The West and the Rest

<p> Niall Ferguson is a historian whose gifts are unfortunately less common than they should be in his profession. He can tell us about the past through outstanding anecdotes and explain why it matters. The present is a compendium of the past, and there is little sense trying to puzzle through our world without the aid of history. </p> <p>His visually dynamic BBC series “Civilization: The West and the Rest” (out on DVD) asks a crucial question: Why did the West, rooted in the once marginal peninsula of Asia called Western Europe, gain ascendance over the world? Western dominance wasn't a foregone conclusion. After all, Islamic civilization, drawing from Greek and Persian sources, was far advanced over Western Christendom until the 1500s. And in the early1400s, China launched a fleet that made Columbus' flotilla look like matchsticks, exploring East Africa and probably rounding the Cape of Good Hope. </p> <p>And then they stopped. The embrace by the new Ottoman overlords of an anti-intellectual fundamentalism stunted Islam; China's emperors decided the outside world was puny and unimportant. Both paid the price when ambitious European upstarts arrived on their shores. </p> <p>The West won, but Ferguson's “Civilization” explodes any notion of its inherent superiority. As he points out, London in 1400 was a dark cesspool of 40,000 inhabitants. Nanjing was home to 1 million relatively well-shod and housed souls. </p>