The Empire Strikes Back

BBC's Civilization: The West and the Rest and Top Gear

It’s seldom the hardware –– guns and tanks –– that changes the course of history. It’s often the soft, the human factor, which Niall Ferguson trendily calls the “Killer Apps” and six of which he promises to identify in The West and the Rest, a BBC documentary series on how the West won its supremacy.

How did Europe, which was wallowing in the mud of fear and ignorance, all of a sudden shake itself loose of the Dark Ages at year 1500 and proceed to invade and conquer its neighbors? After all, the East possessed all the trappings of an advanced civilization –– paper, gunpowder, printing press, timepieces. The East had discovered the number 0 and had kept Greek medicine and astronomy alive in their magnificent libraries while Europe had only animal skin to write on.

Ferguson’s answer No. 1 is “competition.” Before modern nationalism united Germany or Italy, Europe was made of little city-states that competed to better their neighbors in commerce and warfare. It was this tribal rivalry that drove them across the oceans in the race for such luxury goods as spices and silk. It was a bit like the competition that fuels free-market capitalism now –– corporations pouring their brains into maximizing profits with offshore labor and markets.

In contrast, the East had peace and unity. In the 15th century, decades before Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to reach the New World, China had built a fleet of ships 10 times as large as the Santa Maria, had sailed all around the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean and reached the east coast of Africa to bring back giraffes for its Emperor. Then, what happened? Having satisfied its aim of displaying its power, the Middle Kingdom put its naval expeditions in sleep mode. No need for internal competition to disturb the peace and unity; they had everything that they wanted.

Of course, now, emerging from its Confucian-communist protectionism, China is a sleeping dragon no more. “Are we the generation on whose watch Western Supremacy ends?” asks Ferguson.

Well-paced and argued, the chapter offers gorgeous footage and is full of startling revelations. I was about to let its hints of tribal breast-beating slide until I saw another BBC series, Top Gear. In Top Gear’s India episode, the show’s British hosts mount a “friendship race” and throw a party, to a hilariously disastrous ending in wayward fireworks and the guests’ voluntary evacuation. In the afternoon of preparation, Team Top Gear try to build a tent in the colors of the Union Jack with the help of locals. To the row of brown faces they ask, “So, how many of you speak English?” A silent beat. “…I guess no one.”

In Top Gear’s “China” episode, they examine the new cars being manufactured in China and pronounce them all “imitations of European cars.” Now that’s something I used to hear all the time in the U.S. about Japanese cars, and all that stuff about the “economic miracle” and “Japan, Inc.” floods back –– all obscured now behind China’s 30-year economic ascendancy.

What is going on in the UK? A need to reassert its cultural supremacy? Even at the cost of rehashing its Colonial past? Ferguson promises to discuss “nutrition” in another episode of The West and the Rest. Maybe then he will enlighten us all on the British addiction to sugar and tea that fueled the triangular trades with the Americas and China, involving African slaves and opium.
–– Rika Ohara