Ian Morris (historian)

Based on Wikipedia: Ian Morris (historian)

Here's a question that has obsessed thinkers for centuries: Why did Europe and its offspring—the United States, Canada, Australia—come to dominate the modern world? Was it something special about Western culture? Superior genes? Christianity? The scientific revolution? Or was it, as some have controversially argued, simply an accident of geography?

Ian Morris has spent his career trying to answer that question, and his conclusions have made him one of the most provocative historians working today.

From Stoke-on-Trent to Stanford

Morris was born in 1960 in Stoke-on-Trent, an industrial city in the English Midlands famous for its pottery factories. He attended a comprehensive school—the British term for a non-selective public school—in the nearby town of Stone. Nothing about his early biography suggests someone destined to become one of the most widely read historians of his generation.

He studied at the University of Birmingham, then moved to Cambridge for his doctorate. His thesis topic might sound narrow: burial practices in ancient Athens between 1100 and 500 BCE. But even then, Morris was interested in big questions disguised as small ones. How people bury their dead reveals everything about a society—its beliefs about the afterlife, its social hierarchies, its anxieties about death and status. A cemetery is a society's autobiography written in stone.

After teaching at the University of Chicago from 1987 to 1995, Morris moved to Stanford, where he became the Willard Professor of Classics. The title sounds traditional, almost dusty. But Morris has never been content to stay in his lane. At Stanford, he's been Associate Dean, department chair, and director of the Social Science History Institute. He co-founded the Stanford Archaeology Center and led excavations at Monte Polizzo in Sicily. He's won a Dean's Award for teaching and been showered with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The British Academy made him a Corresponding Fellow—a significant honor that recognizes scholars outside Britain who have made exceptional contributions to the humanities. Two universities have given him honorary degrees.

But all of this institutional recognition matters less than what Morris actually argues.

Why the West Rules—For Now

In 2010, Morris published a book with a title designed to provoke: Why the West Rules—For Now. The subtitle promised to reveal "the patterns of history and what they reveal about the future." It delivered on both counts.

The book compares Eastern and Western civilizations across fifteen thousand years of history. That's an almost absurdly ambitious scope. Most historians spend their careers studying a single century, or even a few decades. Morris wanted to explain everything.

His answer to the question of Western dominance is deceptively simple: geography.

Not culture. Not religion. Not politics. Not genetics. Not great men. Geography.

This is a controversial claim. It seems to strip away human agency, to reduce the rise and fall of civilizations to an accident of latitude and longitude. Critics accused Morris of determinism—the philosophical position that everything is predetermined and human choices don't really matter.

But Morris's argument is more subtle than that. He doesn't say geography determines everything. He says geography determines the playing field on which history unfolds. The Atlantic Ocean, for instance, is much narrower than the Pacific. Once Europeans developed ships capable of crossing it, they could reach the Americas more easily than East Asians could. This wasn't because Europeans were smarter or more adventurous. It was because their geography gave them a shorter route.

The Economist called it "an important book—one that challenges, stimulates and entertains. Anyone who does not believe there are lessons to be learned from history should start here." Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times all named it one of the year's best books. It won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction and has been translated into thirteen languages.

The "for now" in the title matters. Morris argues that the same geographical forces that lifted the West could shift power back to the East. The patterns of history don't guarantee Western dominance forever. They suggest it might be temporary.

Measuring Civilization

Critics of Why the West Rules demanded to see Morris's work. How exactly do you compare civilizations across thousands of years? What counts as "development"? How do you quantify something as messy as historical progress?

Morris responded with The Measure of Civilization, published in 2013. It's a companion volume that shows all the evidence and statistical methods behind his social development index—the tool he used to track and compare Eastern and Western history.

Creating such an index requires making difficult decisions. What factors do you include? Morris settled on four: energy capture (how much energy a society can harness per person), organization (how large its cities are), war-making capacity (how effectively it can project military power), and information technology (how well it can store and communicate information). Each of these can be measured, at least roughly, across different historical periods.

The book sparked serious academic debate. Both the International Studies Association and the Social Science History Association devoted entire panels to discussing it at their 2013 annual meetings. That's unusual. Most academic books get reviewed in a few journals and then quietly forgotten. Morris's work demanded engagement.

The Paradox of War

If Why the West Rules was provocative, Morris's next book was incendiary. Its title asks a question most people think has an obvious answer: War! What Is It Good For?

Published in 2014, the book argues that war has, paradoxically, made the world safer and richer.

This sounds insane. War kills people. It destroys cities. It traumatizes survivors for generations. How could it possibly make the world safer?

Morris's argument runs like this: For most of human history, people lived in small groups that were constantly fighting with neighboring groups. Violence was endemic. Your chances of dying violently in a prehistoric hunter-gatherer society were far higher than your chances of dying violently in a modern state, even accounting for world wars and genocides.

What changed? War created large, internally pacified societies. When one group conquered another, the conquerors had an incentive to keep the peace within their new territory. More subjects meant more taxes and more soldiers for the next war. Over thousands of years, this process created larger and larger political units—from villages to chiefdoms to kingdoms to empires to nation-states. And within these larger units, violence declined.

Morris isn't celebrating war. He's making a historical observation about its consequences. The lesson, he argues, is not that we should embrace war but that we should learn to manage it. Wishing war out of existence won't work. Understanding its historical role might help us move beyond it.

The book includes a chapter on the Gombe Chimpanzee War, a four-year conflict between two groups of chimpanzees in Tanzania that was observed by Jane Goodall's research team between 1974 and 1978. One group systematically killed all the males of the other group and absorbed the females and territory. Morris uses this to argue that organized lethal violence isn't a human invention—it has roots deep in our evolutionary history.

