Book review: 'Civilization' mentions why 'Western civilisation is superior'

Civilization: The West And The Rest
Niall Ferguson
Allen Lane
432 pages
Rs699

History has no final verdicts. Major shifts in events and power bring about new subjects for discussion and new interpretations. Sixty years ago, as de-colonisation accelerated, no one had a good word to say for imperialism. It was regarded as unambiguously bad, both by ex-imperialists and by their liberated subjects. Then, in the 1980s, a revisionist history came along. The West — mainly the Anglo-American part of it — had recovered some of its pride and nerve under US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. And there was the growing evidence of post-colonial regimes’ failure, violence and corruption, especially in Africa.

But the decisive event for the revisionists was the collapse of the Soviet empire, which not only left the United States top dog globally, but also seemed, to the more philosophically minded, to vindicate Western civilization and values against all other civilizations and values. West became again, if briefly, the embodiment of universal reason, obliged and equipped to spread its values to the still-benighted parts of the world. Francis Fukuyama’s The End Of History And The Last Man testified to this sense of triumph and historical duty.

Such a conjuncture set the stage for a new wave of imperialism (though the reluctance to use the word remained). In doing so, it was bound to affect interpretations of the old imperialism, which was now extolled for spreading economic progress, the rule of law, and science and technology to countries that would never have benefited from them otherwise. Foremost among the new generation of revisionist historians is Niall Ferguson of Harvard University.

Civilization: The West And The Rest is the latest offering from Ferguson and is a big book, but one that is mercifully confined to the last 500 years. The key assumption it makes — implicit in the sub-heading, ‘The West and the Rest’ — is that western civilization has indeed been inherently and explicitly superior to other civilizations over the last 500 years. Why this has been so, given the patently poor start the West had in relation to the civilizations of China, India and Islam back in around 1400, is the subject of this work. Ferguson is not the first to probe the reasons for the rise of the West, but he does so in a thoughtful and engaging manner, helped by a lucid style and flashes of humour that will appeal to the lay reader. He draws on a broad range of scholarship, managing to breathe new life into a whole series of ongoing debates, from the origins of the Industrial Revolution to the nature of imperialism.

Ferguson captures the extraordinary complexity of the last 500 years by proposing six innovations which distinguished the West from the Rest. Borrowing from the language of today’s computerised world, he calls them ‘killer applications’: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumer society, and the work ethic. Each of these six complexes of institutions and ideas is cleverly tied up with a good chunk of history and related to a particular region of the globe, so that by the end of the book the reader will have been taken from the Grand Canal of the Yongle Emperor, to Machu Picchu in the Andes, Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, and the ‘Villages of Liberty’ in Senegal.

However, even though  applications are a nice gimmick, his attempt to cram 500 years of history into this rigid structure often leaves the impression of not getting quite what you downloaded.

The French Revolution and imperialism are both crammed into the chapter on medicine in an attempt to argue that “the original French civilising mission had been based on the idea of universal citizenship.” A wonderfully ambitious chapter on consumption encompasses the Industrial Revolution, 19th-century nationalism, and a jaunty romp through Europe’s 20th century of conflict and revolt, all woven together with a fascinating parable on the economic importance of a decent pair of jeans. Although Ferguson’s ‘grand narrative’ is good fun, you are often left turning the pages the wrong way to find out how you’ve gone from reading about John Lennon to Sigmund Freud in a chapter about work ethic.

Yet the most glaring weakness in Ferguson’s presentation is his lack of sympathy for the civilizations dismissed as “the rest,” which points to the serious limitation of his thesis. He further leaves out all of imperialism’s nasty bits: the Black War in Australia, the German genocide in Namibia, the Belgian exterminations in the Congo , the massacre at Jalianwala Bagh, the Bengal famine, the Irish potato famine, and much else.

On the whole this is a book which presents many serious arguments, illustrating them in an entertaining way. Ferguson sees the greatest threat to the West as being a loss of belief among its electorates in the things that made it strong in the first place. To him the West is at risk of turning towards a “vacuous consumer society and a culture of relativism” — which is somewhat at odds with his earlier stress on the importance of consumer demand to industrial progress. Perhaps that paradox can be the subject of his next book.

Adnan Farooqui teaches political science at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi