How the West won

HISTORY: Civilization: The West and the RestBy Niall Ferguson Allen Lane, 432pp. £25

WHY DID civilisations originating in Europe, the so-called western powers, come so to dominate the world over the past 500 years, and how much longer can that dominance last? That is the question Niall Ferguson tackles in his latest book.

As he sees it, the six factors contributing to the rise in power of the West since 1500 were competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism and a work ethic. In light of our present worries, some of his conclusions are alarming. Like the Nazi takeover of Germany, the French Revolution was preceded by a public-debt crisis. In a mere 37 years, from 1751 to 1788, French debt service grew from 25 per cent of revenue to 62 per cent. Now the US Congressional Budget Office predicts that, on present trends, US federal debt service will rise from 10 per cent of US revenues today to 58 per cent by 2040. The cost of ageing societies puts most European governments on a similar trajectory. Meanwhile China is building up huge savings, investing in natural resources overseas, and in expanding its navy.

Perhaps controversially, Ferguson links a decline in the work ethic in Europe with a decline in religious belief. Over the past 50 years he sees a close correlation between the decline in religious practice in Europe compared to the US with a simultaneous decline in the number of hours Europeans work each year compared to the number that Americans work. Ferguson believes northern Europeans have lost the Protestant work ethic while Americans still have it.

It comes back to competition. Competition between churches keeps Americans religious. Two-fifths of white North Americans change their religion at least once during their lifetimes. Meanwhile state churches in Europe stagnate. And competition for jobs keeps Americans working hard.

In his search for the success factors of the West he compares the progress of North America with that of South America. In North America the native peoples were driven off the land in what he describes as the manifest larceny of their tribal territories. Most Native Americans died or were confined to reservations. In South America, on the other hand, the natives stayed on as indentured labourers, and were forcibly converted to Christianity, but they and their descendants were allowed to survive and stay where they were. Labour was thus fairly plentiful in South America, and was employed in a few big estates that controlled all the land. Power was concentrated in the hands of a small, land-owning Spanish elite.

In contrast, labour was scarce in North America. To make up the shortage, immigrants had to be attracted from Europe by the offer of free or subsidised land. Huge numbers crossed the Atlantic and set up owner-occupied farms on the Great Plains. The result was that, by 1910 in rural North America, 80 per cent of the inhabitants owned some land. In Mexico, by contrast, only 2.2 per cent of rural dwellers owned any land. This dispersal of property in North America provided a basis for political and economic competition, for democracy and for the development of a market economy.

On the other hand, slavery in North America was more severe. Brazilian slaves were allowed to marry; US slaves were not. Inter-racial marriage was generally permitted in Brazil but forbidden in the United States. Even after the end of slavery the prohibition continued, until as recently as 1967 in some states.

European colonialism in Africa was a mixed blessing. The advantages came in areas such as healthcare. France introduced free healthcare in its west African colonies in 1905, before it did so in metropolitan France. European researchers helped find preventions and cures for tropical diseases such as smallpox and malaria. African life expectancy started to rise significantly during the late colonial period.

On the other hand, some European colonialists came close to practising genocide. In German South West Africa (now Namibia) the Herrero people were almost exterminated in response to a minor rebellion before the first World War, and some of the techniques later used by the Third Reich were pioneered there. The Belgians had an appalling record in Congo.

Ferguson believes that a key factor in creating a consumer market for the products of the industrial revolution was the desire of people to vary their clothes and to buy new ones. Without the human desire to be fashionably attired there might never have been an industrial revolution.

Mechanisation, pioneered in Britain in the late 18th century, reduced the retail price of cotton clothing to a 10th of what it had been 50 years before, and turned Britain into a major exporter. Britain was the first country to mechanise textile production because in Britain labour was scarce, and more expensive than in continental Europe. Necessity was the mother of innovation. Britain’s naval superiority then helped it keep its access to those new export markets open, and created a basis for the world trading system.

Consumerism also played a part in the fall of communism. Ferguson says that, if the cold war had turned into a hot war, the Soviet Union might well have won it. As its second World War contest with Germany showed, the Soviet Union could better absorb casualties and keep fighting, and it had an economic system ideally suited to mass production of standard military goods. But it fell down when it came to responding to the diverse and changing demands of fashion-conscious consumers. That failure undermined the patience of the peoples of eastern Europe with the autocratic socialist system. China has made a consumer society one of the goals of its communist-run capitalism.

Ferguson also ponders the contest between the Muslim world and the West. While the Arab world was ahead of the West in science 1,000 years ago, he contends that, under the Ottoman Empire, free scientific inquiry was subordinated to religious orthodoxy. The use of the printing press was discouraged. The neglect of science carried a military price when the application of Newtonian physics to artillery enabled western armies to outgun their Ottoman opponents.

This is an excellent book, presenting many serious arguments but 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.

Civilization: Is the West History?, the series to which this book is linked, continues tomorrow night on Channel 4 at 8pm

John Bruton, former taoiseach and EU ambassador to the US, is president of IFSC Ireland