Well, thank you very much.
Thank you, Gil, for those kind words.
I'd like to thank everybody for inviting me, um, to come back to Chicago. It's great
to be back in Hyde Park. I haven't been
in quite a long time. And like Gil
mentioned, last time I was here was a
long time ago. When I came here that,
that's what I looked like when I came
here. You can see what it did to
me over the years. That, that is, uh, I'm
pretty sure that's the summer of 1988,
I was digging in Greece and took a bunch of
Chicago undergrads with me to dig there.
And when we first came to Chicago in
1987, my wife used to work here in the
Oriental Institute, in the Membership
Office, so I used to regularly come along
and, and sit out there in the Members'
Lectures, which were always really good
so I, I hope I live up to the standards.
Uh, but okay well tonight I want to talk
about the East and the West. So,
appropriate to do so at the Oriental
Institute, and I want to talk about
long-term history. When I talk about the
East, though, I won't be meaning quite the
same thing that Breasted had in mind
when he talked about the Orient, when he
was founding the Oriental Institute back
in 1919. Know when I'm talking about the
West, am I gonna be talking about quite
the same sort of thing that we used to
garner about when I taught the History
of Western Civilization program here at
the University of Chicago for quite a
few years. Were any of you Chicago
undergraduates? Now, we got a smattering of
hands. And did you take Western Civ? Yeah,
we got some Western Civ takers. Alright,
so you know exactly, um, what I'm
thinking about here. The, the way we taught
this at Chicago is what people will
sometimes call the Plato to NATO Approach.
It's, it's a straight line from the Greeks to
us. So what I got in mind tonight, well, I
mean you'll see in a few minutes, when I, I
get going. Um, it's a little bit, uh,
different from that. So, okay, so, so, what
what do I mean, right, I'm talking about
these things?
Well, um, sort of one way to think about
it... A few years ago, I w-- I flew from
the West Coast out to Singapore and
that's a long way so we changed planes
in Hong Kong, and I'm getting off the
plane. I'm in that, that the thing you
you walk, the walkway thing you walk down
to get some from the plane to the
terminal.
And, there, it's lined with these ads from the
HSBC Bank, and I'm sure a lot of you will
have seen these pretty much anytime
you fly overseas, you see these HSBC ads, and they
had this one that said, "In East Asia, a
new millionaire is made every minute."
I looked at that and I thought, "That cannot
be true."
And then, I was thinking about it, I, I
looked up, actually, that that week's
copy of The Economist had a little thing
about millionaires. And sort of thinking
about these numbers realized that this is,
it's not now quite true, a little bit of
an exaggeration here, but not very much
exaggeration. And so I think, you know,
this is probably the most important
fact in the world that we live in. This
is an extraordinary development. But,
where is this taking us? And what does
this mean for these ideas about East and
West, and lie behind places like the
Oriental Institute, like the University
of Chicago History Western Civilization
undergraduate course? So, a couple of
years ago I, I decided to write a book.
Um, there it is. I, I wrote this book, Why the
West Rules--For Now, which I was delighted
to see this afternoon displayed in the
Seminary Co-Op Bookstore. But, I, I haven't
been in there since they moved premises,
and I loved the old place, I was very
skeptical about this idea they were
gonna move. But I would say I love the
new place, too. I think they look really good.
So, anyway, I, I wrote this book. Um, the, the old
old ideas about why the West came to
dominate the planet, a lot of these ideas
go back about 250 years. They go back to
the 18th century, when Europeans in the
18th century discovered that they had a
bit of a problem, that they were taking
over the world and they didn't know why.
I mean, as problems go, that's not a bad
one to have. But, en--enormous arguments
grew up in the office, why is this
happening, why are we taking over the
world. And lots of different ideas got
floated, but the one that kind of floated
to the top of the pool was an idea that
there was something unique and special
about the ancient Greeks, and, and here you
see the ancient Greeks being, being
smitten by the gods for taking all the
euros and releasing them down the back of the
carriage. I actually,
this, this picture was much in the
newspapers at the time that the Greeks
first ran into their little local
financial difficulty. Um, I was horrified
to discover that this picture, like a lot
of what we hear about the Greek
financial crisis, was actually completely
doctored. Um, this, the lightning bolt was
pasted in there by somebody, uh, probably
eighteen year-old who knows how to use
Photoshop properly. But, anyway, it's a good
picture though. So, this idea gets floated
back in the 18th century that there's
something unique about ancient Greece,
and the Greeks invented this culture
that had no parallels anywhere else
in the world. And this culture made the
ancient Greeks different from and better
than anybody else
in the whole of the ancient world. And
this culture was then passed down
through the ages, and this culture, this
Greek culture, is the most important
thing in the world. And this culture, it
gets invented particularly in Athens,
obviously, you see here. Tt then gets
spread around the Mediterranean Basin by
Greek colonists. And on this map the
colonists are the kind of slightly
washed out yellowy-green bits, wherever
you see a yellowy-green smudge, that's
where ancient Greeks settled around the
Mediterranean Basin. The brown bits are
where Phoenicians came out from what's
now the Lebanon, of course, and also
settling different bits of the
Mediterranean. And it's, I find it's a
fascinating process.
I, um, excavated for several years on the
site in Sicily, trying to look into this
bit of the story, just how much
impact did the Greeks have on native
populations in the West Mediterranean?
And this is our site in Sicily, that the
great thing about being a Classical
archaeologist is that all these
Classical people lived right by the
beach. You can see here. What we're
looking at, we're on our site
here, looking down toward the
Phoenician colony of Motya, just up
the coastal island, just off the coast of
western Sicily. Um, the Greek colony of
Selinunte is on the beach, just off to
the left from the picture here,
spectacular settings. But we went and dug
in the site for several years to try to
understand just what's happening as
these Greeks come out, bringing this
Greek culture to the west Mediterranean.
But the story that gets going the 18th
century... And so this transforms the
Mediterranean Basin, this superior Greek
culture wins over all the local
populations, subsequently gets picked up
by the Romans and spread
everywhere you see in orange or red here,
passed down through the ages, making
everybody who gets taken over by this
culture, is is made better than
everybody else in the world, just
superior to them, more rational, more
scientific, more dynamic and focused,
until we finally come to the pinnacle of
Western civilization. We have inherited
this culture, but of course I jest, this
is the real pinnacle of Western
civilization, what I have been missing
since I moved in 1995, this is one thing
where Gail is absolutely right, it's a
tragedy to leave Chicago. Now I'll leave
that picture up there for a moment to
torment those of you who were foolish to
come here without eating dinner first.
