Head-on | Civilisations: Decline of the West, rise of the Rest

In his 2011 book Civilisation: The West and the Rest, British historian Niall Ferguson wrote: “In the year 1411, if you had been able to circumnavigate the globe, you would probably have been most impressed by the quality of life in Oriental civilisations. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing, while work had begun on reopening and improving the Grand Canal; in the Near East, the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople, which they would finally capture in 1453. The Byzantine Empire was breathing its last.”

“By contrast, Western Europe in 1411 would have struck you as a miserable backwater, recuperating from the ravages of the Black Death — which had reduced population by as much as half as it swept eastwards between 1347 and 1351 — and still plagued by bad sanitation and seemingly incessant war. In England the leper king Henry IV was on the throne, having successfully overthrown and murdered the ill-starred Richard II.”

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So how did the West rise from this morass?

“The facile, if not tautological, answer to the question,” Ferguson says, “is that the West dominated the Rest because of imperialism. There are still many people today who can work themselves up into a state of high moral indignation over the misdeeds of the European empires. Misdeeds there certainly were, and they are not absent from these pages.”

Unfolding events have exposed Ferguson’s shallow thesis. He claimed that colonialism cannot fully explain why the West rose from penury of the 1600s to the prosperity of the 1900s. Instead, Ferguson and other apologists of colonialism and transatlantic slavery, blindsided by the rise of China and India and the sclerotic decline of Europe, cling to the six factors that led to Western global domination.

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Ferguson’s six “killer applications” that he says contributed to the West’s success are simplistic: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic.

The West grew rich not because of these six killer applications but because colonial invasions, extortionate taxation from the colonies, and slave labour shipped from Africa to North America gave the West a multi-generational bounty: free land and free labour for over 200 years.

The work ethic killer application did not apply to African slaves. The democracy killer application did not apply to European colonies. The consumerism killer application was extractive – raw materials from the colonies fed the Industrial Revolution. The competition killer application applied only to Western powers carving out Africa among themselves following the infamous Berlin Conference in 1884-85. Medicine and science, Ferguson’s fifth and sixth killer applications, were byproducts of the first four.

Ferguson is not unaware of the cruelties of colonialism and slavery. He concedes: “The word ‘imperialism’ is a term of abuse that caught on with nationalists, liberals and socialists alike. These critics rained coruscating ridicule of the claim that the empires were exporting civilisation. Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi is said to have replied wittily that he thought it would be a good idea. In Hind Swaraj (‘Indian Home Rule’), published in 1908, Gandhi went so far as to call Western civilisation ‘a disease’ and ‘a bane’.”

Livid with Gandhi, Ferguson showered venom on him: “The ascetic holy man Gandhi was scornful of Western civilisation’s ‘army of doctors’. In an interview in London in 1931 he cited the ‘conquest of disease’ as one of the purely ‘material’ yardsticks by which Western civilisation measured progress. To the countless millions of people whose lives have been lengthened by Western medicine, however, the choice between spiritual purity and staying alive was not difficult to make.”

Ferguson ignores the horrific discovery that British colonial doctors used Indian political prisoners in the Andaman Islands’ Cellular Jail as guinea pigs to test experimental medical drugs, leading to several deaths. The crime was exposed in a seminal investigation report published by The Guardian in 2001.

Six key factors

The West rose from poverty to wealth not primarily due to Ferguson’s six killer applications but six other key factors.

The first key factor was Europe’s mastery of the seas and the weapons of war. That enabled even small West European nations like Portugal to colonise Brazil and parts of India. The bigger nations of Europe, Britain and France, built bigger colonies and made bigger fortunes for their nations’ treasuries.

The second key factor was the transatlantic slave trade. Millions of Africans were captured by British slave shippers, shackled in chains and sold to the highest bidder in North America from the 1600s to the 1800s. America’s wealth was built with slave labour on its cotton plantations.

The third key factor was European invasions of the Americas and Australasia, driving indigenous people who had lived there for millennia into impoverished reservations and settling invading Europeans on their land.

The fourth key factor was imposing taxes of over 50 per cent on farmers and traders in colonial India, reducing it from a cotton and textile exporting global powerhouse into a land wracked by poverty.

The fifth key factor was creating conditions for famine in British-ruled India. Before colonialism, major famines were rare in India. During Britain’s 190-year colonial rule, India suffered from 31 major famines – roughly one big famine every six years. After 1947, there hasn’t been a famine in India.

The sixth key factor was propagating a distorted history of the West and the “Rest”.

As befits an apologist for the West’s colonial depredations and slave ownership, Ferguson ignores British economics historian Angus Maddison’s conclusions except to say: “Even the late Angus Maddison may have been over-optimistic when he argued that in 1700 the average inhabitant of China was slightly better off than the average inhabitant of the future United States. Maddison was closer to the mark when he estimated in 1600 British per-capita GDP was already 60 per cent higher than Chinese.”

That is a misreading of Maddison’s conclusions, who said India and China accounted for nearly 50 per cent of global economic output in 1700.

Ferguson is forced to concede in the end in the interest of academic integrity: “The decline of the West is a near certainty.”

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.