Civilization: The West and the Rest

Description

How the West's six 'killer apps' transformed the history of the world Winner of the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize 2013 If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe and compare the dazzling civilizations of the Orient with Europe and North America, the idea that the West would dominate the Rest for most of the next half millennium would have struck you as wildly fanciful. So how did it happen? The answer, Ferguson argues, was the West's development of six 'killer applications'- competition, science, property, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. But has the West now lost its monopoly on these six things? If so, are we living through the end of Western ascendancy?

Niall Ferguson is one of Britain's most renowned historians. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968- The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His many other prizes include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013). He was named Columnist of the Year at the 2018 British Press Awards.

Ferguson is the most brilliant British historian of his generation ... he writes with splendid panache * The Times * One of the world's leading historians -- Hamish McRae * Independent * Civilization is another masterpiece ... a pulsing energy suffuses his account fascinating facts burst like fireworks on every page -- Dominic Lawson * Sunday Times * This is sharp. It feels urgent. Ferguson, with a properly financially literate mind, twists his knife with great literary brio -- Andrew Marr * Financial Times * A dazzling history of Western ideas * Economist *