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And so today I'm pleased to welcome acclaimed historian and classics expert Ian Morris who is with us to discuss why the West rules for now of why the West rules Kirkus Reviews writes that it is a formidable richly engrossing effort to determine why Western institutions dominate the world. Readers will enjoy Morris's lively prose an impressive combination of scholarship with economics and science a superior contribution to the grand theory of human history genre and from foreign affairs. Morris is the world's most talented ancient historian and man as much at home with the state of the art technology. State of the art archaeology as with the classics as they used to be studied he has brilliantly pulled off what few modern academics would dare to attempt a single volume history of the world that offers a bold and original answer to the question why did the societies that make up the west pull ahead of the rest. Not once but twice and most spectacularly in the modern era after around 1900. Morris uses his own ingenious index of social development as a basis for his answer. Mr. Mars is a classics and history professor at Stanford University. He has served as associate dean of

humanities and Sciences chair of the classics department and director of the social science history Institute. He also founded the Stanford archaeology center and directed excavations in Greece and Italy. Faster more is has been a word Fellowship's from various foundations including the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for humanities excuse me Pretty's works include death ritual and social structure in classic antiquity burial an ancient society and Mr. Morrison is the editor of classical Greece ancient histories and modern archaeology is. We are thrilled to have him with us today so please join me in welcoming in marce. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. Thank you. All turning out on a Friday afternoon to come and hear me talk for a while. And it's very nice to be here the last time I was in Cambridge I in fact came here and did my level best to support the local bookstore economy. I spent a great deal more than I made for being here in space about half an hour. So I hope you will do the same. Not just on my book but particularly on my book. So OK I'm here to talk about

this new book. Beautifully produced by the fine people at Farrar Straus and Giroux. Why the West rules for now. The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future. So OK. That's what I talk about. So you might well ask does the West drool is the title the book even a sensible title. I learned from my close study of the little book I got called The Economist pocket's world in figures which are the source of all the facts you need for life. I learn from this book that the nations of Europe and North America own two thirds of the capital in the world own roughly two thirds of the weapons. I've spent more than two thirds of the research and development money in the world and yet have only one seventh of the population. Now there's all kinds we could talk for a long time about what we mean by an expression like the West rules but there's never been anything quite like this level of global dominance by one fairly small part of the planet. Never before in the whole of its history. And this is something I think that really doesn't need to be explained. The second part of it the title for now this

obviously implies something is going on here. Things are not going ahead just as usual. You might have seen in the papers yesterday morning the announcements that China has just unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer. It's not just like a little bit fast. It's like a lot faster than the next biggest supercomputer in the world. Things are changing. Everybody's aware of this. I got my own personal reminder of the degree of change. A couple of Saturdays ago when I began this book tour thing I got this call I sold. You have been invited to go on TV to talk about your book and I thought excellence the big time. So yes you're going to be on a San Francisco news station. Also very good. They tell me this is news. The guy runs the show. He's a very dynamic guy. He does not want to be confined in a studio like some boring old style news guy is going to strike out boldly into the community and broadcasting among the people. So you need to meet him on Saturday morning at the apple at home appliance superstore in San Jose. So I drive down there and I get there it is like

acres of parking lot just to meet you know acres of empty parking lot. And we're right under the flight path the sun is had for these planes going in every direction. So here I park and I get out I go in this store and it's Whew. And I walk and I walk and I walk past miles of appliances and never seen so many appliances. But finally I get them and Henry the guy running the show a success. Great. OK. Here's the deal we got 10 minutes with the gadget guy. We're very lucky the gadget guy can be with us today. Ten minutes of the gadget guy. Then we got the 15 minute cooking section but we got five minutes in between. And this is where you get to go. So this is just just getting better and better. But we did a really good really good conversation. Excellent discussion. We're coming to the end of our five minutes. And he says to me so. So OK so why is it that you. What makes you think that Western global dominance is coming to an end. It was stunning that when I look around I mean as far as you see in every direction that all these home appliances tens of thousands of them. And I did a little check on the way. It seemed that every last one of them was made in

South Korea Taiwan or the Republic of China. And we're talking about what makes me think that maybe Western dominance is coming to an end is kind of a surreal experience. But anyway that was how I started off the book tour here put me in the right frame of mind I think well OK and famous amateur historian Winston Churchill once said the father backwards you can look the farther forward you are likely to see. And this is kind of the basic drive behind writing this book for me the idea that we can understand a great deal about the world and where the world is going if we understand its history properly and this is an idea that I think gets a lot of lip service but is not always actually taken very seriously by people. So I thought I should write a book about it explaining why this is in fact a really good idea. And one of the things that drew me to being a historian in the first place was this is a question of did the world have to turn out the way that it did. Could it have turned out completely differently what would it be like if the world had turned out very differently from the way it did. So I start

this book with a scene set in London in 1848 but this is not London of 1848 like you might be familiar with. This is a kind of Twilight Zone version of London in 1848 and in this London instead of winning the Opium War or the squalid war against China the British fought in the early 1840s instead of Britain winning that war then sending its ships into China to dictate peace terms. The Chinese government in my version the Chinese have sent a fleet to Britain to impose peace terms on Britain and the new Chinese government she going come to London to formally invest. Queen Victoria is a vassal of the Chinese Empire. And then take Prince Albert back to Beijing to sign all the paperwork and formally submits Britain to the Chinese Empire. Well the reality of course is that history didn't turn out that way and the book is basically about why it doesn't turn out that way. In reality the British Empire shattered the regime of Dow Guang the Chinese emperor in the 1840s and they then came back again in the late

