MAIN IDEA:

This book represents the approach to history quite different from traditional when the world is divided into civilizations and the contemporary West is based on Greek and Roman civilizations. The author rejects this traditional notion and offers another view of the history defined this way:” There is no privileged connection between ancient Greeks and Romans and the modern “West”: the nation-states of western Europe and their settler colonies overseas. The capital of the Roman empire moved in the mid-first millennium CE to Constantinople, and remained there for over a thousand years. Muslims in the meantime combined Greek learning with science from Persia, India, and central Asia as new technologies streamed around Africa, Arabia, and the Indian Ocean, while sailors on northern seas and riders on the Steppe channeled goods and ideas from China to Ireland. This is the huge world extending from the Pacific to the Atlantic that the rising nations of western Europe inherited in the fifteenth century CE, as they set out into a new one. These millennia of interaction have however largely been forgotten, drowned out by ideas developed in the Victorian period that organized the world into “civilizations,” separate and often mutually opposed. I want to tell a different story: one that doesn’t begin in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean and then re-emerge in Renaissance Italy, but traces the relationships that built what is now called the West from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, as societies met, tangled, and sometimes grew apart. More broadly, I want to make the case that it is connections, not civilizations, that drive historical change”.

MY TAKE ON IT:

I like this approach to history because I also believe that the traditional division of humanity into civilizations distorts the reality in which different parts of humanity constantly interact via war and trade, exchanging their cultural and technological artifacts and everything else conceivable. Sometimes, these are good things, such as wheels or agricultural techniques, while sometimes, these are really bad things, such as communism or smallpox. In either case, the exchange is constant and unstoppable. This book is a pretty good narrative about what we know about what happened before us.

However, I disagree with the author that: “The idea of a European civilization could still be problematic”, even if she admits that:”…notion of “Western Civilization” characterized by democracy and capitalism, freedom and tolerance, progress and science.” I do not see it as problematic because “Western Civilization” is qualitatively different from “Non-Western Civilizations.”

“Western” means resource allocation via widely distributed private property (capitalism). “Non-Western” means resource allocation from the top down, either from one center of power (socialism) or multiple loosely related centers of power(feudalism). “Western” also means individual freedom of expression and actions supported by private property resources with collective action controlled by fairly elected officials. “Non-Western” means suppression of individual freedom of expression and actions with some rigid doctrines violently enforced on people. The consequences of “Western” are wealth and prosperity of people resulting from efficient resource allocation and progress of science and technology due to independent probing of unknown conducted by individuals with the freedom and resources to perform it. “Non-Western” means economic misery resulting from inefficient resource allocation based on the whims of the elite in power and stagnation in science, technology, and arts due to “politically correct” pseudo-science and art combined with the non-competitive development of technology.   

We are now in the process of a global clash between this “Western”, represented by individuals supporting its values, which could be openly done only in the USA and its allies and its enemies represented by the Left within “Western” powers together with all these “Non-Western” powers from Islamic supremacists to Russian and Chinese nationalists that control most of humanity at this point. Whether the next couple of generations will live in prosperity or misery depends on the outcome of this struggle.