But, so, so this idea gets established, um,
basic idea is that the ancient Greeks
invented this fabulous culture, and
Western supremacy is locked in, and I
often think of this as like a long term
lock in story. It's locked in in the
distant past, two-and-a-half thousand
years ago. Now, this, this sort of idea,
this is basically what lay behind the
University of Chicago's History of
Western Civ course, that I taught for
many years and enjoyed teaching very much.
This idea, though, was always criticized
very strongly by my colleagues over here
in the Oriental Institute, who thought
this was, tended to think this was kind
of nonsense. And that a lot of the
important stuff had happened long before
the ancient Greeks came on the scene. Now, 
throughout the 20th century, basically
this idea has come, came under more and
more sustained criticism as the 20th
century went on. People, um, anthropologists,
archaeologists working all over the
world say, y'know, this story just doesn't make a
lot of sense. And the criticism really
intensified in the last quarter, last
third of the 20th century, with the great
East Asian economic boom, there, this year
a millionaire every minute thing starts
to get going. And people start saying,
well, you know if it's true thatWestern
superiority was locked in two and a half
thousand years ago, what is the story
with the HSBC ad, why do we get a new
millionaire every minute in East Asia.
This story can't possibly be true. And
people start coming up with alternative
theories to explain the distribution of
wealth and power around the world.
And one of the most popular ones, what I
like to think of as a kind of short-term
accident theory, most popular rival
theory now says, you know there's nothing
special about the ancient West, nothing
special about Greek culture, basically
East, West, lots of other parts of the
world, these are all much the same until
you get down to a couple of hundred
years ago, when something happens, and it
might just have been a matter of luck,
but something happened to launch Europe
into an Industrial Revolution, and this
was what gave the West domination of the
world. It's just a short-term accident.
Now, the debates between these two
theories get very heated, and professors
have actually been known to come to
blows over this stuff, um, but I think the
debates are, in a way are, very confused.
When I started reading a lot of the
literature, and it felt to me like a lot
of the time people were arguing past
each other. And so I started to think,
well, y'know, if we're gonna say
anything new on this subject, what we
need is a new way to think about it, a
way that will make the arguments a
little bit more explicit so we've at
least all got to address each other on
the same territory. And I decided, in my
wisdom, that what we needed to have was a
debate about what in my book I started
calling "social developments," that this
is what this argument all, all came down
to. And one of my many pet hates, there's
a lot of stuff I hate, but one of the
things that I particularly hate is
people who read PowerPoint slides to me.
But I am now about to do that because I
can, and so I'm gonna read this
PowerPoint slide to you. What I mean when
I talk about social development in these
books is, it's kind of a broad idea.
Basically, it's a society's ability to
get things done. So, I mean like a bundle of
technological, subsistence, organizational,
and cultural accomplishments through
which people feed, clothe, house, and
reproduce themselves, explain the world
around them, resolve disputes within
their communities, extend their power at
the expense of other communities, and
defend themselves against others'
attempts to extend their power. So it's
sort of a broad concept, basically, a
group's ability to master its physical,
intellectual environments. Now, in
principle, at least, it seems to me this
is something we ought to be able to
measure
and compare across time and space. And
this is why I got interested in this
idea, because it seems to me that these
debates between the long-term locking
theories and the short-term accident
theories, they're really arguments about
social developments. That the long-term
lock-in arguments kind of are saying
that something happened to Western
social development a long time ago that
locked in Western dominance of the world.
And often the implication is this is a
permanent kind of thing, having once been
locked in, this Western domination, it's
not going away. The short-term accident
guys are basically saying no, that's
completely wrong. Western social
development, nothing special about it
until very recent times, and when it did
get special, it was kind of an accident,
and the implication is often, there's
nothing locked in about this at all, this
is a temporary situation, it's going to
change. Now the problem, as I saw it, the
problem was these are really
quantitative claims, numerical claims
about who's got most social
development's when and where. But people
were arguing about them in qualitative
terms, and, and ended up just talking past
each other a lot of the times, a lot of
the time. Now, I, I wasn't quite so
optimistic that I thought that if I just
measured social developments that would
make everything completely objective and
everybody would have to agree with me. I
learned some years ago that that is not
going to happen in a university, nobody's
ever going to agree with me. So it's not
that measuring stuff makes it more
objective, but it does make it more
explicit. So like if you put a numerical
value on social development in a
particular year, you have to be able to
say why you came up with that number, and
somebody else can challenge it on the
facts to say you know you came up with the
wrong number, or they can challenge it on
the method, so say no, this whole thing of
working out this numbers, it's just
stupid, it just doesn't work. It would make
the whole debate a lot more explicit. So,
I decided what I needed to do was
measure social development over long
periods of time, compare it to different
parts of the world, and figure out
whether the short-term or the long-term
theories were correct. How, how difficult
could that possibly be? Well, a famous
part-time historian, Winston Churchill,
once said that the farther backward you
can look, the farther forward you're
likely to
see. And I was saying, I've always thought
that was right, and I think particularly
with this question, to, to try to explain why
the West came to dominate the planet, we
need to look back a very long way to be
able to see the full picture, the whole
story, and then, I think, we actually can
see some way forward, as well. So, I
felt this meant not just looking back
a couple of hundred years to the origins
of democracies in Europe to talk about
the West, or even looking back a couple
of thousand years of the origins of
Christianity, or even two and a half
thousand years to the time of the
ancient Greeks. By then, I think the
Oriental Institute guys are right, by
that point a lot of the important things
have already happened. You've got to look
back much further. You've got to look
back, in fact, all the way to the first
point that you begin to see
distinctively different styles of life
appearing around the world. And at that
point, I think, you can begin to talk
about different regional traditions,
Western, Eastern, Southern, Northern,
whatever you want to call them. And you
can start comparing these. So, so that's
what I did, and, and that involved me going
back all the way to the end of the last
Ice Age, fifteen thousand years ago, um, to
the the origins of the first complex
societies around the world, when
distinctively different ways of life
began to appear. Now, um, seemed to me when
we do this, uh,
archaeologists argue endlessly, as I'm sure
you've heard at OI lectures before, argue
endlessly about which of the places
where agriculture began, and what exactly are
the criteria we're looking for, and so
this is a, uh, beautiful sketch map drawn by
myself, um, which picks out about half a
dozen, seven places, and different
criteria will give you slightly
different selection of places, but most
archaeologists would agree more or less
on this as the centers where complex
societies began to appear after the end
of the last Ice Age. Now, seems to me, the
sensible way to approach this problem is
to say which of these centers is the one
from which we can think of a Western
tradition as having developed. And the
center marked on the map, the westernmost
center in Eurasia, the Hilly Flanks, this is
marked on this map, this is where we
begin to see the complex societies from
which the societies of Europe later
developed, a
direct sort of spin-off from these. Since it's
the westernmost core area in Eurasia
where complex societies began, seems to
me, it's common sense to think of this as
the western region of the Western
civilization, tradition, whatever you
want to call it. At the far end of Eurasia,
the Yellow Yangtze Valleys area
in China, this was an independent core
from which complex societies developed,
again, seems to me to make sense to think
of that as an eastern core of complex
societies. Um, and what I'm basically gonna
do in the time I've got left is compare
these two regions, and say a little bit
more about the definition ratio in just
a moment, but compare these two regions
and look at what's happened to them in
the last fifteen thousand years. So, so
what I did for my book was look at
these regions and try to calculate, um,
social development scores for how well
these societies were mastering their
environments. And I'm not gonna bore you
with all the details, I discovered that of
all the different things I can give lectures
on, my Social Development Index is the
most boring, by a very long shot, but if
you like details, I published an entire
book about this which came out on my
birthday, earlier this year, which you can
also rush and buy from the Seminary Co-Op.
