Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest Book

A story of sailboats, missiles, land deeds, vaccines, blue jeans and Chinese Bibles.Read More

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  • Play

    If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe you would have been most impressed by the dazzling civilizations of the Orient. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing; in the Near East the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople. By contrast England would have struck you as a miserable backwater ravaged by plague bad sanitation and incessant war. The other quarrelsome kingdoms of Western Europe - Aragon Castile France Portugal and Scotland - would have seemed little better. As for fifteenth-century North America it was an anarchic wilderness compared with the realms of the Aztecs and Incas. The idea that the West would come to dominate the Rest for most of the next half millennium would have struck you as wildly fanciful. And yet it happened. What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient? The answer Niall Ferguson argues was that the West developed six 'killer applications' that the Rest lacked: competition science democracy medicine consumerism and the work ethic.The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six things. If so Ferguson warns we may be living through the end of Western ascendancy. Civilization takes readers on their own extraordinary journey around the world - from the Grand Canal at Nanjing to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul; from Machu Picchu in the Andes to Shark Island Namibia; from the proud towers of Prague to the secret churches of Wenzhou. It is the story of sailboats missiles land deeds vaccines blue jeans and Chinese Bibles. It is the defining narrative of modern world history.

  • TheBookPeople

    A fascinating examination of how Western civilisation secured a lion's share of the world's resources and an intriguing take on what the future holds as the rest fight back, Niall Ferguson's Civilization is a thought-provoking and compulsive read. An excellent companion to the recent six-part Channel 4 TV series in which Ferguson drew bold, ambitious and utterly compelling conclusions on the history of economics, politics and the growth of the Western world, this superbly written and researched hardback is an essential gift for anyone with an interest in how our modern world was shaped over time and history.

  • Waterstones

    Takes readers on their own journey around the world - from the Grand Canal at Nanjing to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul; from Machu Picchu in the Andes to Shark Island, Namibia; and, from the proud towers of Prague to the secret churches of Wenzhou.

  • ASDA

    A story of sailboats missiles land deeds vaccines blue jeans and Chinese Bibles.

  • 1846142733
  • 9781846142734
  • Niall Ferguson
  • 3 March 2011
  • Allen Lane
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 432
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