This much too brief paper is an attempt to use a distinctive model of human history in order to outline a coherent account of that history, and to begin to explain some long-term trends and large-scale transitions that have been central to that history. For reasons that will become apparent, I describe this model as a Darwinian version of historical materialism. Darwinian historical materialism claims, first, that differential reproductive and military success generate persistent tendencies to productive development and production-enhancing social change; and, second, that inter-regional differences in productive circumstances (productive techniques and productively-relevant environmental characteristics) explain inter-regional differences in the extent to which, and the ways in which, these tendencies are realized as historical trends.
The sustained global warming that took place as the earth emerged from the last ice age, and particularly from the end of the Younger Dryas around 9600 BCE, had huge environmental consequences across the world. In some places, though, the consequences were of particular significance for human history.
For most of human history, human beings had lived in relatively small and egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands. As the climate shifted from cold and dry to warm and wet, however, there was a group of places (certainly five, and possibly nine or more) where productive circumstances favoured a shift away from nomadic foraging towards sedentary farming (Diamond 1998: 98-103). In the new conditions, this shift could lead to the production of more food per unit area. The productive advantage enjoyed by those groups whose innovations placed them (almost certainly unwittingly) a little further along the continuum between foraging and farming meant that they could, over the long term, outbreed and outfight those groups that were not so far along that continuum. Reproductive and military competition in these regions therefore led, over several millennia, to the relevant populations making the shift to farming.
In five of these regions, in Southwest Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Mesoamerica, and the northern (Peruvian) Andes, societies would go on to develop particularly high levels of production, population, military power and social complexity, all driven by processes of reproductive and military competition, underpinned by differences in productive circumstances (Morris 2014: 88).
Societies in these five highly fertile regions underwent broadly similar historical transitions: the emergence of settled village life and the domestication of plants and animals; the development of more complex and hierarchical societies, chiefdoms and then advanced, multi-village chiefdoms; the steepening and centralisation of these hierarchies; and the development of agrarian states, with ruling elites and cities, sometimes growing into large, multi-ethnic empires (Morris 2013: 142-3; 2014: 88).
Hierarchies developed because they enhanced production (and therefore reproduction and military power) in circumstances where levels of production could be raised by the organisation and intensification of labour that hierarchies imposed. More complexity involved an increasing division of social roles, not just between rulers and ruled, but between food producers and small but growing classes of artisans and traders. This division of labour enhanced levels of production, and thus the reproductive and military success of those agrarian states that developed such social complexity. Denser networks of people in urban areas enhanced production (and therefore reproductive and military success) by facilitating the flow of goods, services and information, and so reproductive and military competition favoured societies with larger urban areas, and therefore urban areas expanded.
Differences in the availability of domesticable plant and animal species in these five regions, and so in their potential for a transition to agriculture, meant that these changes occurred at different times in each. So domestication developed in Southwest Asia during the eighth millennium BCE, in East Asia and South Asia in the sixth millennium BCE, in Mesoamerica in the late fourth millennium BCE, and in the Peruvian Andes in the early third millennium BCE. Centralised states developed in each of these regions around three to four millennia after the development of domestication (Morris 2014: 77, 88).
(In many other parts of the world, the limited productive potential of the environment for indigenous hunter-gatherers or simple cultivators meant that independent transitions beyond these modes of production would not have been productively advantageous, so reproductive and military competition in these regions simply maintained efficient hunting-gathering or simple cultivation.)
Because production, and therefore reproductive and military success, was enhanced by the development of trade and manufacture, the more successful agrarian states tended to be those, not just with more agricultural potential, but also better placed (nearer navigable waterways, then seas, and then oceans) to develop higher levels of trade and manufacture. Consequently, there was a long-term development of increasingly commercial, and eventually capitalist, societies. Growing market competition began to create an economic selection process that favoured continuous reinvestment in improved productive techniques, and this fostered higher levels of production. Increasingly capitalist societies, because of this “internal” selection process, thereby developed a growing productive advantage in the “external” selection processes of reproductive and military competition.
Western Europe had been on the periphery of the Western Eurasian zone of agrarian-manufacturing states that had developed from the original agricultural core in Southwest Asia. From the sixteenth century CE, however, the competing, and increasingly capitalist, states of Western Europe were favourably placed to develop an Atlantic economy, building on the resources of the Americas (and the labour of West African slaves).