1850s and shattered the regime of Shan Fang Guang son beat him up even worse. And this is what leads me to the central question in the book and I thought I would just read you a little bit out of the book I said and describe what my core question is picking up from this business with Dow Guang Shan thing. So OK. Prince Albert expired just a few months after Shannah thing despite spending years campaigning to persuade the British government that poor Dranes spread disease. Albert probably died from typhoid character wins the castle's wretched sewers sadder still Victoria who is as deeply enamored of modern plumbing as Albert was in the bathroom when he passed away. Robbed of the love of her life. Victoria sent deeper into moods and melancholy but she was not completely alone. British officers presented her with one of the finest curiosities they'd looted from the Summer Palace in Beijing. A Pekinese dog. She named him Lootie. Well why did history follow the path that took Lootie to Balmoral Castle there to grow older Victoria rather

than the one that took Albert to study Confucius in Beijing. Why did British boats shoot their way up the young sea in 1842 rather than Chinese ones up the Thames to put it bluntly. Why does the West rule. So that's my starting point. The core question I try to answer in this book and countless theories being dreamed up about this in the last few hundred years. I talk about a bunch of these in the book I suggest though that the real answer to this question of why it was the small group of nations in the West rather than some other part of the world or no part of the world at all that came to be dominant in the 19th and 20th centuries. The real explanation I suggest is simply geography. Now this is a very simple straightforward one word answer. I say it's not driven by culture. It's not driven by great men or bungling idiots it's not driven by religious differences or political institutions. It's all about geography. Now there's a famous quotation I cite in my book that often gets brought up by people who think geography is important but it's from a book by a guy named Bentley written about 100

years ago his book was called the art of biography and what he explains in the first sentence of his book. He says the art of biography is different from geography. Biography is about chups but geography is about maps. I took this as my mantra in the book that basically I'm saying it's the maps stupid. This is the explanation for everything that's going on now. OK. On this question I think if it is really that simple with geography really answers these great questions to our two questions would come up in this one. Is it everything is so simple why is history so complicated and so messy. Why do you need a 768 page book to give a one word answer to this question if it's really that simple. Second part I think would be to say what if it's so simple why isn't everybody else already saying it it's all so obvious. What I suggest in the book is that while geography has really answered this question of why it's the west that is dominant it doesn't do so in a simple way. Geography is like a two way street. And so I

suggest on the one hand geography drives the development of societies geography is responsible to how societies develop. But on the other hand how societies develop change is what geography means and it kind of goes back and forth and this explains about why wealth and power have shifted around the world at different periods because this is complicated back and forth process going on now another one of these famous definitions either one of my favorite ones here and rather prone to these things you're probably gathering now another humorous from 100 years ago. Ambrose Bierce wrote a very famous book called The Devil's Dictionary full of scandalous and shocking definitions of things. So at one point you sent a letter H in the devil's dictionary and it tells you history now in an account mostly false of events mostly unimportant which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves and soldiers mostly fools. Now I found that on the whole that's not a bad definition of what passes for history. But I spend most of my book trying to show how the messiness of real history because it is a

very messy business how the messiness of real history can actually be accommodated within this very simple theory that geography is the driver of this grand scale of why the west came to be the dominant part of the world. Now obviously to get the full pleasures of my theory you need to buy and read my book. That's obviously the way to proceed. But since I'm here for about 10 minutes now I want to give you rather breathless tour of world history explaining what I mean by saying I know make utterance is one sentence thing that geography drive social development but social development drives what geography means. So I want to flip back 15000 years which is what I do in the book as well go back fifteen thousand years to the end of the ice age and then zip back forward right up to present times explaining why my core thesis here and trying to convince you that this actually makes some sense. So if you zip back fifteen thousand years to the end of the ice age and you look at the planet there's about half a dozen places around the world

where when the world starts warming up 15000 years ago where people start to domesticate plants and animals and become farmers and these half dozen places are dictated by geography. There are only certain kinds of wild plants and animals that can be profitably domesticated and they don't pop up just anywhere anything but randomly distributed they tend to be in a very narrow band of latitudes running across the old and new worlds. And out of these half dozen places the half dozen places are not the same either. Geography again determined that some of these places had very dense concentrations of potentially domestic plants and animals. Others had just a few potentially domestic plants and animals others had none at all. If you lived in Siberia you could not have an independent agricultural revolution because you know you can't domesticate pine trees and turn them into valuable food crops just can't be done. Now all of these half dozen or so places around the world where domestication is possible. The one that has the densest concentrate the densest concentrations of all at the end of the Ice Age

was what archeologists like to call the hilly flanks an area in southwest Asia running around roughly the borderlands of what we now call Iran Iraq Turkey Syria Jordan Lebanon Israel and then curving around in a loop around this area. And I forget the exact numbers. I put them in the book but a remarkable proportion of the world's major domesticated plants and animals and their wild precursors in this region. Now it's not surprising that because of that this was the part of the world where domestication began first before 9000 B.C. people are all already domesticating plants and animals here. Yields are growing on their farms and there's far more people living in this area as they begin domestication. The complexity and level of development as a society begins to increase as population grows over the next few thousand years. Other parts of the world that have somewhat dense concentrations of plants and animals they begin to domesticate too. And so has spread around the world invented independently in other places but it's driven entirely by the