Um, when I was doing this, I was thinking, I, I want a
simple numerical index to measure social
development in these different places,
how am I gonna do that? I, I looked
around a little bit, and I realized, um, the
best thing, someone has already kind of
done this for me, in a way, figured out
how to do this. And I'm sure some of you
will be familiar with the United Nations
Human Development Index. Every year, the
UN publishes this book, um, measuring human
development in different countries. And
their concept of human development is,
it's basically how well our government's
doing at creating the conditions that
allow their citizens to realize their
innate human potential. They realized it
would be very helpful for aid
organizations, um, if they had some kind of
simple charts, telling them how well
different countries are doing at this. So
they hired a bunch of very clever
economists in the late 1980s to come up
with this index, which they publish every
year, updating
how, how developed different countries
are in this particular regard. And these
economists, when they brought them
together in the late 80s, the UN says to
these guys, "Go out and measure human
development for us." And the economists, as
economists do, said them, "Well, what what
do you mean, what what do you mean human
development?" And they had this long argument over what
exactly it meant. And the economists,
again, as economists do, said, "Okay, the UN
has got this very shapeless, baggy
concept of human development, it's kind
of loose and doesn't really mean
anything. Our job is to boil it down to
the smallest possible number of
variables which can actually be measured,
but which when you put them together
more or less cover the idea the UN has got." And so these economists come back
and say, "Okay, we think when you talk
about human development, what you
actually mean is three different things.
And if we measure life expectancy at
birth, if we measure real wages in
different countries, and if we measure
levels of education, and put those
together, that doesn't cover the whole
thing of what you mean by human
development, but it covers most of it.
And this will give you a single number,
and it's a reliable number you can then
use to compare these different societies."
So I realize this is kind of what I need
to do for my Social Development Index.
And my social development is different
from their human development, but I ended
up with four different traits that I
looked at, which don't cover everything
in social development, but cover enough
of it. And they're what I got listed
under the picture there. So one of them
was energy capture per person. One was
levels of organization, and as economists
often do, I cheated a little bit here, and
used the size of the largest community,
the largest city in a region, as a rough
proxy measure of levels of organization.
And the third one was war-making
capacity, which is a crucial part of
my definition of social development. And
the last one is information technology,
the ability to store and transmit
information. And of course, um, specialists
will argue themselves blue in the face
over trying to measure these different
points in time. But my feeling, which I
explore at mind-numbing length in this
book, is that you actually can do
within tolerable margins of error. So I
put these things together, constructed
this index going back, I ended the
index in the year A.D. 2000, because it's a nice
round number to end at. Went back to
14,000 B.C., put together an index with
scores that ran from 0, uh, you can't
actually score 0, because you'd all be
dead if you scored 0, but from almost
zero to a theoretical maximum that you
could have scored in the year 82,000 of
1000 points, and just looked at East and
West over these 16 thousand years,
measured their social developments, came
up with my scores, and compared them. So,
okay, enough preamble. You may be
thinking too much preamble at this point.
What do you actually get when you do all
this stuff? Well, I put several years of
work into this and came up with this
fantastic graph that shows you
everything you need to know about human
history. I've been talking about this
graph for several years now, and I don't
think I've ever once avoided people
laughing at my graph, which is very
hurtful, if I may say that. But I see the
point, I understand why people laugh when
they see my graph. The problem here, because
unless your eyesight is a lot
better than mine, it's really hard to see
much going on in this graph. Oh,
especially tonight, because the
right-hand side of the picture has been
cut off by the projection. What we're
looking at here, let me clarify for a
moment, I shall just step over here and
yell for a second, so I hope you still
hear me. Along the bottom axis here we've
got dates, from 14,000 B.C. to A.D. 2,000. On
the vertical axis, we've got scores on
the Social Development Index from 0 up
to 1000 at the top. And the two lines
we've got, um, I'll come back over here because
you can figure this bit out for
yourselves, I suspect. You've got a blue
line and a red line, the blue line is the
Western social development scores, the
red line is the Eastern social
development scores. Now, you look at this
picture, the first thing you see, I think,
is that the two lines are very similar,
which is sort of bad if you are a long
term lock-in person. The old theory, the
Western score should pull ahead in the
time of the ancient Greeks, around 500 B.C.
or so. It's kind of hard to see much of
that going on here.
Second thing I think we see here, the
lines, uh, I'll go over here again. Not much
happens, basically. The lines stay on the
bottom of the graph almost through the
whole of history since the Ice Age. They
drag themselves up around 2000,
3000 B.C. They wobble around a little bit
here, and then you get here, about 200
years ago, about the year 1800. Um, around the
year 1800 A.D., they take this 90 degree turn
to the left and shoot almost straight up.
Now, if you're a short-term accident
person, this looks good,
because this is, something short-term has
happened here, so short-term guys ought
to be excited. Now the problem, problem
with my graph, is that the second of these
points, that the fact that the line shoots
up so high to 906 points, where
the blue line ends up in the year 2000,
the Western score. The fact that they
shoot up so high largely explains the
first point, which is the fact that the
lines look so similar. In order to get
906 points on here, you've got to squish
down everything that happened in earlier
history, so you can't see what's going on.
