|
Laddar... ¿Por qué manda Occidente... por ahora? (urspr publ 2010; utgåvan 2018)av Ian Morris (Författare), Joan Eloi Roca (Översättare)
VerkdetaljerWhy the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future av Ian Morris (Author) (2010)
   Ingen/inga Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken.  bookomaniac | Apr 20, 2019 |  A great overview and a great read. Morris sweeps over all of mankinds history in a single book and makes it fun to read. I can definitely recommend this even for casual readers of history books. But why not the full five stars? Well, it's still lengthy, and the conclusion is... weird: he's been talking about hard ceilings all the time, but in his forecast he pretty much disregards the option of mankind hitting another hard ceiling. (  ) cwebb | Jun 6, 2017 | My thoughts on Why the West Rules for Now: The Patterns of History and What they Reveal about the Future http://meganeasleywalshauthor.blogspot.ie/2015/02/writer-wednesday-why-west-rule... (  ) Megan.Easley-Walsh | Dec 9, 2016 | Way too much information. Okay, I got it, geography is significant in determining history, but do we have make the book that long? (  ) zhoud2005 | Jul 8, 2016 | If you like Guns, Germs and Steel, you will like this book as well. ( ) M_Clark | Apr 25, 2016 |
 A British-born archaeologist, classicist and historian now at Stanford University, Morris is the historians’ equivalent of those physicists who search for a still elusive unified field theory. In his new book, he sets out to discover broad patterns, “the overall ‘shape’ of history,” by sifting through the world’s long development process. Following the oscillating forces from prehistory to the present, he shows how both the East and West managed to catalyze themselves at different times and in different ways to progressively new heights of development. But his ultimate challenge is to make sense of all these cycles of rise and fall, the better to judge whether either side was in possession of any innate superiority. His answer to that question is an emphatic no. East and West, he tells us, are just “geographical labels, not value judgments.”  Morris’s attempt to tackle the history of the world, while refreshing, might be dismissed as the exercise of a 19th-century generalist fraught with 21st-century specialist perils.
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 twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first 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 two hundred 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 fifty thousand 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. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
 Google Books — Laddar...Populära omslagBetygMedelbetyg: (4.1)
Är det här du? |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2
De visie van Morris op de Divergence-kwestie is dat geografisch toeval bepalend was voor de (tijdelijke) dominantie van het Westen: omdat het als periferisch gebied in de late Middeleeuwen zijn achterstand op de veel rijkere Islamitische wereld (volgens hem toen het kerngebied van het Westen) kon goedmaken, en omdat het door de Atlantische Oceaan veel gemakkelijker toegang kreeg tot een enorm expansief gebied (de Nieuwe Wereld) met enorme rijkdommen. Ik formuleer het nu wat kort door de bocht maar volgens Morris doet al de rest er eigenlijk niet toe. Het Oosten (voor hem uitsluitend beperkt tot China) had evenzeer tot dominantie kunnen komen, maar het werd veel minder door de geografie uitgedaagd om zichzelf te overstijgen.
De grote sterktes van dit werk zijn Morris’ eigen systematische aanpak, met zelfs een poging om tot een meetbare vergelijking van menselijke culturen te komen, en het toch leesbaar, verhalende karakter van deze (bijna) heel de wereld omspannende geschiedenis. Zijn grote zwaktes zijn dan weer een erg negatieve visie op wat de mensheid drijft, een betwistbare invulling van wat de begrippen ‘Oost’ en ‘West’ dekken en een geografisch determinisme dat vooral de culturele factor in de menselijke geschiedenis onderwaardeert. Voor een uitgebreide bespreking van die sterke en zwakke kanten, zie mijn review in mijn Senseofhistory-account op Goodreads, zie https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/900953925 (