At the rising of the sun

Niall Ferguson, in his impressive and exuberant book Civilization, published last year, sought to explain why Western civilisation triumphed in the centuries after the Renaissance with reference to six factors. He identified them as competition, science, property, medicine consumption and work, or a particular work ethic.

These historical tours d’horizon are never without their critics, and Ferguson’s confident account of what one had thought an undoubted historical phenomenon found a memorable one in the  pages of the London Review of Books. The London-based writer Pankaj Mishra dismissed what he saw as a triumphalist tone, and refused to accept that those eastern civilisations which are now in the ascendant have learnt from the West.  The idea that the Chinese are, in Mishra’s paraphrase, ‘a thrifty, shrewd people who, in colonising remote African lands and building up massive reserves of capital, seem to borrow from the grand narrative of the West’s own ascent’ was obviously wrong and unacceptable.