So the next graph I'm going to show you,
and I apologize actually for graphs
this time of night, but there kind of is no
way to do this without at least a few of
them. And the next graph is exactly the
same data points, my Social Development
scores, but just leaving off the final
score for the year 2000. So we end, I did
once every century, we end in the year
1900. So exactly the same data. But when you
leave off the final score, what we now see
looks like this. Again, the blue line is
the Western scores, the red line is the
Eastern scores. Um, we've left off the
last score, so now we're ending at 180 on the vertical scale, not
a thousand, and so everything is now
pulled up. So same data as this, but when
we look at it in a different way, it
looks like this. Clearly on this graph,
there's a lot going on before the year
1800. Um, one of the first things I think
we see here, the blue Western line is
higher than the red Eastern line 'bout
ninety percent of the time since the end
of the last Ice Age, which is, I think,
quite extraordinary. The lines on the
first graph, that looks like the lines
are kind of flat, nothing happens through
most of history. This graph, we see that's
actually not true. The lines are usually
rising, both Eastern and Western, generally
they're rising, it's not flat then boom,
generally they're rising, it's just that
the slope increases over time. Next thing
I think we see here. The lines generally
rise, but they don't always rise, it's not
consistent. There are periods when the
scores level of,f even periods when they
collapse abruptly. Last point I would
make about this graph. While the Western
scores have been higher than the Eastern for most
of the time since the Ice Age, hasn't
been higher all the time. And there's in fact
a 1200 year period from about A.D. 550 to
roughly 1750. So not a short period. Oh,
is this a pointer? Oh, excellent. So, this, this period here, this is
1,200 years, it's like five times the
length of the the history of the United
States, this is a long period of time,
when Eastern scores are higher than
Western. Now, I think to understand
properly why the West rules, you, you've
got to explain all of these observations,
all six of the observations I just made,
and to do that obviously what you need
is to buy my book and read it from cover
to cover. You'll be relieved to hear
tonight I'm not gonna try to march you
through all of this stuff. What I'm gonna
do with the rest of my time is just talk
about four points I'd like to draw out
of the book that I wrote, which I think
are interesting. The first of the points
is an explanation. This is by far the
longest of the points, so please don't
start to panic. If you guys, "Oh good God,
he hasn't even started point two yet." The
last three points, three consequences of
this explanation, will go much, much
quicker. So, okay, explanation for why, why
does the pattern of history look like
this? Explanation for this. The answer, I
would say, historians are famous for
giving long complicated answers to
simple questions. But this time I think
the answer is very simple. It's a
one-word answer. The explanation for the
shape of history has been geography.
That's all there is to it. It's not great
men, it's not religion, it's not
institutions, it's not culture, it's not
in fact any of the things we used to
talk about in the History of Western
civilization course. It's not even the
last refuge of the desperate historian,
which is accidents, which is how we
explain everything we can't figure out.
None of those things.
It's geography. Um, seems to me, that when
you look at long-term history,
the obvious thing you see is that people
are all the same anywhere you go in the
world. Large groups of people are pretty
much all the same everywhere. Because the
people are pretty much all the same
everywhere,
the societies develop in very similar
ways everywhere. What differs is the
places where you're doing the developing,
and that, it seems to me, explains pretty
much all the cultural and social and
economic diversity we see in the modern
world. People are all the same, societies
develop the same ways, it's the places
that differ. So this means that geography
drives social development, it, it's that
simple. But, having said that. Now
obviously you're all here at an Oriental
Institute lecture, you're all people
interested in history, you all know lots
about history. You all know that history
is a complete mess. If it's so simple, if
geography explains everything, why is
history such a mess? Well, the reason for
that, I think, is that geography is also a
mess, that's the problem. Geography, I
would say, is like a two-way street. On
the one hand,
geography determines social developments.
But on the other hand, social
development determines what geography
means. I am very pleased for this sort of
gnomic wisdom of this one sentence
summary, because like all these one
sentence things, it doesn't actually mean
anything by itself. So what I want to do
now is basically a lightning tour of
world history, the history of the world in
half an hour,
or perhaps less if I can manage it. Um,
trying to explain, to illustrate this
theory about the history of the world,
that geography drives social development,
but social development determines what
geography means, and this answers all of
our questions. Well, okay, let's sit back
again, to the end of the Ice Age, where we
were just a few minutes ago, around, um, say
13,000 down to about 9,000 B.C.,
as the last sort of waves, the last spasms of
the Ice Age. If you look back to this
period, and ask, where in the world are
the complex societies developing, the
farming societies, bigger and bigger
villages, more complexity in their
societies, larger populations where are
they? Turns out they're all in the same
places. They're what in my book I
started calling the "lucky latitudes."
Runs basically from China to the
Mediterranean Basin in Eurasia in the
Old World,
roughly from Peru to Mexico in the New
World. All of the early farming societies,
the ones that appear within the first
five thousand years of the end of the
Ice Age, they are all in this, this band of
lucky latitudes. Obvious question: Why
these places, why then? Well, I think the
answer has actually been pretty clear
for quite a long time. Archeologists have been
saying this for quite a long time, but it
was, uh, the, the evolutionist Jared Diamond,
in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was the
guy who really pulled it together in a
convincing case.
Geography is why it's these areas in the
world. At the end of the Ice Age, there
are only certain places in the world
where large easily usable and
potentially domesticable plants and
animals had evolved. There were only
certain places where you could begin
farming in the first few thousand years
after the Ice Age, and geography had
determined where those places are.
Ecology and climate had determined where
those places were. So the lucky latitudes
is where we see the beginnings of
complex societies all around the world.
And if you lived in Siberia, you, you
didn't become a farmer, not because you
were lazy or stupid or anything, but
because farming was impossible, there was
nothing to domesticate, you couldn't do
it up there.
Geography is very, very unfair. If you
lived within the lucky latitudes, there
were also enormous variations from place
to place in how easy it was to become a
farmer, and how and what what had to be
done to produce domestication and start
up the first farming. And of all the
places in the lucky latitudes, the one
where it was easiest, where there were the
most potentially domesticable plants and
animals, is one that everybody will be
familiar with from being OI members.
This area here marked is the Hilly Flanks,
in Southwest Asia. And Southwest Asia, by
about 9500 B.C., so immediately after the
last spasm of the last Ice Age, we see
the beginnings of the process of
cultivation of plants that leads to
domestication. Over the next two thousand
years, similar things start to happen in
China. Over the next few thousand years,
it happens in other places within the
lucky latitudes. After that, gradually
starts up in other places in the world
as well.
Geography determined this pattern.
Geography gave the West a long head
start in social development. By about
10,000 years ago, Western social
development was
already distinctively higher than in any
other part of the world. Now as you start
farming, one of the things that happens
is that populations grow. Populations grow,
the societies become more complex, more
organized to handle this, and they also
expand. The farming vill--uh, valley you live in
starts to fill up, people migrate to find
a new valley to farm. And they keep going.
Little by little, they spread out. And
this is one of the things archeologists
have been most successful at tracing
over the last few generations. And what
we got here on the right is a map
showing our best data for the expansion of
farming and cultivation and
domestication in western Eurasia,
starting around 9,000 B.C. or so down here
in the Hilly Flanks, spreading out across
Europe. By 4,000, people have spread
farming all the way to the Atlantic
Ocean. Picture on the left,
similar map for East Asia, the original
core area up here around 6000 B.C. in central, um,
eastern China. By 2,000 B.C. it's spread
all the way down to Borneo, by 1500 it's
over in the Philippines. The other,
the other original cause of farming, they
have similar expansions, as the farming
population spread out, just they start
later in the day. So, okay, takes about
five thousand years for farming to
spread all the way from the original
Hilly Flanks all the way out to the
Atlantic Ocean.
