I've made a start on Ian Morris's Why The West Rules For Now and am loving it. The grand sweep of history has always been appealing to me, and what's more the opening section of this book cites some of my previous favourite reads: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel; David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations; Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence. I'd add to this opening list Greg Clark's A Farewell to Alms, and The Company of Strangers by Paul Seabright. And more gloomily, Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies and Jared Diamond's Collapse.
Morris's book so far has quite a lot of overlap with Seabright, as its first section covers (from the perspective of an archaeologist rather than an economist) what I'd inexpertly call Stone Age history. He, like Seabright, brings in anthropology and evolutionary biology as well as his own discipline. But one of the opening points Morris makes as that when trying to think about how to interpret the grand sweep and the status of the West vs the rest, we often think about the past 250 years, maybe the Renaissance onwards, or about the earliest millennia of human history and our evolution into talking, thinking creatures, but rarely about the millennia in between (from say 10000 or 8000 BCE to 1400 CE). I'm about to get onto that long and often overlooked stretch.
His other introductory argument overlaps with Diamond's claim that geography matters overwhelmingly. But Morris adds that this should be thought of as an interaction between geography and other facts – biology, psychology, culture, chance – in what he terms the Great Chain of Energy. Electro-magnetic energy from the sun is converted to chemical energy by plants and kinetic energy by animals (including us). Changes in the Earth's climate make different geographical factors weigh in different ways at different times.
Anyway, to return to my first point, this is grand sweep with a vengeance, being interdisciplinary rather than merely historical. I'll report back as I work through the remaining 600 pages.
