Ian Morris
Why the West Rules - For Now
Summary
Around 200 years ago, a small group of nations around the shores of the North Atlantic began to dominate the planet. Nothing like that had ever happened before in history. This lecture delves into the reasons behind their ascent to power over other nations and why it occurred at that particular juncture in history. Ian Morris compares Eastern and Western histories spanning the 14,000 years since the last ice age and suggests this type of examination unveils historical patterns and offers insights into the potential shape of the future.
Ian Morris
Ian Morris teaches at Stanford University, where he has won the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and served as Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society for the Arts, and the London School of Economics’ IDEAS institute, and has excavated archaeological excavations in Britain, Greece, and Sicily. He studies long-term global history, asking what the patterns of the past tell us about the future. His fifteen books, which have been translated into seventeen languages, include the prize-winning Why the West Rules—For Now. The most recent, Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World, a 10,000-Year History, came out in 2022. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, delivered the Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Princeton University, and taught in the University of Zurich’s MBA program, as well as advising the World Bank and US National Intelligence Council and serving as the Australian Army’s Keogh Professor of Future Land Warfare. His research has been funded by the Carnegie and Guggenheim Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Geographic Society, and he has sat on the Max Planck Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board.