Next slide, another picture that I'm sure
you've all seen variants on this many,
many times. The greenish--doesn't look
very green does it--sort of, they're the
sort of nasty colored area here, marked
is the Levantine Corridor. That's roughly
what I was talking about as the Hilly
Flanks. This is the, the core heartland of
domestication farming. Takes five
thousand years to spread farming to the
Atlantic Ocean, it takes about three
thousand years to spread it, um, so here's
the thing, spread it just this short
distance down to Mesopotamia, a very
short distance. Why does it take three
thousand years? Well, you can probably guess my
answer to this: geography.
Mesopotamia has really bad geography for
early farmers. Um, doesn't rain enough, you,
your fields get flooded at these
inconvenient times, it's just terrible.
And you can farm, there but it's a lousy
place to be a farmer.
But then, what happens is as farmers move
down into Mesopotamia, as social
development keeps rising over the course
of thousands of years, up here in the
original Hilly Flanks, which are fed
mostly by rainfall, are the main source
of water for their, for their farming. As
social development rises higher and
higher in the Hilly Flanks, much more
complex societies are developing, people
start to figure out, "Ah, we could tap into
the flood water of these great rivers
and irrigate our fields, we could start
using these rivers to ship goods up and
down," um, developing quite sophisticated
trade networks. Once they reach a level
of social development that they're able to do
this, they change the meaning of
geography, and Mesopotamia goes from being 
this lousy place to be a farmer to this
fantastic place to be a farmer. And on the
scale we're talking about here, very
rapidly, it overtakes the original core
in the Hilly Flanks in social
development. Turns out, if you've got
access to great rivers, the Euphrates,
the Tigris, of course, the, the Nile down
here, if you've got access to these great
rivers and a level of social development
that allows you to exploit them, you
could start building cities and states
that are much, the people back in the old
Hilly Flanks, they're not able to do this
anywhere near so easily. So the, the
Fertile Crescent, uh, Mesopotamia, Egypt, sort of leaps ahead of the old Hilly Flanks.
Um, the first place in the world to
develop cities and states is this
western core area, again, not because
these guys are more industrious than the
Chinese or the Indians or anybody else,
but because it's easier there, they've
got this head start in social development.
Now as they do this, as they start
building cities, developing states, they
change the meanings of geography even
more. Access to great rivers has been the
big secret so far. By the first
millennium B.C. though, they're discovering
access to an entire sea is even better.
At the beginning of the first millennium,
um, social development is at the point
that no one political power can control
the whole Mediterranean Basin, and the
Mediterranean is mainly a source of
disruption and chaos for ancient
societies. By the end of the first
millennium B.C., the Roman Empire has
conquered the whole Mediterranean Basin
and it goes from being this sort of
disaster zone of pirates and all kinds of bad
things to bring this superhighway. You
can ship goods from one end to the other,
ship information around, move armies
around. Mastering the Mediterranean
catapults social development up even
higher. The two are feeding off each
other. So, okay, first millennium B.C. goes
on, then. From one end of Eurasia to the
other, you get this great band of empires
developing: the Roman Empire in the West,
Han Dynasty China in the East, in between,
mysteriously not marked on my map, i'm
not quite sure why, but we've got the, the
Kushan Empire developing in India, the
Parthian Empire in Iran and Mesopotamia. A great band of empires develops across
the Old World. And as these empires
develop, pushing social development up
higher and higher, as you can probably
imagine what I'm going to say next, they
change the meanings of geography even
more. And I think the next big turning point
in in this story is that the band of
steppe grasslands, which runs sort of
all the way from Manchuria, over here, to
Hungary, these waterless, arid, very
flat places, very, very difficult to live
on. Nomadic societies developed there, but
in very difficult places to live, but by
the end of the first millennium B.C., horse
nomads have discovered, "Hey, living on the steppes is great, because now there's these
complex empires with high levels of
social development, and we can raid them
and steal all their stuff. And this is
fantastic." And, and the nomads have many
positive effects. They tie the whole of
Eurasia together, it has never been
linked before, social development rises
higher and higher. They also have some
negative effects. They, they will keep invading the great empires. And then in particular
what they do, um, is and this is a theme
pointed out by the great University of
Chicago historian, William McNeil, who
taught here for many, many years and
wrote what is still the best book on the
history of disease, Plagues and Peoples,
McNeil pointed out it's these guys, these
horse nomads, moving around faster than
ever before along the steppes, they tie
together the disease pools of different
parts of Eurasia. By A.D. 200, the great
empires get attacked by new diseases
that have never existed before, um,
wholly new diseases that wipe out
probably somewhere between a third and a
half of the populations are dying very,
very suddenly in all of the great
empires, from one end of Eurasia to the
other. Consequence of this is the
collapse over, it takes centuries, but the
collapse of the great empires. Geography
once again feeds back into social
developments. The Western empires never
reunite Europe or the Mediterranean
Basin. The Byzantines try, the Arabs try,
Charlemagne and the Franks try, they all
fail. China, though, gets reunited by 589. Um, geography changes its meanings once
again, northern and southern China are
brought together, creates this huge
economic engine in East Asia.
This is the point, the first time in
history when Eastern social
developments rises above Western social
developments. Um, it's that, the, the, it's
kind of the pre-modern Golden Age of
China, and people who study Classical
Chinese literature, they're studying the,
the literature of this period, of the
Tang Dynasty. My, my necktie, which my
mother gave me, has a Tang Dynasty poem
on it. This is the Golden Age of Chinese
literature. It's also the Golden Age of
pre-modern Chinese science and
technology, and they have this
technological revolution, the Tang, Tang,
and Song dynasties. Um, and I just want to
focus on two of the things that come out
of this, because these change the story,
I would say more than anything that had
ever happened before. So the two things I
want to talk about come out of this
surge in East Asian social development
after the sixth century. And the first of
them is new kinds of ships that, uh,
reliably will let you cross oceans. Now
people have crossed oceans before. I mean, the Vikings get to the Americas, all kinds
of things happen. But you can't do it
reliably. You get out to the Americas,
say from East Asia or, or Western Europe,
but usually you can't get back again. And
this is not likely to go all that well.
Well, by 1200, certainly by 1300, the
Chinese have got ships, that if they
wanted to, they could sail almost
anywhere in the world. And historians 
have known this for a long time, a lot of
people remain skeptical about this, the historians have known this for a long time.