geography the climate the ecology where animals and plants are able to evolve entirely driven by geography. Now as this process goes on the population booms in these places where farm has been introduced farming starts to spread outward through a combination of people migrating from the original core areas or people who live around the course of copying what's being done there farms spread out from these original core areas. And in the western end of Eurasia the societies that descend from this original Western core farming spreads really quickly into Central Asia really quickly across Europe across a band of latitudes where the climate is all kind of similar. That's very very quickly spreads very slowly though from the hilly flanks down to the south and to what we now call Iraq. Because if you go from if you're a farmer in the flanks you get a lot of rainfall. You can grow your crops from rainfall if you go down into what's now Iraq. I mean we've all seen Iraq on CNN in the last few years enough to last us a lifetime. We know it doesn't rain a heck of a lot in Iraq. There's a lot of sand everywhere you look. It's really hard to be a farmer there

if you can plant your crops and wait for the rainfall. You're going to have a very very bad year you're going to die. So it's hard to get farming going there now do the geography is a constraint on these people. Now in order to get pharming going what they've got to do in Iraq is figure out how to third slice their crops with river water by irrigation because it doesn't sound so difficult to you dig a ditch. You dig a big hole. The water runs out of the river when it floods it goes in the big hole when you need the water you take it out of the big hole. That's all sounds quite straightforward it's actually way more difficult than that is a lot of technicalities you've got to solve. It takes a couple of thousand years for people to perfect irrigation techniques in Iraq but at this point something very dramatic happens once they perfected the irrigation techniques once society has developed to the point they can do this. It changes what geography means now that they can use the river water to integrate their crops. They become much more productive than the people back in the original agricultural Corps so relying on rainfall. So geography constrains what you can do as a farmer.

But when you develop the new techniques to make make things work in a new area you change the meanings of geography. The core areas in the West very rapidly shift from the old hilly flanks down into Mesopotamia modern Iraq and also down to Egypt the great river valleys because people have now worked out how to make these things work for them. This is where cities and states first develop great rivers a huge importance for these for trading goods around as well as for fertilizing the fields. Empires then begin to develop there as well. When empires develop having access to great bodies of water great seas rather than just rivers that begins to become enormously important to the rise of Empires changes the meanings of geography in Western Eurasia. The center of gravity shifts into the Mediterranean basin we get the Roman Empire becomes the great power now because access to the Mediterranean Sea is becoming so important. Well over the next few centuries we've got a band of Empires developing all across the old world from Rome and the West to Han Dynasty China in the east huge empires

populations in the tens of millions cities of hundreds of thousands of people. And this growth pushes social development up more and more as social development increases. Geography continues to change its meanings and in particular what we see in the age of the Roman and Han empires is and the steps this big band. They're very open bands of land from Mongolia to Hungary. This turns into a kind of highway linking Eurasia from one end to the other. People start moving around at high speed on their horses on the state highway raiding the great empires of the South before of course the empires weren't there step nomadism didn't really pay the rise empires changes the meanings of geography. Unfortunately one of the big stories in the book that we see is that you don't get to control the meanings of geography it always changes in ways you didn't quite expect the creation of this step highway from end to end of Eurasia. This starts to undermine the very empires that are fed it in the first few centuries of the first millennium A.D. the great migrations begin to undermine all the huge

empires that the way they change geography undermines the empires themselves. All these empires collapse after about 200 A.D. then geography changes meanings. Once again China gets reunited in the sixth century the western end of Eurasia doesn't buy re-uniting the whole of China. The Chinese government is able to draw the fertile rice lands in southern China into a single great empire. Population explodes this becomes the golden age of Chinese culture. The Tang dynasty in particular if you like classical Chinese poetry most of what you read wellby Tang dynasty like 7th through the 9th century is basically the golden age of Chinese culture Chinese inventions and the western end of Eurasia. They're not able to re-unite politically. Social decline and fragmentation continues for centuries at the western end of Eurasia through lots of people working in Europe would call the Middle Ages. China is the absolute center of the world the richest and most powerful part of the planet. Now once again though rising social development

continues to change the meanings of geography medieval China is a place of incredible scientific and technological invention inventiveness and two of their inventions in particular turned out to be hugely important. This is kind of the big turning point I think in many ways in the way geographies interacted with social development. These two big inventions they are ships that can cross the oceans and guns that you can rely on to kill people. And these are great inventions who everybody loves ships and guns and these spread like wildfire across Eurasia. It takes the first gun that we know the first working gun was made in 12 88 is found in Manchuria in northeast China by 13:28 just 40 years later. There's a manuscript in Oxford in England that has an illustration of vastly superior guns in that in 40 years. It's split five thousand miles and been dramatically improved in the process. This site everybody loves the ships and the guns you can sail across oceans when you get to the other side. You can shoot the people that you meet. There are huge advantages. But what the ships and

guns do is change the meaning of geography in a very spectacular way. Now ever since the continents settle down in roughly modern positions Western Europe has been about 3000 miles from the Americas. China has been about 6000 miles in the Americas you have to go. You have to loop around a little bit in the Pacific to get from China to the New World to take advantage of the winds and the tides. Western Europe has been twice as close to the Americas as China is now. Almost all of history. Really who cares. It doesn't matter because nobody can cross the ocean so it doesn't matter how close you are if you can't cross the oceans. Just doesn't matter very abruptly in the 15th century. People begin to be able to cross the oceans and all of a sudden this geographical facts the distance between America and the east and west ends of Eurasia. This goes from just being a fact of no particular interest to being the most important fact in the world. Now people can cross the oceans but for Europeans it's only half as far to go to the Americas as it is for Chinese. Other things being

