Why has the West been so globally dominant in the last 500 years? It’s latitudes not attitudes that explains it.
I am currently reading “War: What Is It Good For”? by Ian Morris and this fascinating look at big history frequently refers to the ‘lucky latitudes’. This led me to look up earlier writing by Morris on this idea that it is geography and not biology that has largely shaped the history of civilisations.
In this article, Morris gives a lightning tour of world history. emphasising the advantages to humankind of farming in the latitudes between 20° and 35° north in the Old World and a similar band between 15° south and 20° north in the Americas.
“So what do we learn from all this history? Two main things, I think. First, since people are all much the same, it is our shared biology which explains humanity’s great upward leaps in wealth, productivity and power across the last 10,000 years; and, second, that it is geography which explains why one part of world – the nations we conventionally call ‘the West’ – now dominates the rest.
Geography determined that when the world warmed up at the end of the Ice Age a band of lucky latitudes stretching across Eurasia from the Mediterranean to China developed agriculture earlier than other parts of the world and then went on to be the first to invent cities, states and empires. But as social development increased, it changed what geography meant and the centres of power and wealth shifted around within these lucky latitudes.
Until about ad 500 the Western end of Eurasia hung on to its early lead, but after the fall of the Roman Empire and Han dynasty the centre of gravity moved eastward to China, where it stayed for more than a millennium. Only around 1700 did it shift westward again, largely due to inventions – guns, compasses, ocean-going ships – which were originally pioneered in the East but which, thanks to geography, proved more useful in the West.
Westerners then created an Atlantic economy which raised profound new questions about how the world worked, pushing westerners into a Scientific Revolution, an Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century, the West dominated the globe.”