Why does the West rule? Eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing uniquely on 15,000 years of history and archaeology, and the methods of social science.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, British entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal and the world changed forever. Factories, railways and gunboats then propelled the West's rise to power, and computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Today, however, many worry that the emergence of China and India spell the end of the West as a superpower. How long will the power of the West last? In order to find out we need to know: why has the West been so dominant for the past two hundred years? With flair and authority, historian and achaeologist Ian Morris draws uniquely on 15,000 years of history to offer fresh insights on what the future will bring. Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why The West Rules - For Now is a gripping and truly original history of the world.

"A provocative and extraordinary contribution to wide-screen comparative history... a true banquet of ideas" - Independent

"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" - Economist

"Perhaps the smartest and sanest guide to the twenty-first century so far" - South China Morning Post

"One doffs one's hat to Morris's breadth, ambition and erudition" - Sunday Times

"Morris is the world's most talented ancient historian, a man as much at home with state of-the-art archaeology as with the classics as they used to be studied. Here, he has brilliantly pulled off what few modern academics would dare to attempt" - Foreign Affairs

"Morris handles huge ideas and transglobal theories with a breathtaking ease and humour" - Evening Standard, Books of the Year

"[an] enjoyable and thought-provoking book" - Telegraph

"A lucid thinker and a fine writer" - New York Times

"A formidable, richly engrossing effort to determine why Western institutions dominate the world . . . Readers will enjoy [Morris's] lively prose and impressive combination of scholarship . . . with economics and science. A superior contribution to the grand-theory-of-human-history genre" - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)