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Why the West Rules - for Now
- The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
- Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
- Length: 24 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's summary
Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West’s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the 20th century secured its global supremacy.
Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past 200 years, and will its power last? Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.
Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules - for Now spans 50,000 years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines - from ancient history to neuroscience - not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
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- Everything You Need to Know About the World But Never Learned, Revised and Updated
- By: Kenneth C. Davis
- Narrated by: Kenneth C. Davis, Joe Ochman, Mark Bramhall, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Kenneth C. Davis, author of Don't Know Much About® History, Don't Know Much About the Civil War and Don't Know Much About the Bible, turns his inimitable wit and wide-ranging knowledge to the subject of geography, and proves once and for all that there is a lot more to it than labeling countries on a map. From often amusing perceptions people have had through the ages about the world and the universe to the changing map of today, Davis shows how geography is really a great crossroad of many fields: biology, meteorology, astronomy, history, economics, and even politics.
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Errors
- By The Product Owner on 08-29-15
By: Kenneth C. Davis
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Justinian's Flea
- Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe
- By: William Rosen
- Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The emperor Justinian reunified Rome's fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals. At his capital in Constantinople, he built the world's most beautiful building, married the most powerful empress, and wrote the empire's most enduring legal code, seemingly restoring Rome's fortunes for the next five hundred years. Then, in the summer of 542, he encountered a flea. The ensuing outbreak of bubonic plague killed 5,000 people a day in Constantinople and nearly killed Justinian himself.
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More history than Disease
- By joan on 06-25-07
By: William Rosen
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Millennium
- From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization Has Changed over a Thousand Years
- By: Ian Mortimer
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In Millennium, best-selling historian Ian Mortimer takes the listener on a whirlwind tour of the last 10 centuries of Western history. It is a journey into a past vividly brought to life and bursting with ideas, that pits one century against another in his quest to measure which century saw the greatest change. We journey from a time when there was a fair chance of your village being burned to the ground by invaders - and dried human dung was a recommended cure for cancer - to a world in which explorers sailed into the unknown and civilizations came into conflict.
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Bad ending - literally
- By John Gordon on 12-14-16
By: Ian Mortimer
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Destiny Disrupted
- A History of the World through Islamic Eyes
- By: Tamim Ansary
- Narrated by: Tamim Ansary
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Until about 1800, the West and the Islamic realm were like two adjacent, parallel universes, each assuming itself to be the center of the world while ignoring the other. As Europeans colonized the globe, the two world histories intersected and the Western narrative drove the other one under. The West hardly noticed, but the Islamic world found the encounter profoundly disrupting.
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A history of the world before the West mattered
- By David on 05-05-14
By: Tamim Ansary
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The Ocean of Churn
- By: Sanjeev Sanyal
- Narrated by: Abhishek Sharma
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In this ambitious audiobook, best-selling author Sanjeev Sanyal chronicles the grand sweep of history from East Africa to Australia, conjuring the great cities of Angkor and Vijayanagar, medieval Arab empires, and Chinese "treasure fleets" in rich, vivid detail. He explores remote archaeological sites, maritime trading networks, and half-forgotten oral tales to challenge established historical narratives with fresh evidence. Shining new light on medieval geopolitics and long-lost cities, The Ocean of Churn is a mesmerizing journey into the heart of a vibrant civilization.
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An unputdownable treatise on the history of Indian Ocean
- By Akash Mitra on 06-20-20
By: Sanjeev Sanyal
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Nonzero
- The Logic of Human Destiny
- By: Robert Wright
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 16 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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At the beginning of Nonzero, Robert Wright sets out to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web." Twenty-two chapters later, after a sweeping and vivid narrative of the human past, he has succeeded and has mounted a powerful challenge to the conventional view that evolution and human history are aimless.
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Non-Zero (but pretty close to zero)
- By Douglas on 02-06-14
By: Robert Wright
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Walls
- A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick
- By: David Frye
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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With Frye as our raconteur-guide, we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed - to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone and with them effectively divide humanity: On one side were those the walls protected; on the other, those the walls kept out. The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves - rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America....
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A boom that will transform how you view all of history.
- By BB on 08-04-24
By: David Frye
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Civilization
- The West and the Rest
- By: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Niall Ferguson
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
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The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations.
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Thoughtful analysis of the ascendancy of the West.
- By Patrick on 05-25-13
By: Niall Ferguson
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Ancient China
- A Captivating Guide to the Ancient History of China and the Chinese Civilization Starting from the Shang Dynasty to the Fall of the Han Dynasty
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Desmond Manny
- Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
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In this audiobook, you will be led on a journey through almost 2,000 years of Chinese history, showing you all the ups and downs of those ancient times, the sufferings and joys of the Chinese people, along with their greatest achievements and failures. Dynasties will change, people will be killed and born, art made and destroyed, but the Chinese civilization will prevail, rising from humble beginnings to an empire that at some points outshined any other in the world at that time.
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Ancient China
- By Joey on 05-31-20
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American Holocaust
- The Conquest of the New World
- By: David E. Stannard
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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For 400 years - from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the US Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s - the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people.
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Most important book I never heard of
- By Robert Bourque on 03-16-18
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An Edible History of Humanity
- By: Tom Standage
- Narrated by: George K. Wilson
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout history, food has acted as a catalyst of social change, political organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict, and economic expansion. An Edible History of Humanity is a pithy, entertaining account of how a series of changes---caused, enabled, or influenced by food---has helped to shape and transform societies around the world.