War! What Is It Good For? was translated into German, Dutch, and Spanish, and was a finalist for the California Book Awards in nonfiction.

Energy and Values

In 2012, Morris delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. The Tanner Lectures are among the most prestigious invitations a humanities scholar can receive. Past lecturers include philosophers, economists, legal scholars, and public intellectuals. The lectures are meant to advance "scholarly and scientific learning related to human values."

Morris's lectures became the book Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels, published in 2015. The title identifies his three great stages of human history, each defined by how humans capture energy.

Foragers—hunter-gatherers—lived on the energy their bodies could extract from wild plants and animals. Their societies were relatively egalitarian because no one could accumulate much more than anyone else. There wasn't much to accumulate.

Farmers could store surplus grain, which meant some people could become much richer than others. Agricultural societies developed steep hierarchies: kings and peasants, lords and serfs, priests and commoners. These societies valued authority and hierarchy in ways that would have seemed bizarre to foragers.

Fossil fuel societies—powered by coal, oil, and natural gas—can generate so much wealth that even inequality can coexist with rising living standards for most people. These societies tend to value equality, at least in principle, because the old agricultural hierarchies no longer make sense when a factory worker can live better than a medieval king.

Morris's argument is that human values don't float free of material conditions. What we think is right and wrong, fair and unfair, depends partly on how we get our energy. This is a materialist argument—it says that economic and technological factors shape culture and morality, not the other way around.

The book includes responses from several distinguished commentators, including the novelist Margaret Atwood and the historian Jonathan Spence. Their critiques sharpen Morris's argument and highlight its implications.

The Axial Age and What Comes Next

Morris has announced that his next book will tackle the transformations of the first millennium BCE—a period sometimes called the Axial Age, a term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers.

The Axial Age refers to a remarkable period, roughly between 800 and 200 BCE, when several civilizations independently developed new forms of religious and philosophical thought. In Greece, this was the age of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In Israel, the age of the prophets. In India, the age of the Buddha and the Upanishads. In China, the age of Confucius and Laozi.

Why did these breakthroughs happen simultaneously in different parts of the world? What was it about the first millennium BCE that made humans everywhere start asking new questions about ethics, transcendence, and the meaning of life?

Morris plans to examine this through his characteristic lens: the shift from religion-based power to bureaucratic and military power, and the rise of what he calls "Axial thought." He'll likely argue that these intellectual revolutions weren't accidents but responses to specific material conditions—growing states, expanding trade networks, increasing social complexity.

Geography Is Destiny

Morris's most recent major work, Geography Is Destiny, published in 2022, applies his comparative method to a single country: Britain. The subtitle promises "a 10,000-year history," and Morris delivers exactly that, tracing British history from the end of the last Ice Age to Brexit.

The book asks why Britain became the world's first industrial nation and, for a time, ruled the largest empire in history. Morris's answer, predictably, involves geography: Britain's position at the edge of Europe, facing the Atlantic, made it ideally placed to benefit from the new trade routes opened after 1492. Its coal deposits, located near its iron ore and accessible to its canal and later railroad networks, gave it advantages in industrialization that other countries couldn't match.

But the book is also about Britain's relationship with Europe—always close, never quite part of it. Morris sees Brexit as the latest chapter in a very old story about an island that can never decide whether it belongs to the continent or to the wider world.

The Big Picture Historian

Morris belongs to a tradition of historians who refuse to specialize. His intellectual ancestors include Arnold Toynbee, who wrote a twelve-volume study of the rise and fall of civilizations; Oswald Spengler, who argued that civilizations have life cycles like organisms; and more recently Jared Diamond, whose Guns, Germs, and Steel explained European dominance through geography and biology.

These big-picture historians are always controversial. Specialists accuse them of oversimplification, of bulldozing over details to make their grand theories work. There's something to this criticism. When you're comparing fifteen thousand years of history, you can't possibly know everything about every period. You have to rely on secondary sources, on syntheses, on generalizations that specialists find maddening.

But big-picture history serves a function that specialized history cannot. It asks the questions that matter most to non-specialists: Why is the world the way it is? How did we get here? What might happen next? These questions require someone willing to step back far enough to see patterns that specialists, with their noses pressed to the archival glass, cannot see.

Morris's training as an archaeologist helps here. Archaeologists are used to working with fragmentary evidence, to making inferences from broken pottery and buried bones. They know that the past doesn't come with labels attached. You have to interpret it, and interpretation requires theory—big ideas about how societies work, how they change, how they compare to each other.

Whether you find Morris's theories convincing or outrageous, they force you to think. That's what good history should do. Not just report facts, but make you see the world differently.

The Question Behind the Questions

Running through all of Morris's work is a single underlying question: Are humans in control of their fate, or are we carried along by forces—geography, energy, technology—that we barely understand and certainly don't control?

Morris doesn't give a simple answer. He's not a determinist who thinks everything is predetermined. But he's not a voluntarist who thinks human will can overcome any obstacle. He occupies a middle ground where geography sets constraints, but within those constraints, human choices matter.

This is a more honest position than either extreme. We are not gods, free to reshape the world however we wish. But we are not ants either, following scripts written by our genes and our environment. We're something in between—creatures with agency, but agency bounded by circumstances we didn't create.

Understanding those circumstances—the geography, the energy systems, the historical patterns—might help us make better choices. That, ultimately, is why Morris writes. Not to prove that nothing we do matters, but to show that understanding history might help us make a better future.

The West rules for now. But history isn't over. The patterns continue. And the choices we make—about energy, about war, about how we organize our societies—will determine what comes next.