A few years ago, a group of
businessmen in Taiwan it decided that
not enough people knew about this. So
what they did was they, they pooled their
resources, and they built, um, where did it
go.
Oops, I'm pressing the wrong button,
I'm sorry, figuring this out, okay,
no, went too far, no, it's still too far,
there, they, okay they built an exact
replica, that you see at the top left, of
an early 15th century, um, Chinese junk.
And they built it in Taiwan. And they
said, "What we're gonna do is sail this
junk to California and then sail it back
home again, so everybody will have to
agree that the Chinese could've done
this in the 15th century if they'd
wanted to do it." And they actually
weren't the first people to do this,
so, at least, at least, in a sense. They sailed
it all the way from Taiwan to California,
and what you see at the bottom there is
the junk in San Francisco Bay refitting
at one of the harbors in San Francisco.
That, though, that had been done before,
because that, that's the easy bit. Well,
maybe not the easy bit, I mean, I, I
couldn't do that. But people who sail tell me that's the relatively easy bit, getting
from China to California. Tricky bit is
getting back again. But they said, "We're
gonna do this, we're gonna show that this
could have been done." So they get in the
junk, and they sail and they sail and they
sail, and they're sailing along, they can see
the bright lights of Taiwan in the
distance and the sun is going down. It's all
very exciting. They go to bed knowing,
"Tomorrow, we'll wake up in Taiwan, we
will have a dim sum breakfast or
whatever, and we're all gonna be heroes,
it'll be fantastic." Middle of the night, disaster strikes.
Great, big, steel freighter slices their
ship in two. Yeah, one half goes down like
a stone, you see the other half here.
The, the extraordinary thing, nobody
died, nobody actually even got hurt
during this thing. But they get winched
up in the boat because all the
reporters are crowding around saying, "So,
how do you feel? You've just been proved
wrong, your ship sank like a stone, you
know, no GPS back in the 15th century,
obviously couldn't be done." To which, of
course, the sailors say, "Yes, no GPS in
the 15th century, but no steel freighters
in the 15th century either." And because, I mean their point didn't need to be
proved, but it proved it if you had any
doubts about it.
By the 15th century, Chinese ships could
have gone anywhere in the world. And very
quickly, um, these sort of innovations
that they were pioneering, uh, compasses,
watertight compartments, these spread
through the Arab sailors in the Indian
Ocean, and Europeans begin to incorporate
versions of these into their own very
different ships. So within the course of about 200 years, all
of these ideas spread all the way to
Europe.
Now the second big invention. Second big
invention is guns. Um, what you see in the
top left is the oldest known proper gun
in the world, dates to about 1288, was
found on a battlefield in Manchuria in
northeast China. At the bottom, you see a
painting of a gun, of a much improved
version of a gun, from a manuscript
painted in Oxford in the year 1326. Less
than 40 years after the oldest known gun
in China. This technology, the gun-making
technology, has spread the entire way
across the Old World, like four or five
thousand miles it spread. No invention in
the history of humanity had ever spread
this fast before. Extraordinary thing, I
mean, everybody loves guns. If you needed
proof, there it is. So you got these two
inventions, and when you put them
together, you have this amazing thing. You
got ships that allow you to cross the
oceans, and guns that allow you to kill
the people you meet on the other side.
Put them together, it changes the meaning
of geography more than has ever happened
before. But the weird thing about what
happens is it's not the East Asians who
put them together and perfect this
package, it's the Western Europeans. Which
I think if you'd been an alien from
outer space in the year 1200, you would
have been really surprised by this story.
As Western Europe, I mean, I grew up in
Western Europe, if you count Britain as
part of Western Europe, it's got a lot of
disadvantages, take it from me. It's snuck
out into the cold waters of the North
Atlantic, it's a long way from the real
centers of action in this period.
Down here in the Mediterranean, and the
Muslim world out to China. This is just,
this is a real backwater, stuck out there.
But, once this package shows up in
Western Europe, it changes everything. Cause,
there's, there's a fact of geography, a
simple geographical fact. From Europe,
Western Europe to the New World, it's
about 3,000 miles by sailing ship. From
China to the New World, the, the
direction you have to go with the
prevailing winds and tides, is closer to
8,000 miles, it's more than twice as far.
Now, while you couldn't cross the oceans,
that didn't matter. Once you could cross
the oceans, though
this goes from being an unimportant fact
to being the most important fact in the
world. And, I think in a lot of ways, it's
like the origins of agriculture.
Agriculture begins in Southwest Asia
because that's where geography has made
it easiest to begin agriculture. It's the
Europeans who sail to the New World,
find it, colonize it, plunder it, breathe
their disgusting germs on the natives.
It's the European to do that, not the
Chinese. And that happens not because the Europeans were more inventive or
creative or ambitious, and not because
the Europeans were wickeder, either, it's
just because they're nearer. Geography made it easier for the Europeans to do this.
So the Europeans from the 15th century on start colonizing the New World.
They change the meaning of geography.
The Atlantic goes from being this
barrier that cut the Old World off from
the New World to being a kind of
superhighway, tying the two together. 
Historians will often say that the
Atlantic Ocean turns into a kind of
Goldilocks ocean, it's neither too big
nor too small. And what they mean by this,
um, they'll often talk about it in terms of
a triangular trade network that develops.
Atlantic is big enough that you've got
very different kinds of societies, very
different ecological zones around it, but
small enough that by 1600, European ships
can zip around, trading goods, picking
up goods at every point, and trading them
as they go. The Atlantic starts to turn
into this motor for generating profits,
but it's unlike anything the world has
ever seen before. So, you say, start in England with
manufactured goods, take them down to
clay pipes or guns or whatever, take them
down to West Africa, swap them for human
beings, making a profit on it, take the
human beings over to the Caribbean, swap
them there for rum or sugar or molasses
or whatever, and take, making a profit
again, taking a run back to England,
selling it for another profit, buying
some more pipes and guns, and heading off again.
And off they go, round and round,
generating these enormous profits, and
creating, creating the world's first true
market economies in Europe as a response
to this, which again become this motor
for generating wealth like the world has
never seen before. Now, geography is doing this to
Europe, the new meaning that geography has taken on, as social development changes.
Once this process starts, it doesn't stop.
It doesn't just stop with a few sea
captains sailing around the Atlantic.