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Flawed, but worthwhile
- By Ary Shalizi on 12-28-17
By: Tom Standage
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What listeners say about Why the West Rules - for Now
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Skeptical
- 09-11-11
Compelling and infuriating take at World History
After an extensive first third of the book dealing with prehistory to dispel any still possible existing claims of racial superiority between East and West, the book becomes mainly a comparative history between "East" and "West".
Of course this description does not do full justice to the scope and ambition of the author, whose main theory is that progress in history is a product of geography and social development, with one feeding on each other, creating both splendor and collapse; he comes up with an index to measure civilizational development and concludes that there is no foundation for one culture claiming superiority over another.
Mr. Morris wildly overreaches in staking a claim for geography as the main driver of history: he concludes that great men, and culture in general, have played no crucial part in civilization, and that history would have taken pretty much the same course whatever these men or women did: would really history have been the same without Napoleon, George Washington or Isaac Newton? This gives his theory a sometimes disturbingly materialistic and deterministic bent.
His definitions of East and West are highly debatable: since for him culture is not important, he does not make a difference of the split between Christianity and Islam, and sees both as part of the West; obviously, he does not make a big deal of the subsequent schism between Catholics and Protestants. Just look at the huge differences between Europe and the Arab World, or the US and Latin America and the claim that these divergences have not had a major role in shaping history seem wildly unrealistic, .
That said, Mr. Morris is a compelling narrator, and in some cases his arguments are definitely persuasive. The close attention he gives to both the rise of the East and the West provide a much needed balance to existing world histories, and shed light on the interconnectedness of the World starting in Antiquity. His final thoughts are quite dazzling. Well worth a listen.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-15-14
not entirely suited for audiio book
If you could sum up Why the West Rules - for Now in three words, what would they be?
survey of whys
Would you recommend Why the West Rules - for Now to your friends? Why or why not?
depends on the friend...parts of the book are heavily dependent on references to charts and graphs which obviously are not available through listening, though available on his web site. I'm interested enough in the subject to listen through this, but parts are a real slog. Other parts do work well, illuminate the subject, and even are dryly humorous.
Any additional comments?
I really enjoyed Ian Morris' book, War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, highly recommend that.
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- Douglas Ryan Osselaer
- 04-17-22
Are all humans greedy parasites or just the West?
Ancient China=the center of the world
Islamic Egypt=the Gem of the west
Western success=luck or greed
human beings=parasites
and guess how it ends... climate change.
Tough to finish.
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- fj
- 11-05-12
Good way to finish a book
What made the experience of listening to Why the West Rules - for Now the most enjoyable?
It allows for listening on the go
Who was your favorite character and why?
N/A
What does Antony Ferguson bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
N/A
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
N/A
Any additional comments?
I like the audio format I have various listening/play back devices and I can multi-task and get more things done, including finishing books.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jerry
- 10-25-11
Deep history, Interesting projection of the Future
I loved the way Ian goes back to the very begining of man - Out of Africa. It was very informative to me to get this broad persopective on the evolution of our race and our society. And he makes a very compelling argument for what the next 100 years will bring. Loved the last chapter.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Harsh Pareek
- 08-13-16
An excellent book on the history of civilization
I grew annoyed with the constant comparison of East and west, because I do not think that question is a very interesting one, but I did expect it going in, given the title. I think the book could have been better if it did not fixate on that question.
The author does a great job of trying to be a neutral observer instead of a part of the "western" civilization and treating all civilizations with scientific neutrality. This book is full of interesting details on civilizations throughout history and comparisons among them, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how the world got to be the way it is, and why empires rose and fell, and to anyone interested in predicting the future
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- George
- 08-03-11
I bought it hardcopy
I was so impressed with Ian Morris' viewpoint and breadth that I purchased the hardcopy to re-read and share with friends. As the cover says, this is possibly the closest we'll ever come to a grand unified theory of history. Even more enjoyable if you're familiar with the basics of complexity theory as his arguments (seemingly unintentionally) flow very much along those lines.
The only quibble - and this is a minor one - is that there is significant discussion of various diagrams throughout the book This of course doesn't come across in the audio-format however they are generally explained well enough to be not completely lost.
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8 people found this helpful
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- PATO
- 04-29-17
Only addresses two parts of the world. incomplete.
There is more to human development than what occurred in Europe and east Asia . What about the Americas and sub Saharan Africa ? Other than that it was well reasoned and entertaining .
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- CentralTexasLife
- 01-07-15
No PDF for often referred illustrations and tables
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
No PDF for often referred illustrations, charts and tables.
What was most disappointing about Ian Morris’s story?
No PDF for often referred illustrations, charts and tables.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
No PDF for often referred illustrations, charts and tables.
Any additional comments?
No PDF for often referred illustrations, charts and tables.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Oldie
- 08-30-14
A history lesson that we all should be aware of.
Would you consider the audio edition of Why the West Rules - for Now to be better than the print version?
I like audio because it provides the flexibility to "read" on the go.Dr. Morris uses a multidisciplinary approach to analyze the history of man from the last major ice age 20K years ago to today. And he fills in the banks illustrating how vulnerable mankind has been and is to physical geography and climate change magnified by migration, famine, epidemic and state failure. He shows what was to me, and I think most others, how our education leaves huge gaps during which these forces have negatively impacted human history countless times, just as they Probably will again in regard to who, if anyone, will rule the future.
What did you like best about this story?
Detail ans science.
Which scene was your favorite?
He unfolds in depth detail numerous insights into aspects of history that I was surprised to find out that I did not know.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Many.
Any additional comments?
Great read for people who want to know the real story and it's context.
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