Niall ferguson civilization the west and the est (v5 0)

NIALL FERGUSON Civilization The West and the Rest ALLEN LANE an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS ALLEN LANE Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M 4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com First published 2011 Copyright © Niall Ferguson, 2011 The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book ISBN: 978-1-84-614282-6 For Ayaan Contents List of Illustrations List of Maps List of Figures Preface to the UK Edition Introduction: Rasselas’s Question Competition Two Rivers The Eunuch and the Unicorn The Spice Race The Mediocre Kingdom Science The Siege Micrographia Osman and Fritz Tanzimat Tours From Istanbul to Jerusalem Property New Worlds Land of the Free American Revolutions The Fate of the Gullahs Medicine Burke’s Prophecy The Juggernaut of War Médecins Sans Frontières The Skulls of Shark Island Black Shame Consumption The Birth of the Consumer Society Turning Western Ragtime to Riches The Jeans Genie Pyjamas and Scarves Work Work Ethic and Word Ethic Get your Kicks The Chinese Jerusalem Lands of Unbelief The End of Days? Illustrations Conclusion: The Rivals Notes Bibliography Index List of Illustrations Scene from the Hundred Years’ War (Corbis) The Four Conditions of Society: Poverty, Jean Bourdichon, c 1500 (Bridgeman) The Triumph of Death, Peter Bruegel the Elder, c 1562 (Getty) The Yongle Emperor (National Palace Museum, Taiwan) Su Song’s water clock (Adrian Pennink) A game of Chinese golf (Palace Museum, Forbidden City) The qilin (Jinghai Temple) The Chinese civil service examination, from a 17th-century history of Chinese emperors (Bridgeman) Vasco da Gama’s tomb, monastery of St Jerome, Lisbon (Dewald Aukema) 10 Earl Macartney’s embassy to the Xianlong Emperor, cartoon by James Gillray (Getty) 11 Jan Sobieski’s men raise the siege of Vienna (Vienna Museum) 12 Sultan Osman III (Bridgeman) 13 Ahmed Resmỵ Effendi’s arrival in Berlin, 1763 (Dewald Aukema) 14 Frederick the Great’s Anti-Machiavel, with annotations by Voltaire (Dewald Aukema) 15 Pages from the German edition of Benjamin Robin’s New Principles of Gunnery (Dewald Aukema) 16 Machu Picchu, Peru (Dewald Aukema) 17 Boneyard Beach, South Carolina (Dewald Aukema) 18 Millicent How’s indenture document (National Archives at Kew) 19 Abraham Smith’s land grant (National Archives at Kew) 20 Map of Charleston (The South Carolina Historical Society) 21 Jerónimo de Aliaga (Dewald Aukema) 22 Simón Bolívar mural in present-day Caracas (Dewald Aukema) 23 Scarred slave (National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; copyright © Photo SCALA, Florence) 24 Saint-Louis, Senegal (Dewald Aukema) 25 Blaise Diagne (Getty) 26 Louis Faidherbe (Corbis) 27 Senegalese tirailleurs (Institut Pasteur) 28 French doctors in the tropics (Institut Pasteur) 29 Three photographs of ‘Bastard’ women (Adrian Pennink) 30 A Senegalese tirailleur on the Western Front (French MoD; copyright © ECPAD) 31 Lüderitz, Namibia (Magic Touch Films; © Manfred Anderson) 32 Young woman on horseback, Urga [Ulan Bator], Mongolia, 1913 (Musée Kahn) 33 Hirohito and Edward (Getty) 34 Observance of His Imperial Majesty of the Military Manoeuvres of Combined Army and Navy Forces, Yōshū Chikanobu, 1890 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) 35 Ladies Sewing, Adachi Ginkō, 1887 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) 36 Poster for Giant (Alamy) ® 37 Levi’s London flagship store, 174–176 Regent Street (Levi Strauss & Co) 38 Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned, The Plastic People of the Universe (Jaroslav Riedel) 39 Headscarves on dummies in Istanbul (Dewald Aukema) 40 Max Weber in America (Getty) 41 The St Louis World’s Fair, 1904 (Missouri History Museum, St Louis) 42 China Inland Mission Students, c 1900 (Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library) 43 An American missionary’s map of South-east China (British Library) 44 A scene of death and destruction from the Taiping Rebellion (Getty) 45 The Nanjing Amity Bible Printing Company (Reuters/Sean Yong) 46 Industrial China (Dewald Aukema) 47 Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, November 2009 (Corbis) List of Maps Zheng He’s Seventh Voyage and da Gama’s First Voyage Ottoman Empire Disintegration from 1683 Prussian Expansion from 1668 United States Expansion from 1783 Gran Colombia’s Disintegration The French and German Empires in Africa, 1914 Protestant Missionaries in China, 1902 * The most uncannily accurate prophecy was by the American journalist James P O’Donnell in an article entitled ‘The Ghost Train of Berlin’, published in the West German Reader’s Digest magazine Das Beste in January 1979, which foresaw the destruction of the wall ten years later and even the sale of pieces of the wall as souvenirs Sadly, the rewards for such foresight are paltry – as were the penalties that should have been paid by a generation of clueless academic ‘Sovietologists’ The business of political prognostication remains a highly inefficient market * The ideal of covering the female head (the Arabic term is hijāb) and body (jilbāb) derives from the Koran, which commands women to ‘subdue their eyes, and maintain their chastity They shall not reveal any parts of their bodies, except that which is necessary They shall cover their chests, and shall not relax this code in the presence of other than their