European intellectuals start asking all
kinds of new questions. People are coming
to them, saying, "If we could just really
understand how the stars move into
heaven, how the winds and tides move down
here, we could get so rich. If we could
just understand this stuff." And European
thinkers start asking themselves, "How
does the natural world work?" In a way
that nobody has really attacked the
problem in this sustained kind of way
before. They realized very quickly, to um,
this calls for new ways of looking at
nature, and that calls for entire new
language, language of mathematics. Without
that, you can't answer these questions. As
they develop new kinds of mathematics to
respond to these problems, cascades of
breakthroughs follow on the back of the
mathematics--new ways of thinking about
physics, chemistry, biology, all comes on
the back of this initial question about
"how does the physical world work?" All
over Europe, you've got intellectuals
attacking these problems. In the 17th
century, Europe has a Scientific
Revolution. Not because Europeans are
smarter or more energetic than Arabs or
Indians or Chinese,
but because geography is thrusting a
different set of questions onto the
Europeans. And so lots of really smart
Europeans are trying to answer these
questions, and lots of them do, often at
the same time. As I'm sure many of you
will know, Leibniz and Newton, two of
the most famous scientists in late 17th
century Europe, they make each other's
old ages miserable, because each claims
to have invented calculus independently.
And they spend their, their golden years
hurling abuse at the other one, accusing
him of stealing the idea. All these guys
are popping up all over Europe, solving
the same problems at much the same time.
In the 18th century, Europeans start
taking these scientific principles and
turning them back to analyze their own
societies, in, in what we, of course, call
the Enlightenment. So the Europeans have
Locke and Voltaire, the staples of our
Western Civ course in Chicago in the old
days, not
the Chinese, but not because Europeans
are innately more democratic, it's
because different questions were being
thrust onto them.
Well, okay, by the end of the 18th century,
um, th-this, um, this economic motor out in
the Atlantic Ocean, this is driven wealth
up in Europe to unprecedented levels,
particularly in northwest Europe, and
particularly in Britain, which comes to
dominate these Atlantic trades. The
British start to find, though, that as
profits push up wages, they're
beginning to be priced out of a lot of
the European markets. And a lot of
people in Europe are saying, "Right, labor is
getting really expensive, if we could
just come up with some kind of machinery
to replace all this expensive human
labor, we can make so much more money."
Lots of Europeans are working on this
problem, but the problem is particularly
acute in Britain. And the British, because
of this, are the first ones to tap into
the energy of fossil fuels. Britain has
an Industrial Revolution before anyone
else, and here you see the Industrial
Revolution. This is my hometown. We had
the first Clean Air Act in the world, for
obvious reasons. The British had the
Industrial Revolution, again, not because
we're smarter than the French, pains me
to say that, but it's true. Not because
we're smarter than the French, but
because the problem was thrust unto us
by geography. Coal and steam power allow
the British to project their power
globally. Nobody's ever done that before.
They conquer India, they crush China. By
1850, they bestride the world like a
colossus. And all of this is driven by
the transformation of geography since the
year 1400. And so that's why I say
geography explains why the West rules.
Second part of the title of my book,
though, you'll remember, was "For Now."
And what I mean by that, um. Back in the
1970s, when I was in high school, in
England. There was a weird thing about
our high school modern history books.
They all stopped in the year 1850. Now,
yeah, that was a very convenient place
for a British high school history book to
stop. The problem Great Britain had was
that history did not stop in 1850. And
the same processes that have basically
been shrinking the world, in a sense, pushing Britain up to the top of
the pile, these processes continue
working after 1850. So what's happening, y'know,
before 1850? The Atlantic Ocean, in a
sense, has been shrunk to a manageable
size. Great Britain has come to dominate
this global economy, in which North
America is a periphery, a very, very
valuable periphery to the British core.
As the later 19th century plays out,
increasingly North America begins to
move from being a periphery to
dominating the entire economy. By 1900, y'know,
Chicago has become Chicago. The, the
wealth of North America, as the railroad
comes in, all, all these other things,
steamships, the wealth of North America
starts to dominate this global economy.
By 1950, Britain's been shoved
unceremoniously off the top of the pile.
The United States now dominates the West,
and because of that, the whole world. Now,
I didn't study history in an American
high school, but I've been reliably
assured by friends about same age as me,
their high school history books all
stopped in 1950. Very, very convenient
place. The problem the United States had,
and continues to have, and will continue
to have, is that history did not stop in
1950. Same forces have continued to work.
The forces that shrank the Atlantic to
the point that Britain and then the U.S.
have been dominating the world have,
since 1950, shrunk the Pacific. To the
point that East Asia became first a
periphery to an American-dominated core,
and it is now beginning to look like it is
going to come to dominate the core in
the 21st century. So that's why I
say that's why the West rules, for now.
Okay, that was the first of my four points
They start to panic and run for the
doors. The other three that will go very
quickly. Now one of the things that I
particularly like, I was a bit of a
math geek, I have to admit, I like playing
around with numbers. But one of the
things I particularly liked about my
Numerical Index of Social Developments
was that having drawn this thing, you can
then start playing around with
projections, projecting a forward, saying,
"What will happen?" And, of course,
projections, all they tell you, really, is
how, how sensible are the assumptions
you're making, here, and what will happen
under certain assumptions.
So I tried to, making what I think very
conservative assumptions. I said, "What
will happen if Western and Eastern
social developments continue to rise at
the same speed across the next hundred
years at the same point that they rose across
the last hundred years?" Which i think is
an implausibly conservative assumption.
But what would happen if that were the
case? And what happens is what you see in
this graph here. And again, the blue line
is Western social development, the red
line is Eastern social development.
What we see here is that the lines cross.
The blue Western line, uh, 2000, where
I stopped my story, clearly higher. You go
a bit to the right, the red Eastern line
catches it up. And it's going to catch it
up, and you you might want to make a note
of this, it's going to catch it up in the
year 2103. That is what my Index says. Which, I got to
say, this is, like, the perfect prediction.
Because everybody always says, "You get in
the predicting game, you must be precise.
So people know whether it's come true or
not." And they also say, "It must play out
after you're dead." And 2103,
absolutely perfect. So, what, I mean, if this, if these assumptions have any
validity to them, what they suggest is that
global power is shifting. They also
suggest that the United States is likely
to remain at the center of the world for
the coming generation, possibly for the
generation after that, as well, but
probably not for three generations. That,
I think, is what these assumptions
suggest. They suggest that the process is
inexorable. If, so far, the whole story has
been driven by geography,
we should probably assume it will be
continued to be driven by geography. And
what we do is not that likely to change
it. So, revaluing the renminbi or shutting
down the U.S. government, these are not
going to change how this turns out.
Which is something to think about. Okay,
my next point, the third and the fourth
points I want to make. I've been talking
about where the, the red and the green--the red and the blue lines cross down here
on the horizontal axis, around the year 2103. What about where they cross
over here on the vertical axis? It's
about roughly 5000 points on the
vertical axis. And the reason I give you
that number is that
to get from the cave paintings at
Lascaux to all of us sitting here in the
Oriental Institute tonight, that costs
about 900 points on the Social
Development Index. This graph suggests
that the next hundred years will see a
rise of 4000 points, more than four times
as much as all the changes happened since
the end of the Ice Age. And that, I think
it's fair to say, is a mind boggling kind
of projection. And like I say, this is a
conservative projection to suggest
that's what will happen. So, so, what would
the world at 5000 points look like? And
this is what I think it gets really
interesting. It, um, seems to me, I talk
about this in the last chapter of Why
The West Rules For Now. A world at 5,000
points, we're talking about a
transformation of humanity, that the
basic animal we're familiar with is not
going to be the animal at 5,000 points.
