A brilliant history of the rise to global dominance by the West, exploring the links between cultural values and military success.
Instead of weighing up the West through its cultural and literary accomplishments, Hanson engages with the much starker record of the battlefield. In place of The Great Books, he studies The Great Battles. With graphic representations of nine major clashes between West and non-West, Hanson argues that the West has won not just because of technology and military might, but because of its focus on individualism, democratic political structures and scientific rationalism.
However, this is no mere Eurocentric account of the steady millennia-long rise of Western power. Rather, it is an explanation of why the West finds itself now militarily unmatched, its values spreading around the globe - sometimes with devastating effects on local cultures.
