Civilization tackles an ambitious question: what explains the West's rise to global dominance, and why has virtually the entire world adopted Western styles, from blue jeans to constitutional government? His answer, while thought-provoking, often veers into peculiar territory, particularly in his extended preoccupation with clothing as a marker of civilizational success.

Ferguson identifies six key features, which he calls "killer apps," that enabled Western dominance: competition, the Protestant work ethic, modern medicine, consumer society, the scientific method, and the rule of law. These are reasonable enough as organizing principles, though hardly original observations. Where Ferguson becomes more interesting is in his comparative analysis of colonial settlement patterns and their long-term consequences.

His contrast between North and South American development offers genuine insight. British North America, he argues, was populated largely by indentured servants who brought experience with self-governance and property rights, and who would become landowners themselves within five to seven years. Spain and Portugal, by contrast, sent single men seeking quick riches, who intermarried with local populations and established extractive rather than participatory institutions. By 1640, English colonies had eight assemblies of landowners; Latin America had none. The comparison between George Washington and Simon Bolivar illustrates these divergent paths, with Washington accumulating 52,000 acres across multiple states while Spanish colonists received rights to indigenous labor rather than land itself.

Ferguson's treatment of the Industrial Revolution and consumer society, however, becomes oddly fixated on textiles and fashion. He traces the spread of Western dress from mass production techniques through the cultural influence of Hollywood westerns and 1950s rebels. John Wayne's transition from leather chaps to plain jeans in Stagecoach (1939), followed by Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), apparently represent civilizational turning points. The 1968 revolutionary moment, in Ferguson's telling, was fundamentally about miniskirts and bikinis. His claim that "the West's great economic leaps forward were, to a huge extent, because of our clothes" seems a bridge too far.

Even more strained is his Cold War analysis. Ferguson argues that had the conflict turned hot, the Soviets would have won because centralized planning excels at war production. America prevailed instead through superior consumer goods, particularly its ability to mass-produce desirable jeans while the Soviets could not (or would not). While consumer dissatisfaction certainly played a role in communism's collapse, reducing the Cold War's essence to denim and rock music oversimplifies a far more complex geopolitical struggle.

His chapter on religion feels particularly out of place, as Ferguson himself seems to acknowledge. If religion was central to spreading European civilization to "the heathens," what does it mean that Africa now demonstrates higher religious participation than largely secular modern Europe? He raises the question but provides no satisfying answer.

Ferguson's analysis of imperial decline and Western debt loads proves more convincing. He draws parallels between the 1929 crash and the 2007-2009 financial crisis, noting that excessive debt has historically accompanied imperial decline. His attribution of the Great Depression to central bankers who first inflated markets through lax monetary policy, then tightened after the crash, anticipates more recent critiques of Federal Reserve policy. He quotes Churchill's observation that "The US will do the right thing when all other possibilities have been exhausted," a maxim that seems increasingly relevant.

The book's treatment of economic development in Korea and Singapore acknowledges an uncomfortable truth: their dramatic advances occurred under non-democratic regimes, complicating simplistic narratives about democracy and prosperity. Ferguson notes that "mass consumerism, with all the standardization it implied, could somehow be reconciled with a rampant individualism" as "one of the smartest tricks ever pulled by Western civilization."

Civilization offers valuable historical analysis, particularly regarding legal institutions, property rights, and the divergent paths of European colonization. Ferguson's six "killer apps" provide a useful framework, even if they lack novelty. However, his extended meditation on clothing as civilizational marker grows tedious, and his reduction of complex historical forces to fashion trends undermines more serious arguments. The book succeeds when examining institutions and systems of governance; it stumbles when trying to explain global transformation through the popularity of blue jeans.

For readers interested in Western ascendancy and comparative institutional development, Civilization provides food for thought, provided one can wade through Ferguson's peculiar obsession with what the world wears rather than how it governs itself.