By the eighteenth century, productive development in Western Europe had reached a point where market competition in Britain, which had particularly accessible and plentiful supplies of coal, favoured the development of machines powered by coal, and eventually other fossil fuels. This developing industrialisation endowed Britain, and the other Western European and North American societies that began to emulate Britain, with massive advantages in international reproductive and military competition.
As humans in the more productive regions made these transitions, and increased their productive capacities, their reproductive fitness and their military power, the same productive advantages (and therefore reproductive and military advantages) that led to the initial development of the new modes of production and social structures, also led to their expansion. So agriculture and villages, cities and states, empires, capitalism, and industry spread across most of the world, sometimes carried by the originators and sometimes adopted by indigenous peoples who were faced with the alternatives of being displaced or subjugated (Morris 2010: 557, 559).
As the zones inhabited by people practising a new, reproductively and militarily more successful, mode of production expanded, their most productive cores underwent still further changes, and began, in their turn, to expand. So there have been multiple waves of change moving outwards from the original regions of change. And powering each wave were higher and rising levels of reproductive success and military power, supported by higher and rising levels of production.
From the end of the last ice age, therefore, the areas inhabited by agriculturalists expanded, while the areas inhabited by hunter-gatherers shrank. From within the expanding zones of agriculture, more complex and hierarchical societies – chiefdoms – emerged and expanded geographically. And from within the expanding zones of chiefdoms, even more complex and hierarchical societies, states and then empires, emerged and expanded, first across land, then around and across seas, and finally across the steppes and oceans.
As the zones ruled by agrarian states expanded, those agrarian states most favourably placed for sea- and ocean-based trade and manufacture survived and expanded more successfully, so the zones of agrarian states became increasingly commercialised, some of them developing proto-capitalisms. The zones occupied by these increasingly commercialised and capitalist states expanded and, as they did, industrialisation began in the most developed core of the Western Eurasian zone of agrarian-manufacturing states. Its fossil-fuel-based productive power, and its consequent reproductive and military power, enabled industrial capitalism (and industrial capitalist societies) to spread rapidly across the world, expanding and transforming itself more quickly than any previous mode of production, and giving rise to an unprecedented acceleration of the long-term trends of rising production, population, and military power.
The twentieth century saw a series of conflicts between different forms of industrial, and industrialising, societies: liberal-democratic capitalist, authoritarian capitalist, and authoritarian Communist. By the end of the century, liberal-democratic capitalism had been victorious over each of its rivals. Despite these conflicts, or perhaps because of them, the twentieth century also saw levels of production, reproduction, and military power rise much more rapidly than ever before.
The demise of Communism seemed to indicate the final victory of liberal democratic capitalism over its only remaining rival. But the end of the Cold War was followed by the transformation of many of the old Communist powers (China, Russia, and some of the former Soviet republics) into authoritarian, more or less capitalist powers stretching across large parts of Eurasia. It is tempting, given the view of history outlined in this paper, to predict military conflicts between liberal-democratic and authoritarian capitalisms. But our enormous productive and, therefore, military powers are such that it is better not to view the issue in these apocalyptic terms.
While the liberal democracies obviously need to maintain a military posture in a dangerous world, we should perhaps hope and work for a victory of liberal-democratic capitalism over its authoritarian rivals through emulation of the more successful by the less successful. Above all, therefore, the liberal-democratic powers should avoid policies that make them less successful (and liberal-democratic capitalism less attractive) – policies that lead to rising inequality, for instance, or fiscal austerity in depressed economies that leads to economic stagnation and the deconstruction of welfare systems, or irreversible damage to the natural habitats upon which all human societies depend, and so on. There is no certainty in these issues, but the weight of evidence seems to favour a shift, in present circumstances, towards a more “social-democratic” capitalism.
To the extent that human rationality, and therefore human freedom, has emerged and developed historically, we might be able to transcend the blind (or at least myopic) forces of reproductive and military selection. These forces are not going to disappear in the foreseeable future but, to the extent that we can understand them, we can begin to exert some control over them (and over ourselves) and reduce the risk of potentially catastrophic outcomes.
Christian, David 2005, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, London: University of California Press.
Diamond, Jared 1998, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, London: Vintage.
Livi-Bacci, Massimo 1992, A Concise History of World Population, Oxford: Blackwell.
Morris, Ian 2010, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, London: Profile Books.
Morris, Ian 2013, The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations, London: Profile Books.
Morris, Ian 2014, War! What is it Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots, London: Profile Books.