Цитаты из произведения Почему Запад правит до сих пор? — стр. 2

Easterners could have discovered America in the fifteenth century (some people believe they did) but geography always made it more likely that Westerners would get there first.

Contacts pushed Eastern and Western development higher still, but they also set off unprecedented disruptions. For the first time, the five horsemen of the apocalypse linked the cores, exchanging microbes as well as goods and ideas. Instead of breaking through the hard ceiling, the Roman and Han empires both came apart…

To break through the twenty-four-point ceiling, states had to reorganize themselves and develop a whole new way of thinking about the world, creating what we might call first-wave Axial thought.

A second great geographical contrast between East and West then came into play; the East had nothing like this extraordinary inland sea, providing cheap and easy transport. But like so much else, the Mediterranean was a paradox, offering both opportunities and challenges.

Rising social development produced worse disruptions and collapses, but it also produced more resilience and greater powers of recovery.

Because Westerners were the first to farm, and because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners were also the first to feel the paradox of development in a serious way and the first to learn what I have called the advantages of backwardness.

I have stressed a two-way relationship between geography and social development: the physical environment shapes how social development changes, but changes in social development shape what the physical environment means. Living on top of a coalfield meant very little two thousand years ago, but two hundred years ago it…

People confront and solve such paradoxes every day, but once in a while the paradox creates tough ceilings that will yield only to truly transformative change. It is rarely obvious what to do, let alone how to do it, and as a society approaches one of these ceilings a kind of race begins between development and collapse.…

History is not just one damn thing after another. In fact, history is the same old same old, a single grand and relentless process of adaptations to the world that always generate new problems that call for further adaptations. Throughout this book I have called this process the paradox of development: rising social…

We have seen people constantly tinkering, making their lives easier or richer or struggling to hold on to what they already have as circumstances change, and, in the process, generally nudging social development upward. Yet none of the great transformations in social development—the origins of agriculture, the rise of…