“In 1412, Europe was a miserable backwater, while the East was home to dazzling civilizations. So how did the West come to dominate the rest?”Ferguson has picked up competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism and work ethics as the reasons for the domination of West during last five centuries and supported his argument with ample historical evidences. This book is a proof for Ferguson’s ability to tell history in an interesting way: even with so much of historical information an...

What caused the ascendancy of Western Europe over and against much larger, more established, homogenous and resource rich clans, kingdoms, empires? Professor Ferguson lays out six "killer apps" that the West possessed or developed that the Rest lacked to varying degree (p. 305-6): 1. Competition, in that Europe itself was politically fragmented and that within each monarchy or republic there were multiple competing corporate entities.2. The Scientific Revolution, in that all the major seventeent...

THE ACTUAL REVIEW AS OPPOSED TO THE COMPLAINT ABOUT THE TITLENiall Ferguson is exhausting. He leaps, darts, pirhouettes, swandives, uses statistics as Molotov cocktails, he quotes, he hectors, he nudges, he booms, he hollers, he balances, he bulldozes, his book is like 500 years of history considered as a switchback ride, most of which is spent upside down going at 120 miles per hour. The argument of this book is clear. NF wishes to explain why the West dominated the Rest for the last 500 years,...

Western civilization, the West. Decades ago, Edward Said noted Western Europe’s tendency to claim Greek, Roman, and even aspects of Egyptian civilization as its own. The Roman Empire has long been seen (perhaps anachronistically) by the West as a “Western” phenomenon, but it could instead be seen as a Mediterranean phenomenon. Certainly at the time Rome had less to do with the druids and barbarians in present-day northern Europe than it did tradesmen and soldiers from northern Africa and the Nea...

This was my first read of a book by the prolific historian Niall Ferguson. As a professor at Stanford, he is certainly not just anyone: he has an extensive list of publications to his name, is also a very public figure who presents himself as a right-wing conservative, does not shy away from polemics and likes to kick left-wing holy houses. Now, I think of myself as being above left or right (which is an illusion of course), but I have tried to read this book as open-minded as possible and that

This is a story that can be told in many ways. It's history, a history of the European dominance in world affairs and the reasons for it. It's geopolitics told through Ferguson's prism which receives the vast record of European history during the last several hundred years and projects it into a patten. The West has dominated, he explains, because they differed from the Rest, or excelled while the Rest didn't, in 6 key areas: the spirit of competition, the scientific revolution in the West, stro...

Audio book cage match! Niall Ferguson vs. Jared Diamond! Two explanations of western domination of the world go in, only one comes out!(view spoiler)[not really (hide spoiler)]Ferguson and Diamond are public intellectuals, conservative and liberal, respectively, in the modern-day US political sense of the c- and l-words. Both of them have, with great effort, constructed historical folk narratives of how the world got the way it is, whether that way is a good thing, and what will cause that way t...

Ferguson’s latest book, grandiosely entitled “Civilization”, is a vapid, meandering, and mostly pointless effort that falls woefully short of its ambitious goals. His stated intention is to explain the rise of “the West” from the 15th century backwater that was pre-renaissance Europe to the utterly dominant powers they became in the 19th and 20th centuries. Not only does he offer no novel explanation or nuanced interpretation, but his very answer is incoherent, disorganized, and downright simpli...

I read everything this man writes that I can lay my hands on. He’s an opinionated, deeply informed, pungent, pugnacious, provocative and often surprising writer. On these scores, his latest book doesn’t disappoint.A companion volume to British television series of the same name, this trans-Atlantic historian (he teaches at Harvard and Oxford and this year at the London School of Economics) argues the West grew to world dominance because it embraced competition, the scientific revolution, the rul...

Civilisation is historian Niall Furguson’s attempt to answer what he sees as perhaps the most important historical question; how did the West go from being the world’s backwater, in the early 15th century, to come to dominate the rest?Furguson was inspired to write this book in the wake of China’s impressive rise, exemplified by the speed of their economic ascent, their superlative Olympic Games and their impressive cities. Furguson notes that there is an air of concern in the West that we are w...

Ferguson raises a good question, answers it himself, and gives a far-ranging tour of history to show that he's basically right. Why has the Western world been dominant for 500 years? His answer is its six virtues of competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic. Ferguson upholds the worth of these virtues, and shows that they've enabled enormous progress around the world. He considers the recent setbacks and deficiencies of Western societies, but remai...

This book has some problematic aspects, which I mentioned earlier in my general account on Goodreads (see here). I'll ignore them here, and want to focus on what this book contributes to the 'Great Divergence' debate, the scientific debate about how the West has managed to dominate the world. Half a library has been written about which factor was decisive. I'd like to refer to the Wiki article which perfectly sums up this extremely engaging discussion. Of course, numerous perspectives are concei...

A must-read for history buffs. Surprisingly, the most interesting stats are on China. Ferguson loses credibility only when opining that tall height is a western introduction. (Colonial New England diarists habitually recount 6 foot native men, and Maasai male warriors average just under 7 ft.) Wow moments :---------—-“In 1500… the biggest city was Beijing, with a population of 600,000 to 700,000.”“As late as 1776, Adam Smith could still refer to China as ‘one of the richest, that is, one of the

It's not a good sign when you spend an entire book wondering "What exactly are you getting at?" I admired Ferguson's book on the history of finance and Jared Diamond's much more famous book on why the West dominated the world, so I expected to enjoy this. While it does have some novel discussions (for example, comparing how England, France, and Germany comported themselves in the treatment of their colonies), I was generally unimpressed by Ferguson's failure to tie his observations into a larger...

Prolific Oxford, Harvard and Stanford professor Niall Ferguson continues his excellent string of publications with a well researched and erudite tour of the past 500 years of western civilization. The book is very, very detailed (over 700 end notes, plus a 30 page bibliography), but extremely readable. Its many facts are both interesting and woven together logically and chronologically to support a central thesis - that the West has predominated because it developed six killer apps: competition,...

"...all that we admire on this earth - science, art, technical skill and invention - is the creative product of only a small number of nations...All this culture depends on them for its very existence...If we divide the human race into three categories - founders, maintainers, and destroyers of culture - the Aryan stock alone can be considered as representing the first category...".Hitler doesn't have a goodreads account, so we have to look in Mein Kampf to see what he would have to say about th...

This dude is a genius. I never hesitate to read every article I come across in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, or wherever his name pops up but this is only my second book length material after reading Colossus over ten years ago. This was a combo of Colossus and Guns, Germs and Steel - why some civilizations make it and others do not. If macro-history was a real word, I would use it to describe this book but it isn't so I won't.

thanks, I hate it

Is Niall Ferguson an historian? Some people doubt it. I can see what they mean when reading "Civilization, the west and the rest". He is certainly no historian who just relates what happend and how it happend. He is not afraid to give his view on the way the West gained supremacy over the rest the last 500 years or so. I see him more as a pamphleteer, an opinionater, a publicist with a historical streak. His thesis why the west became dominant rests on the 'six killer applications' (to use a mod...