equal it's going to be roughly twice as likely that Europeans will be the ones who bump into the Americas colonized the Americas and plunder the Americas. I suggest in the book that the given time given a few more centuries it's highly likely that Chinese and Japanese sailors and Korean sailors would have come to the west coast of the Americas would have breathed their disgusting germs on the Native Americans rather than it being Europeans breathing their germs on the natives would have decimated the native population of the Americas just like the Europeans did or have colonized and plundered the Americas just like Europeans did. But they didn't have the centuries because it was so much easier for the Europeans to do it. So because by the 16th century Europeans are starting to settle down all over North America South America Central America as they do this. It changes the meanings of geography once again. And by the 17th century it's becoming vitally important for Europeans to understand how the winds and the tides and astronomy work in a way that all of these complex

societies have people are interested in these things. But for your West Europeans by the 17th century this is the biggest question in the world. How do the winds and tides work or how do the stars work. How does all this stuff fit together. They new ways of looking at nature being kind of thrust on to people they're studying nature in new ways they're developing new mathematical techniques to allow them to describe and calculate what they're looking at. And this cascade of scientific breakthroughs follows in the 17th century and I think it's not because Isaac Newton was clever say the contemporary Chinese astronomers like way mending the guy who was director of the major Observatory in Beijing while Newton was active. Newton is probably no clever other than way was but different questions have been thrust upon him. Geography is making him and his intellectual peers confronted different set of problems. They're able to solve these problems begin to crack the secrets of nature in the 18th century. The Europeans are therefore the ones who apply these

scientific principles back onto society itself have what we normally call the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. The Europeans are the ones who start to confront a whole new set of problems particularly in Britain. What they find in Britain in the late 18th century is the new Atlantic economy they've created by colonizing the Americas moving slaves from Africa to the Americas moving rum from the Americas back to Britain. Changing the run for guns and taking that into Africa and trading for the slaves. They create this new economic system that drives wages up very very high. A lot of British manufacturers really begin to worry that they're not competitive anymore because they have to pay the workers so much. They're under great pressure to come up with innovations that would mechanize production and introduce fossil fuels power things with coal and steam rather than doing it with workers. Workers are just too expensive. The British face this in an extreme form and not surprisingly it's the British are the first ones to crack the secrets of fossil fuel. Britain has an industrial revolution rather than the Persian

Empire or or China or Japan because of the nature of the questions that geography has thrust upon people in Western Europe. Now when I was a youngster not so long ago I assure you when I was a youngster in school our history courses used to pretty much stop around 1870 because clearly that the feeling was in Britain that this was the right place to start. History things have been good. Britain had bestrode the world struggle whatever it is the world like a colossus in the 19th century British power reach everywhere. As the first nation to industrialize Britain was the first nation in history to be able to project its power on a global scale. History obviously ended somewhere in the 19th century. Nothing since and was very good. Now the problem the British had in the 19th century was this interaction of geography and social development didn't simply stop when Britain got to be top nation. It carried on working just as new inventions new ways of organizing society have been shrinking the world for the past few hundred years.

Shifting Britain to the center of the global economy in the 19th century exactly the same processes continue steamships the railroads make the Atlantic Ocean effectively get smaller and slow the north america gets drawn into this global economic system more and more North Americans discover ways to take the kind of industry the British have got and do it better and push the British off to one side of the horror of the West Europeans of course push them off to one side and North America emerges increasing in the center of the global economy. The end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century. Now Americans then start to have a bit of a shock to the process has still not stopped the same kind of forces of geography and development interacting with each other have continued in the late 20th century. They've effectively shrunk the Pacific Ocean. There's enormous body of water is no longer a great impediment it's now a great highway. We've seen just by the same logic that shifted the world centre of power and wealth from Europe over to the Americas in the 19th century. Exactly the same thing is continued in the 20th

century. Shifting it over into East Asia the last 50 years we've seen a kind of reinvention of industry science and finance technology in an Asian context. Until we reached the point where I am standing in a warehouse full of Asian appliances in San Jose a couple of Saturdays ago. The logic of geography and history have carried on working everything that we're now confronting has been driven by this transformation of geography since about the 14:00 geography explains why the West rules so. OK. That is the main part of the title of my book why the West rules for now. Geography has put the west on top of the world. Geography is currently knocking the west off the top of the world. But in my book obviously it has a subtitle to the subtitle is The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future. It seems to me that if like me you actually convince yourself that you've understood the larger patterns driving history and where they're going. Seems to me that you ought to be able

to do the Winston Churchill thing and project these forward gets some kind of rough sense of what the next century is likely to bring us. So this is what I try to do in the last part of my book the last chapter. And a lot of you probably like me. I love these books are people tell us what's going to happen in the future in the next century the coming hundred years as thousands of these things and always buying them in airports and devouring them like candy on the plane. I love these books. But there is one thing which I find sort of irritating about them that I find it almost always these books suggest that the future is going to be basically like the present but shine here and it will be bigger and faster and OK China will be richer. But otherwise it's all basically the same. And in it's what I like to call the Star Trek fan See I love Star Trek growing up Star Trek was great on the phases and that beaming people up and down is all so very cool. But then it dawned on me one day that Star Trek it's like you take

