Summary of Ian Morris's The Measure of Civilization

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Theories explaining why the West has been so successful long date back to the eighteenth century, when Europeans began to take over the world. These theories vary from saying that the West is the heir to a distinct and superior cultural tradition, to arguing that the West is biologically superior to other humans.

#2 The real question at issue is about social development, which refers to groups’ abilities to master their physical and intellectual environments and get things done in the world. Defenders of the new versions of the eighteenth-century theories argue that Western social development has been higher than that in other parts of the world for hundreds or even thousands of years.

#3 I want to provide critics of Why the West Rules—For Now with the ammunition they need to subject the conclusions I reached in that book to systematic analysis. I also want to make comparative history more explicit and quantitative.

#4 Social development is a measure of communities’ abilities to get things done in the world. It is a bundle of technological, subsistence, organizational, and cultural accomplishments through which people feed, clothe, house, and reproduce themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822504509

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Insights on Ian Morris's The Measure of Civilization

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Theories explaining why the West has been so successful long date back to the eighteenth century, when Europeans began to take over the world. These theories vary from saying that the West is the heir to a distinct and superior cultural tradition, to arguing that the West is biologically superior to other humans.

#2

The real question at issue is about social development, which refers to groups’ abilities to master their physical and intellectual environments and get things done in the world. Defenders of the new versions of the eighteenth-century theories argue that Western social development has been higher than that in other parts of the world for hundreds or even thousands of years.

#3

I want to provide critics of Why the West Rules—For Now with the ammunition they need to subject the conclusions I reached in that book to systematic analysis. I also want to make comparative history more explicit and quantitative.

#4

Social development is a measure of communities’ abilities to get things done in the world. It is a bundle of technological, subsistence, organizational, and cultural accomplishments through which people feed, clothe, house, and reproduce themselves.

#5

Social development is not a measure of the worth of different societies. It is a value-neutral analytical category that does not imply anything about the moral, environmental, or other costs of social development.

#6

Social evolutionism is the idea that societies evolve through four levels of differentiation, from the simple to the trebly compound. Herbert Spencer was the most influential philosopher writing in English in the mid- nineteenth century, and his ideas won an enormous audience.

#7

The idea that societies should be organized into stages of differentiation, from savagery to barbarism to civilization, was popular in the late nineteenth century. But by the 1910s, a backlash was under way, and by the 1920s, many anthropologists had decided that societies should be understood as separate, seamless wholes.

#8

In the 1930s, Childe, a British archaeologist, began to realize that agriculture and cities had evolved independently in different parts of the world. In the 1950s, many American social scientists returned to evolutionary frameworks.

#9

The most widely read evolutionist in this period was anthropologist Leslie White, who emphasized energy capture as the motor driving evolution. White divided history into stages of primitive,