The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations

1. David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York: Free Press, 1998) discusses the history of these arguments.

2. Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Anchor, 2001), and Roger Osborne, Civilization: A New History of the Western World (New York: Pegasus, 2008), are widely read recent examples of arguments for Greco-Roman roots, while Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2011) has championed IndoEuropean roots and Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) has argued for medieval ones.

3. Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003) is probably the most influential example.

4. For example, David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: Norton, 1998).

5. Oded Galor and Omer Moav, “Natural Selection and the Origin of Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (2002): 1133–91; Gregory Clark, “Genetically Capitalist? The Malthusian Era and the Formation of Modern Preferences,” http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/capitalism%20 genes.pdf.

6. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The Ten Thousand Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009), and their website http://westhunt.wordpress.com/.

7. For example, Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

8. State structures: Bin Wong, China Transformed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997) and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Bin Wong, Before and Beyond

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