1965 L.A. where it was made and add some phases. And on warp drives and everything else stays exactly the same. The assumption is you can add this weird and wild technology and nothing else changes. And that I think is the one thing we can be 100 percent certain is not going to happen in the 21st century. We are not going to have more of us but shiny and richer. I suggest in my book that we can in fact predict I think fairly confidently that there were two paths of development which are one of these is likely to pan out not both. No compromise is very plausible. There are two possible outcomes. I think that we can see from the lessons of history for where the world is going in the next twentieth century. And one of these outcomes basically comes from just projecting forward the trends that we've been seeing recently taking 20th century rates of increasing social development and projecting them out and saying well what will happen if things just carried on exactly the same. And what will happen according to all the graphs and diagrams in my book is that

social development in the east will catch up with Western social development by the end of this century. And in fact I come out and say it will happen in the 21 03 3 I think you know everybody likes a precise prophecy and that is a nice sharp one the best kind of prophecy at all. Of all of course because I'll be dead in twenty one or three. So there's no price to pay for this. I mean obviously it's being a bit silly to say it's 2:39 and that's the number that is implied by the methods I use in the book. But if the roughly similar trends continue we should expect the differences between East and West in terms of development and power and wealth to disappear sometime in the second half of the 21st century. But interesting about this. It's one thing to say that justices say that straight out is another thing to ask you what does this mean if twentieth century rates of increases in development continue. What would this mean. Well in this book I got this elaborate scoring system I devised for calculating levels of social

development. If the 20th century trends were worth it to continue for another hundred years at the same rate of increase what it would mean is that the amount of change between now on the 21:00 will be roughly four times as great as the amount of change that we've seen between now and the end of the Ice Age 15000 years ago and that took us from your cave paintings to the Internet. You think four times as much change. This is something it's very very hard to picture for your regular mere mortals like us. I mean cities have 140 million people is the implication of the same way all of the world's greatest cities bundled into one. Impossible to imagine that it means weapons that will make everything in the world today simply irrelevant. We like the way the machine gun made the musk is irrelevant. But more so all of our nuclear weapons everything we've got will simply be laughable in a hundred years time and completely pointless kinds of weapons. But the thing that I think that's

most alarming to think about is what this means in terms of the technology of information and biology while people often call that link to revolutions in genetics nanotechnology in robotics that are going on all around us right now and the light outside Boston here around Silicon Valley where I live these the world is changing very very dramatically. A lot of technology experts have written on where this might be going. And one guy in particular very famous invented in Ray Kurzweil. He suggests that we should call what's going to happen in the 21st century. The singularity by which he says he means it will be change has happened so fast that it appears to be instantaneous nothing will stay the same for any measurable period of time the level of change is going to be so fast it's going to transcend biology. He suggests we can already any kind to see some of this stuff going on around us. Human bodies have already changed more in the last hundred years. They did in the previous 50000. If you have a hearing aid you have begun to merge your body with with technology.

If you have a pacemaker you begun to break down the biological machine divide. Already this is accelerating all the time in alarming kinds of ways. If the trends were to continue unbroke of another hundred years Kurzweil suggests. I mean while the details of what he says are probably going to be wrong and the general picture I think there's got to be right that 100 years from now human biology is going to be unrecognizable compared to what we're used to. So that's one lesson that we might draw out of history projecting the trends forward seeing where they lead us in 100 years time. The other lesson the second big lesson though is that when we look at the trends in the past all the time trends have generated the very forces that undermined them. Like say the Roman Empire and Dynasty China got very big and powerful. This creates these nomad movements across the steps which then become decisive in the fall of these empires and British industrialism in the 19th century creates this global economic network that then undermines Britain and takes the power in the world away from the British.

There's no reason to think that the same is not continuing to happen in the 20th century. In fact another slightly alarming thing that only struck me as I was writing the book there were a few periods in history where we see great collapses brought about by these forces undermining the trends in social development. Every single time there's been a great collapse we see the same package of forces doing the undermining what in an attempt to sound poetic and dramatic I call the five horsemen of the apocalypse. On one of these is mass uncontrollable migration. Another is the failure of state organizations breakdown of state. The third is large scale famine. The fourth is pandemic diseases and the fifth This is involved cleaning rather complicated ways differently in each period but always involved when there's a big collapse is large scale climate change and it can be cooling or warming. But that is always there. Now obviously you don't need me to tell you that these are five of the major things that you will find people wringing their hands

over it open Time magazine or the Economist or whatever weekly news magazine you open. These are five of the greatest forces that people are worrying about right now in the 21st century. It seems to me that it's perfectly plausible that in the 21st century we will see another collapse of the kind that's happened so often before in history. So in some ways or the 21st century may be a continuation of this cycle of collapses rather than surging social development. But with one great difference that when when the Roman Empire. You get the undermining of social development. You've got centuries of decline and fall. We are not going to have that luxury because we have invented things which make that a very unlikely outcome. Above all we've been building nuclear weapons even if the Senate in its infinite wisdom decides to ratify the latest arms reductions and we're still going to have more than enough nuclear weapons to kill everybody several times over we have the option if we decide to have a major global social clubs with the

