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]