The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations

by Ian Morris

In the last thirty years, there have been fierce debates over how civilizations develop and why the West became so powerful. The Measure of Civilization presents a brand-new way of investigating these questions and provides new tools for assessing the long-term growth of societies. Using a groundbreaking numerical index of social development that compares societies in different times and places, award-winning author Ian Morris sets forth a sweeping examination of Eastern and Western development across 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He offers surprising conclusions about when and why the West came to dominate the world and fresh perspectives for thinking about the twenty-first century.


Adapting the United Nations' approach for measuring human development, Morris's index breaks social development into four traits--energy capture per capita, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity--and he uses archaeological, historical, and current government data to quantify patterns. Morris reveals that for 90 percent of the time since the last ice age, the world's most advanced region has been at the western end of Eurasia, but contrary to what many historians once believed, there were roughly 1,200 years--from about 550 to 1750 CE--when an East Asian region was more advanced. Only in the late eighteenth century CE, when northwest Europeans tapped into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, did the West leap ahead.


Resolving some of the biggest debates in global history, The Measure of Civilization puts forth innovative tools for determining past, present, and future economic and social trends.

Genres: History, Economics, Sociology, Politics, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Archaeology

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 27, 2013

Reviews

[Mark Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to be a serious fan to read this after tackling "why the west rules, for now" as this books covers the authors source material and references. Interesting nonetheless but only fir the specialist reader.

[Mike Doyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointment after his previous work "Why the West Rules". This book is an extended appendix to that one, explaining in detail his use and calculation of "Energy Capture" as a metric to measure progress and achievements between various countries and civilizations throughout history. This concept was explained in depth in his previous work, and this seems more a reaction to critics (he mentions this several times) of his previous methods in calculating and defining energy capture than anything new. It's not a bad book, just not worth the time or money I spent.

[Sicofonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a sort of extension to Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future; as it explains (in extreme detail) the social development index Morris employed in the latter.
Long story short, the Social Development Index is a score given to a society/culture/civilization based on four different traits. Namely: social organization, energy capture, war-making capacity and information technology. The higher the score the more developed a country is supposed to be.
The title is misleading because rather than explaining how social development decides the fate of nations, it's the index what is presented to us. So Morris resorts to a vast collection of resources to tell us how he devised this index.
There's a lot of guesswork in the book, as Morris literally guesstimates figures to suit his conclusions (he actually uses the word guesstimate several times in his narrative, quite shocking to me).

At the very end he acknowledges the index as such is wrong, but the main point is to find out how wrong it is. By studying the index we observe the existence of factual patterns throughout human history. In essence, the index reflects what Human history has been up until now. So it's the ability to expose these patterns that proves the index is to some degree accurate and it can also be an useful tool not only for comparing societies in the past, but also to predict how they will develop in the future.

And if Morris and his index are to be believed, the current pattern shows that by the year 2100 the Human Kind will face a collapse like it never knew before.

Interesting conclusion indeed.

[jeffrey · Rating 1 out of 5]

While the author's premise is fascinating, the presentation, consisting mostly of charts and tables, was tedious and eminently skippable, and could have been relegated to footnotes. Indeed, the whole book read like footnotes.

[Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really, essential reading - slowly, thoughtfully with great pauses.

[Jeremy Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This may have been the least enjoyable book I've read in years. And by that, I don't mean it lacks substance, or intelligence, or even a worthy subject. On the contrary, what I mean to say is that The Measure of Civilization reads like an extended and exhausting peer-review article, the kind of article that's crucial to good research, as this is, but doesn't translate well for most readers. Littered with errors (3000 for the year 2000, plus repeated words and phrases) it's essentially numerical fodder for students at a doctoral-level and presupposes that level of academic attention on almost every page. I gave up the better part of six hours to go through it, cover to cover without stopping (aside from lunch), because I believe it's necessary to give works like this the very academic attention they deserve. And I definitely filled the book with notes in the margins, things I intend to look back at later. But it was so, so, so not fun. If I were the publisher, I would have recommended a different subtitle, something that adheres to academia. Something like, "The Measure of Civilization: A Detailed Analysis of Social Development through Millenia."

[Don Yin · Rating 1 out of 5]

A binder (not even book) of pure absurdity.