option of killing everybody which is something we've never really had before I'm sure the Romans if it had nukes they would've killed everybody. They were good at that but they did. So yeah they had decline and fall. We have the option of nightfall. So it seems to me that the 21st century is going to be a kind of race between on the one hand the forces driving us toward what Kurzweil and his crowd would call the singularity. On the other hand the forces that undermine that driving us toward global collapse on a scale that's never been seen before. And either way I think we can be confident the next hundred years will see more change in the world than the previous hundred thousand years one way or another. Human beings are going to be very different things a hundred years from now than they currently are. And I think there's a kind of irony in this that most of my book is about explaining why the West rules for now. But once we understand what has caused the western wall what is causing it to be something is probably not going to be very long lived. We also begin to see that whether the West

rules or not really isn't a very important question. The world is going to change so much geography and even biology are going to change meaning so much I think 100 years from now this will just seem rather laughable question and people if there are such things in a hundred years time will find it very amusing that we all gathered in Harvard bookstore to talk about this. But OK I think I will wrap up now by just reading one last bit from the end part of my book. So I've been talking a little bit about this idea that things are changing so much that the very question the book is about is ceasing to have much of its meaning. So I say this should not be a shocking conclusion as long ago as 1889 while the world was still shrinking from size large to a size medium. A young poet named Rudyard Kipling could already see part of the same truth freshly back in London from the far flung battle line. Kipling got his big break with a ripping yarn of imperial daring to call the ballad of East and West. Many of you read the ballad of East and West. It tells a story of come owl a border raider who

steals an English Colonel's mare. The colonel's son leaps onto his own horse and pursues come out of the desert in a chase of epic proportions. They have ridden the low moon out of the sky. Their hoofs drum up the dawn. That done he went like a wounded bow. But the men like a new roused fawn that was getting engaged in case you hadn't noticed the change in tone a little bit Kipling voice finally though finally the Englishman is thrown from his horse. KAMAHL charges back at him rifle raised but all ends well. The two men looked each other between the eyes and there they found no fault. They've taken the oath of the brother in blood unleavened bread and salt stirring stuff. But it's a poem's opening line. Oh East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. That gets all the attention mostly from people quoting it as an example of the nineteenth century West's insufferable self-satisfaction. Yet that was surely not the fact Kipling was hoping for what he actually wrote was. And I want to be the first five lines of the poem which will only get quoted he said Oh East is

East and West is West and never the twain shall meet till earth and sky stand presently and God's great judgment seat. But there is neither east No west border nor breed nor birth. When two strong man two strong men stand face to face that they come from the ends of the earth. Now as Kipling saw it people were real men anyway are all much the same. It's just geography that obscures the truths requiring us to take a trip to the ends of the earth to figure things out. But in the 21st century soaring social development and a shrinking world are making such trips unnecessary. There will be neither east No west border no a breed no birth. When we transcend biology the twain shall finally meet. If we can just put up Knightfall long enough can we do that. I think the answer is yes. The great difference between the challenges we face today and those that defeated song China when it pressed against its limits a thousand years ago and the Roman Empire another thousand before that is that we now know so much more about the issues involved. Unlike the Romans in the song

our age may yet get the thought that it needs. On the last page of his book Collapse the biologist and geographer Jared Diamond suggested that there were two forces that might save the world from disaster archaeologists who uncover the details of earlier societies mistakes and television which broadcast their findings. As an archaeologist who watches a lot of television I certainly agree. But I also want to add a third savior. Historians only historians can draw together the grand narrative of social development. Only historians can explain the differences that divide humanity and how we can prevent them from destroying us. And this book I hope might help a little in the process. So thank you very much Phyllis you have the question was I talk a lot about east and west in the book that's sort of the way I organised and organized the whole thing. Where does Africa fit in the picture and yet Africa is a great example of this back and forth between geography and social development that Africa was the only part of the world in which modern humans could have evolved. The the

animals that evolved into us lived only in Africa. So we had to evolve. The geography was decisive in modern human evolution. Once modern humans have evolved though they are way brainier than any of their predecessors and they fanned out all over the globe. Rates of expansion that no other human like animal has done before. They are more complex animals they create more complex social groups. They're able to occupy all these new knishes they're able to settle down in places like Southwest Asia where at the end of the last ice age the domestication of crops and animals can begin. That couldn't happen. Indigenously in Africa because the wild precursors of plants like wheat or barley or rice or animals like cows or sheep goats they weren't there there weren't any Africa just like there weren't any in Australasia there weren't any in Siberia. There's only certain parts of the world where these things can happen so that those kind of centres of development shift out of Africa and subsequently as you get bigger and more complex societies in the

parts of the world where they can develop they expand and things start to spread back into Africa. So you get agriculture starting up in Egypt you get gradual spreading of Agriculture down across the Sahara Desert down into the southern parts of Africa. And by about 1000 A.D. are starting to get large organized states in Africa but the parts of the world where large organized states have begun so many thousands of years earlier always stay ahead. And this is one of the the sort of the unfairnesses of world history that other things being equal if you could kind of built a wall around Africa to keep everybody else out. And it seems to me pretty clear that given enough time Africa would've developed things like the Roman Empire would've developed things like the Industrial Revolution the Enlightenment the scientific revolution it all would have come to pass. But of course there wasn't a wall around Africa. So what happens is the societies that do develop these kinds of things first and then are able to project that power over much larger areas they then end up colonizing Africa.

