58 pages • 1 hour read
Niall FergusonCivilization: The West and the Rest
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Competition”
Ferguson dedicates the first chapter to the differences between China and Europe in the Early Modern period (around 1400-1800 CE). Ferguson argues that while China stagnated, the West surged forward. He sets out to demonstrate the way in which Europe surpassed China and credits this development to the institutional support for competition (one of Ferguson’s “killer apps”). First, the author compares China to Europe by using the Thames and Yangzi rivers. Second, he discusses the Chinese explorer Zheng He before the age of Early Modern European exploration. Third, he focuses on the perceived stagnation of China under the Qing dynasty (1636-1912).
Western visitors, like the famed merchant and traveler Marco Polo, were “impressed by the volume of traffic on the Yangzi” in the late 13th century. Thames, in contrast, was still “a veritable backwater” in the early 15th century. Similarly, the author compares Nanjing to London, which in the early 15th century “was barely a town” (23). Ferguson acknowledges that multiple factors affected development. The Black Plague ravaged Europe between 1346 to 1353 CE and decimated much of its population. Life expectancy in Europe, in general, was low as a result of poor sanitation, childhood mortality, and violence. It is no wonder, Ferguson argues, that political theorist Thomas Hobbes described “the state of nature” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (24).
In contrast, Ming-era China was “a relatively pleasant place to live” especially after it developed “burgeoning internal trade” (23). To this day, the Forbidden City, built in the early 1400s under the Ming Dynasty, “is not only a relic of what was once the greatest civilization,” but also “a reminder that no civilization lasts forever” (19). Less land was required to feed a family in East Asia in comparison to England. Several inventions such as paper money, the printing press, the seed drill, and paper also originated in China. By the late 18th century, iron production in Britain was lower than in 11th-century China. Finally, Chinese traveler Zheng He traveled throughout Asia and to Africa in the early 1400s in ships that made Columbus’s seem minuscule. His journeys predated the European Age of Discovery and Conquest.
The dramatic rise of Europe, in Ferguson’s view, occurred because competition gave the continent an edge over Asia. For example, The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 effectively divided the world in two between Portugal and Spain, as European maritime exploration began. Soon after, however, other maritime powers like the Dutch began to catch up. The Europeans engaged in exploration and expansion for many reasons such as finding new spice routes.
Indeed, disunity and competition took place not just among European countries but between city-states such as Venice and Genoa. In some places, the most important trade centers were “almost completely autonomous” (39). Europe was also immune to Mongol invasions although not other conflicts such as the Thirty Years’ War. Competition gave rise to the first corporations like the Muscovy Company and the Dutch East India Company. Overall, important cities competed with the monarchy, while companies competed within cities. As a result, “this multi-level competition, between states and within states—even within cities—helps explain the rapid spread and advancing technology of the mechanical clock in Europe” (41).
Ferguson suggests that in contrast to Europe’s diversity, East Asia was politically monochromatic. Confucian bureaucrats ruled China within a top-down political structure. In the author’s view, the “written language at the heart of Chinese civilization was designed for the production of a conservative elite and the exclusion of the masses from their activities (43). He contrasts the latter with the dissemination of vernacular languages such as Italian in Europe.
The 17th-century transition from the Ming to the Qing Dynasty, led by Manchu conquerors, destabilized China. Epidemics ravaged the country between the late 16th and mid-17th century significantly reducing the population. Ferguson suggests that these factors revealed the fragility of China’s equilibrium. He argues that migration, colonization, and global trade benefitted Europe and negatively impacted closed societies. By the middle of the 19th century, it was Britain that acquired Hong Kong from China in the context of the Opium Wars.
Chapter 1 Analysis
In this chapter, Ferguson compares the rise of the West to the perceived stagnation in China after the 16th century. He selects China specifically for this comparison due to its technological advancements which preceded the West. In contrast to defining the West in the introduction, the author does not examine China as a separate civilization. Other scholars, like Huntington, used a broader definition of an Eastern civilization by including not only East Asia but also Hindu culture.
Ferguson’s rhetorical strategy is to build up China’s superiority as much as possible in comparison to the “backwater” that was late Medieval Europe only to bring China down to size as the modern West emerged. From gunpowder and the printing press to the size of its cities, China surpassed Medieval Europe. Yet once Europe invented its own version of the printing press with Gutenberg, it used this invention to disseminate texts and encourage competition that, in Ferguson’s view, China lacked.
Ferguson believes that Europe’s disunity was its strength: small kingdoms, powerful city-states, and different religious denominations were all factors that created additional competition. This point is relevant and has been explored by other scholars such as statesman Henry Kissinger, who stated, “Europe thrived on fragmentation and embraced its own divisions” (Kissinger, Henry. World Order. New York: Penguin Books, 2015, p. 11). The American statesman considered Europe’s decentralization to be instrumental in establishing a balance of power in which no single country could truly dominate others enabling Europe as a whole to dominate other global regions.
Ferguson treats the relationship between European competition and the colonization of foreign countries in a positive light. He pragmatically examines the benefits that imperial pursuits brought to Europe, such as parasitic resource extraction (though his chapter on medicine later explores some of the negative consequences of Western colonialism).
Ferguson sometimes relies on wordplay in the chapter. For instance, the two characters that spell “China” literally say “middle country.” For this reason, China is called the Middle Kingdom. Ferguson changes this name to the “Mediocre Kingdom” to emphasize his belief in Chinese stagnation due to a strict bureaucracy and a lack of competition in the Ming Dynasty, conflating a geographical designation with a qualitative one. Some may consider this type of renaming to be culturally insensitive. “The spice race” is another play on words (33). During the Age of Discovery and Conquest, different European powers searched for and fought over trade routes, including spice routes. The author calls this competition the “spice race” in reference to the Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States known as the space race. He uses this section heading to underscore his belief in the importance of competition to technological advancement and social progress.
Ferguson amplifies and downplays the negative factors that affected Europe and China, respectively. For example, he examines the way in which the Black Death ravaged Europe and reduced its population stifling its ability to advance. Yet, he seems to consider the epidemics in China from the 16th century onward to be less significant. Similarly, he discusses the Thirty Years’ War as a devastating event in European history. However, he dismisses the transition from the Ming to the Qing Dynasty in China, even though it took decades (1618-1683), involved an invasion of the Manchu, affected neighboring Korea, and is estimated to have had a high death toll. It is unsurprising that a long and bloody political transition through an invasion would negatively affect a country and its development.
Later, in the 19th century, China fell victim to British imperialism—and the devastating effects of selling opium to the Chinese population—which the author describes as a sign of Western preeminence. Here, Ferguson uses the “might is right” argument, citing that China had to “pay an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars, open five ports to British trade and cede the island of Hong Kong” (47-48). To Ferguson, the Opium Wars were a sign of British triumph.