And that, that sounds a little bit
hyperbolic. But, you think the last
hundred years, which saw about a seven
hundred point change, the last hundred
years have arguably seen more change in
the human animal than the previous
hundred thousand years. But if we brought
somebody here from even five hundred
years ago, drop them down in here tonight,
they would be astounded by the people in
this room. They would just be astonished
by us. They would look at us and say," Well,
why didn't half of you die before your
first birthday? Why do you have teeth?" I mean,
there's people in this room, though, I
mean I don't want to insult anybody, there
seem to be a number of people of my
generation in this room, and you have
teeth. What's that about? That
wouldn't have happened in the past. On
average--I'm talking about the whole
planet, not just people in this room--on
average, humans today are four inches
taller than they were a hundred years
ago. They live thirty years longer, their
internal organs are fifty percent bigger,
and more than twice as disease
resistant as they used to be. People in
rich countries can have laser and
genetic surgery to correct things they
don't like. Tiger Woods has more than
perfect eyesight,
didn't stop him backing into things, of
course, but had more than perfect
eyesight. We are merging with our
technology. This, I think, is the big story.
And that, of course, that sounds like a
science fiction prediction. But, of course, we
all know it's not a science fiction
prediction. For
all I know, if we X-rayed you, several of
you might look like the guy at the top
left here, somebody who had a pacemaker
fitted, somebody who would be dead had he
not merged with his technology. Um, very few of us, I suspect, would look like the guy
on the bottom right, who has recently
become very famous.
Oscar Pistorius, the South African
sprinter. They call him "The Fastest Man
On No Legs." He has no legs. And in 2008,
the International Olympic Committee, in
its wisdom, decided that it was unfair
that sprinters handicapped by having
legs had to run against the guy who
didn't have legs. And so they banned him
from competing to get into the Olympic
Games. And the IOC, I mean it, it has
problems to start off with, of course. It
didn't need to wake up and see all these
headlines all over the world saying it. It
promptly reversed its decision. In
2012, he c--he qualified to run in
the Olympic Games. A man with no legs is
one of the fastest runners in the world.
This is magic. There's no other way to
describe what's already happened, and we
have barely begun to scratch the surface
of what's going to happen in the 21st
century. Okay, final point, to wrap up.
That's what happens if we project the
trends forward using the assumptions I
talked about. Obvious question, which I'm sure most of you all have thought of already.
Should we do that? Is that in fact a
sensible prediction? When we look back
across the long run of history, here's this
graph again going up to the year 1900, so
we can see all the curves. We see these
constant discontinuities, that social
development rises, stagnates, collapses. We get great Dark Ages: um, the fall of the
Roman and Han Empires,
the 14th century, the Black Death, the
Mongol invasions, all kinds of terrible
things, constant collapses and Dark Ages.
When you look at these Dark Ages--which
some of us morbid historians actually
specialize in Dark Ages--when you look at
these things, what you see almost always
is the same five forces involved in
these Dark Ages. What I, I cheerfully
started to call the five Horsemen of the
Apocalypse. Almost all of them involve
mass migrations on a scale the
societies can't handle. Um, almost all of
them involve new kinds of epidemic
diseases, causing
mass mortality, often driven by the
migrations, as people are bringing in new
disease pools, so people aren't used to
before. Always involved the collapse of
states. State looses a third of its
population in the space of ten years,
they can't cope with this, they regularly
collapse. As the states collapse, famines
regularly set in, killing even more
people. All the trade routes break down,
the markets collapse. Every single case,
somewhere in the mix, the fifth factor:
climate change. It's always involved in
different and complicated ways, but it's
always in there. Now, you don't need me to
tell you. Plenty of people think that all
five of these forces are looming on our
doorstep, right now. The 21st century is
going to be a rerun of the third century
or the 14th century, an age of disaster,
history repeating itself with one big
difference, which is this:
We now have nuclear weapons, which the
Romans didn't have. They would have used
them, I am certain, but they didn't have
them. This is the biggest nuclear
explosion in history, more than 50
million tons of TNT equivalent. This
picture, just to give you a sense of what
you're looking at, the picture is taken
from 99 miles away. The mushroom cloud is 35 miles high. The fireball was five miles
across, hotter than the surface of the
Sun. Every living thing within 25 miles
of ground zero, every plant, every animal
was killed instantly. They stopped making
bombs that big after this, because they
realize if you made 51 megaton bombs, you
could kill so many more people that way.
We can do this, nobody before in history
could have done this. Um, if we go through
a collapse like some of these older
collapses, it seems to me that this could
well be the final collapse. So, okay, the
pattern of the past, then. It suggests to me
that the next hundred years, one way or
another, is going to see more discontinuity than
anything in the last hundred thousand
years. And when we understand the
patterns of the past, I think we see that
the 21st century is going to be a great
race, between a transformation of
humanity and a disaster on a scale we
have not seen since the Mount Toba
eruptions 78,000 years ago. Now, um,
the bad news, as I see it, the bad news. Um, 
great shifts of power and wealth, of the
kind that I think we're currently living
through, these always, throughout history,
have been accompanied by mass violence.
This has always been the case. Um, and this
is a very, very depressing thought.
Geography, I think, has been the great
motor driving history. War has been the
mechanism through which the changes are
often played out. And this, I think, is
more likely to be true in the 21st
century than it ever has been before.
Which is why, um, then, the book that I
just finished writing, will be out early
next year, is gonna be all about war. All
war, all the time--a bit like The History
Channel, in fact. War is--has been the
great driver of history throughout the
human story. So there's a great deal to
worry about, I think. But, the good news.
I'll close on the good news. I think
there's very good reason to be
optimistic. When you look at the
large-scale history of wars--I tried to
do it in my new book--what you see is
that humans have learned to manage
violence extraordinarily well across the
last hundred thousand years. You are less
than one tenth as likely to die violently as
the average person in a Stone Age society.
This, in some ways, is the great success
story of humanity. But although it seems
sometimes, seems hard to believe it, when
you hear about things going on in Syria
or Egypt, we have learned to control
violence in a way which would also have
seemed like magic to almost everybody
throughout the history of humanity. And
because of that, I'm confident the future
is in fact going to look like this. That the
future is going to be richer, safer, and
more amazing than ever. So thank you for
listening. [Applause]