husbands, their fathers, the fathers of their husbands, their sons, the sons of their husbands, their brothers, the sons of their brothers, the sons of their sisters, other women, the male servants or employees whose sexual drive has been nullified, or the children who have not reached puberty’ (Sura 24 (Al-Nur): 31) The hadith, which recounts the acts of Muhammad, goes further, requiring the covering of the neck, ankles and wrists Zealous Muslims promote the wearing of the burqa, a term usually taken to refer to the niqāb and the abaya * These events inspired Orhan Pamuk’s seminal novel Snow (2002) Anyone wishing to understand the psychology of Islamic terrorism must read Pamuk’s imagined last conversation between the Kars Director of Education and his murderer * Jews have in fact outperformed Protestants in the United States over the past century, with significantly higher earnings and rates of self-employment Of the chief executive officers of Fortune magazine’s 100 largest companies in 2003, at least 10 per cent were Jews as were no fewer than 23 per cent of CEOs of the Forbes 400 Not only have Jews been disproportionately successful in starting financial firms; they were also founders or co-founders of some of the world’s biggest technology companies, for example Dell, Google, Intel and Oracle * These transatlantic differences are smaller than used to be the case, however Unemployment has risen much higher in the United States than in most of the European Union as a result of the financial crisis; within the OECD, at the time of writing, only Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain have a higher jobless rate than the US Measured as a five-year (1996–2000) average of days not worked due to strike action per 1,000 employees, Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Italy and France are all more strike-prone than the United States, but the other members of the European Union are less so * The song was later covered by the British singer, record producer and convicted paedophile Jonathan King (Charterhouse and Trinity, Cambridge), also noteworthy for having produced ‘Leap Up and Down (Wave your Knickers in the Air)’ and the original cast album of The Rocky Horror Show * Even at the real Woodstock, the Who had premiered parts of Tommy, Pete Townsend’s rock opera about a deaf, dumb and blind messiah * Chiang had converted to Christianity in 1930 His wife was one of the daughters of the Methodist millionaire Charlie Soong I have used the more familiar Wade-Giles form of his name and also of Sun Yat-sen’s (pinyin: Jiang Jeshi and Sūn Yixiān) * Comparable organizations in the United States include the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) There are also American branches of the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth * In his 1966 book, Tragedy and Hope, Quigley attributed great power to a mysterious Anglo-American ‘secret society’ allegedly founded by Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner and the journalist William T Stead and devoted to ‘extend[ing] the British Empire’ and converting it into a federation The ‘Rhodes–Milner group’ and its Round Table affiliates, Quigley claimed, were responsible for the Boer War, the weakening of the Versailles Treaty and the appeasement of Nazi Germany After Milner’s death in 1925, this group continued to exert a malign influence through the Rhodes Trust, the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York Quigley exaggerated both the secrecy and the success of Milner’s activities * Born in Yorkshire in 1881, Richardson was a Quaker, a conscientious objector during the First World War (though he did drive ambulances on the Western Front) and a proponent of Esperanto It depressed him that he could find no evidence of a trend towards less war, nor any strong statistical predictor of when and where war would occur, beyond two relatively weak relationships: wars were more common between neighbouring states and more likely between states with different religions * In fact the total current dollar gross domestic product for all the countries defined by Huntington as Western has remained remarkably constant at between 61 and 69 per cent of the global total since 1960 * The only commodities in the comprehensive International Monetary Fund database that have not gone up in price since February 2009 are natural gas, wood, olive oil, shrimp and chicken – good news for anyone planning a surf and turf barbecue * I would suggest the King James Bible, Isaac Newton’s Principia, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species – to which should be added William Shakespeare’s plays and selected speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill If I had to select just a single volume as my Koran, it would be Shakespeare’s complete works ... resist the encroachment of Western patterns of marketing and consumption, as well as the Western lifestyle itself More and more human beings eat a Western diet, wear Western clothes and live in Western... not another self-satisfied version of The Triumph of the West I want to show that it was not just Western superiority that led to the conquest and colonization of so much of the rest of the world;... between the Western core and the Rest’s periphery But what if the whole world eventually ends up being Westernized, in appearance and lifestyle at least? Or could it be that the other civilizations