So the African story is more complex than say the story of Australia or Northern Asia or something because this is Africa is the part where humans come from. But this same story of the interaction of geography and development I think this does gives a very global picture it allows us to see how all the different continents fit it together in the biggest story. Yeah well one or the other. The question was What exactly is this relationship between geography and social development that I've been talking about so much relevant standing up here. Yes. And I suggested the beginning of the book that to understand history properly there are three main things you need to know about one of these is biology. One is sociology and one is geography. And what I mean when I use those words I want to say you need to understand a little bit about biology to understand history. You need to know what we are that we we we are animals we're clever chimpanzees. We want things which are remarkably similar to what chimpanzees want. I become obsessed with trying

mythology recently. Incredible how like us chimps are we're just a bit better at getting what we want on the whole. We got the thumbs that we can talk a whole bunch of other stuff. We're very very like other kinds of animals. But another implication of the biology is that human beings are pretty much the same wherever and whenever you look at them throughout the whole of the last 50000 years of history across the whole of the world human beings are pretty much the same animals. The second thing is a sociology thing. Sociology I think shows are the social sciences more broadly show shows why societies develop in the precise kinds of ways that they do and why innovation sometimes catch on spread like wildfire. Why they sometimes don't. When you put the biology of the sociology together I think what you get is a like a universalizing theory of humanity tells you about all people in all times and places and it seems to me kind of logical that the result of that would be the differences between societies in different places are probably going to be driven by the geographical differences that you put the

same kinds of people who basically construct the same kinds of societies in different environmental unleashes the environment is going to determine how their societies evolve. Just like goes with biologists again this is one of the big things if you study evolution the environment in which species is operating tends to be the decisive thing in determining how that with a one particular colony may evolve very differently from another just by being in a different environment. A One of the big things I try to do in the book is to go through the details of history and see is this true is it really geographical differences which have led to things like the industrial revolution happening in this one place rather than that of the place. Because this forces me to go into all the kind of stories that normally tell history books and rightly so. And you're looking at the you know the doings of great man and the spectacular mistakes that have been made and the differences between religion and art and philosophy in different places and constantly asking the question. Does it seem to be the bungling idiots or the

religion. This is really driving the differences between different places. Or does it just seem to be a function of putting similar kinds of humans in different geographical unleashes and the officer are as I keep saying I think it's very much the geography that shapes the different directions. Yes. Yeah the follow up question was you know do I see in the 21st century as geography basically loses its meaning. So I see a kind of blurring of everybody else into a giant circle singing Kumbaya or something and everything becomes more or less the same. And I guess I mean in a way in a way yes. And it seems to me there's multiple ways in which this can happen. So you know one of the worst case scenario scenarios we say there is a catastrophic nuclear war. Einstein had this great line he said at one point to a journalist in the New York Times I don't know what weapons they're going to use in the third world war. But I do know what they'll use in the fourth world war. Will be rocks. And if something like that were to happen you could say to a great extent geography will have the meanings of geography we basically the same as they

were during the stone age back in the ice age to be completely different from the sort of meanings or geography we used to now. If on the other hand something like one of these science fiction type scenarios plays out like the one I mentioned Ray Kurzweil and his scenario is that basically the difference between biological brains and machine intelligence is simply going to note that he feels that there isn't really much difference anyway and it's very condescending offices are about artificial intelligence because it's just as real intelligence is hours and hours will start to seem a very sloppy messy hot and wet kind of intelligence. In a few years time we will basically merge with the machines. Obviously he doesn't know if this is really going to happen and I don't know if that's really going to happen nobody does but the trends that things are taking suggest that something of this type is going on around us. I one of our favorite examples when I cite in the book is one of the projects that comes out of dark the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration the people who brought the Internet to one of their favorite things at the moment is implanting molecular scale

computers into human brains. We already have these molecular scale computers certain kinds of cancer can be treated with little mini computers just a couple of molecules across made of enzymes and DNA that's injected into your bloodstream and can calculate which other disease cells and sort of design a strategy to tackle them it's really it's bizarre. This is actually real though about so Dapra is working on similar things that will be implanted directly into the brain that will give soldiers some of the advantages of machine intelligence. So it'll leave you able to think like a human animal but speed up the synoptic connections it'll give you something more like the kind of memory you have on a computer where you can you just download stuff into your head and it will give you internet access from the convenience of your skull. I mean how great is that. I was on the Amtrak today coming up from New York and the Internet access was not so good when I can do it from here. That's just going to be swell. It probably isn't going to be swell these are the sort of things people are talking about the NSF report just a couple of years ago suggested in all seriousness though what they were calling

network enhanced telepathy is going to be a reality in the 2020s. So this is not. I mean it is science fiction still but it's not the wilder fringes of science fiction. So we have something even vaguely like that plays out. I think not just the meanings of geography but the most basic meanings of sociology and biology I mean for us today are simply going to be totally different it's going to be an utterly different kind of planets. Yes. Yes. You know the question about yes is about other forms of singularity that might be out there particularly because a lot of religious traditions offers very different views of the coming days. Most religious traditions seem to feel that the are and days they are pretty close to us. And yes because we're in with kurze Wiles work in some of its critics will often describe it as the Rapture. It's a technological version of the last days. And yet I mean you do have to wonder whether the some of some of the similarities between what some of the technologists are

seeing in our future and the sort of ideas that we know about religious traditions for a very long time. And my impression from looking at the language of human history is that none of the great religious traditions really explain the world very well. I mean this is obviously other people differ in this. It's perfectly possible for people to come to utterly different conclusions from looking at history and that's fine with me I'm going go ahead and do that. I mean I guess I I feel that history can give us at least some guide to what the future might hold even if it's only in the sense that their history is the worst possible guide to what is going to happen next except for all the other guy it's kind of sad. I think it can give us a guide to what the future holds that deserves to be taken just as seriously as the ideas have been around and the great religious and philosophical traditions of the last few thousand years. And they ought to be compared against each other. And it may be that somebody is able to come along and show that this is all complete nonsense and the world is going a very very different direction from what I think. But

