Civilization: The West and the Rest examines how the Western World has come to dominate the globe, despite being so far behind the near and far East in the early period of the Middle Ages. Ferguson breaks the reasoning into six different portions (Killer Apps as he calls them) that allowed the backwards kingdoms of Europe to catch up to the Chinese Empires as well as the Ottomans.
The six apps he identifies are : Competition, Science, Property Rights, Medicine, Consumer Society and Work Ethic. Each App gets a chapter devoted to it, with a lot of details and anecdotes to highlight the differences in the different areas. A few of the apps, like Competition make several appearances throughout each other chapter as well.The book is dense with anecodtes and facts, so it is certainly not a light read.
Overall I enjoyed this book, though a few of the premises I find a bit of a stretch. The Work Ethic chapter for instance I believe is a bit thin, and it really relies more on competition than perhaps being its own App. The Medicine chapter also really should fal into the Scientific chapter, since it mostly highlights the change from faith based healing to medical science. The chapters also have a tendency to meander, and include some facts that dont really fall into lien with the main thrust of the chapter. For these reasons I think it compares a little lower to Guns, Germs and Steel which I thought hit a great line of reasoning and defended it quite well. However, it is still a thought provoking book, and provides a lot of interesting facts and figures to consider. Overall a 3.5 star effort.
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