I would challenge them to go ahead and do that and see how it turns out. Yes yes yes. Given Yes the question is given the impact of climate change on the world and particularly the physical being in the world as the climate change is something like the Ray Kurzweil solution of a merging of biology and machine might well be the way to go because one of those things is I'm sure you're aware is there the physical carbon based bodies will become less and less important as there's a merging of the electrical patterns in our brains with the hard drive type arrangements for keeping us on bizarre bizarre the vision and again because you can read all kinds of things into recent trends. I think it's it's not completely crazy to see something along these lines all that happening. And one of the most important things going on in the world has been the demographic shift that after a generation of very rapid population growth the population growth is now slowing we can be fairly confident the world's population will peak around 2050 around 9 billion people which still a lot more people.

But it's not going to carry on going indefinitely. People are having fewer and fewer children. We're living longer and longer. This is one of the reasons why I'm suggesting that the next hundred years will change what it means to be human more than the previous hundred thousand. The way we live now would have just been unimaginable to human beings to most of history. All of this stuff we just take for granted. I will say to most of history half of us in this room would have died before we won. So this is just a universal truth of the half has survived what. First of all looking around the room. Very few of us would still be here now. The average adult age of death tends to be around late 30s early 40s. Is a little bit but this is a fact of life for all humans. Almost all of history the fact that we are regularly regularly living into our 80s. They're sort of astonished people throughout history our level of health I mean you know our eyes and ears begin to give out on us. We just get them fixed on our joints. So we just get it fixed. We go out we get some botox we

look better than we did when we were little kids maybe you know you got I think the thing that would have amazed the emperors of ancient Rome say more than anything was via agrah. They would have given their kingdoms via. And all of these things. This is just no big deal now. All of this would be magic. All of this would seem like Harry Potter seems seem to us when we go to the movies just so utterly different. Our bodies are so different from those that humans have had to almost all of history. We are typically 50 percent bigger than humans we're a hundred years ago. When I say we I mean the entire planet and how people typically live 30 years longer this is not just imagination. Even in Africa you was scourge by AIDS and malaria. People live typically 20 years longer now than they did in 1900. We typically carry 50 percent more fat and I've seen the ritual maybe a little bit too much fat but we carry more fat our organs are bigger more disease and trauma resistance. We would have seen like Superman to people 500 years ago. And this of course is just the very very

beginning. If I were to suggest that wow we are we pretty much run and run the whole thing now isn't genetic manipulation stem cell surgery is all overblown nothing really is going to happen. You obviously think those an idiot and we're just beginning the transformations. And so we are getting whether it leads to the specifics or the things that may cause while many of the other predictors say. Who knows. Probably not highly unlikely that it will. But I think that the very nature of our biology is changing 100 years from now it's just going to be totally different. And maybe if things proceed smoothly and successfully we will live in a world where human beings as we know them that evolutionary lifespan will have basically phased out and a new kind of animal will have taken their place or maybe will live in a world where we've eradicated ourselves and cockroaches will take our places. But I am very confident it's going to be different. Yes. Very good question yeah. In the book I focus very much on the eastern and western ends of Eurasia and tell us is that as you say sort of two to stream

story. Originally when I was planning the book I'd originally planned to have it like a three legged stool. And in South Asia I was going to be the third area that I looked at which is the other area of very very high levels of social development throughout history and in the end I didn't go that way. And largely it was driven by practicalities that I realized quite early on that I just couldn't write the book in the way that I wanted to write which is the way it ended up being written. I couldn't write it as a three part story partly because it was just getting too complicated and messy partly because it was getting too long so it seemed to me that the logic of what I was doing required me to have something I needed at least a two way comparison thing. I didn't necessarily have to have a three way comparison in that. I mean the book is asking is there something in the distant past that happened to make the west different for the whole of the rest of the planet and set the west stuff down this course of development that led inevitably to Western domination or is

this more recent group of theories correct that says east and west in fact all of the complex societies in the world have been more or less the same until very very recently when some weird little accident tipped the west into an industrial revolution. Everything was the same until recently or everything was different from in the distant past. Now to to test the thesis like that all I actually need to do is look at one other major developmental tradition in the world and find out if it turns out that say the West had always had higher levels of social development the whole of the rest of the world than that would suggest these long term Lochend theories are broadly true. If it turned out that the West did not always had higher social development of the east which is the reality then these long term theories can't be right. If there's been periods as a twelve hundred year period in which Eastern social developed is higher than western. So the long term Lochend theories cannot be right. Nor can the short term accident theories because through most of history western development has been

higher than other parts. So yeah I mean it's certainly not a perfect solution. What I did it was forced on me partly just by the logistics of writing a book. Partly I think it is reasonably justified by the nature of the comparison they're making. And throughout history the parts of the world that have the highest social development of always been areas that descend from one of these two cores in either the east or the West. There are also periods when South Asia is a very very close behind these leaders. So yeah I mean the most satisfying book would have been a much more global kind of book. But you'd have to be even longer. And I don't think anybody really wanted that. But this isn't the I would like to return to in the future and see how it changes the story to bring in other regional comparisons. So we always have to stop now. Oh OK. OK. But I guess we have to stop this part. Oh thank you very much.