Geography as Destiny – Conversations with Historian Ian Morris

Thank you, Ian. Thanks.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Well, I guess I've always been, I think the way people's minds work, we're all different. And I've always been one of the people who, whenever you're looking at something, I always think, what is the bigger context? What does this mean in the larger picture? What else do you need to know to make sense of it? And this is something archaeologists tend to be like this, because it's a weird field. I'd say, if we were running an excavation, we could excavate an area the size of this stage and maybe spend five years on it. And in a weird sense, you end up knowing much more about what happened, say if this was a house, you end up knowing much more about what happened in that house than if we had even the most detailed written records, because you're excavating the little fragments of people's pottery that broke, and the odd coin they dropped, and their teeth drop out in the corner of ancient houses. All this detail about this tiny, tiny thing. But then what archaeologists have also always done is try to scale up from the little tiny things to these much bigger narratives. I think in a way you can have to as an archaeologist, because what you get within the one house by itself doesn't really mean very much. So I think what I do is not that unusual for an archaeologist, plus I like doing it.

Yeah, probably a lack of judgment, I think, is the big issue here. Historians, as you say, always say, we write about the past, not about the future. And it is really interesting to look at the work of those historians who have tried to predict the future, and to see just how bad we are at it. But with that book, Why the West Rules for Now, and this was a book about the rise of Eastern and Western power in world history, and I started working on it in the 2000s, and there's a big debate going on in the social sciences about why is it that the center of wealth and power seems to be shifting away from the North Atlantic toward the Pacific, and the Western powers being replaced by Eastern powers. And there are a lot of different theories out there. And the odd thing was that I realized once I got working on this, that my own field of classical archaeology, Greek and Roman stuff, was actually, the whole thing rested on a theory about this question, but a very old theory going back to the 1700s. The idea was that something unique had happened in ancient Greece that produces culture unlike anything else in the rest of the world. And in the 18th century, Europeans are beginning to realize that, oh, up till recently, we were terrified the Turks were going to conquer us, and spread Islam the whole way across Europe. Now we discover, oh, we just conquered India. We're taking over the whole world. How did this happen? And the theory was the ancient Greeks made this happen by producing this unique culture. But the problem was, now, if that's true, why is it that Japan and China and Taiwan and all these other places have become so powerful and so important? This should not be happening if the West is, by definition, superior to the rest of the planet. So I decided what I needed to do was look at long-term history going back 15,000 years to the end of the last Ice Age, and develop a kind of index for measuring the development of societies. And then you could compare Eastern and Western development, draw a graph of this, because I love drawing graphs, draw a graph of this, and then you can see the shape of world history and what it is you need to explain. And that, I thought, that should explain also why the West came to have this unique position of global dominance in the last couple of hundred years. So all fine and good so far. But then it struck me, I got this beautiful graph, wonderful graph I've got here. You know, I could just project these lines forward, see where they go next. So I did. And the assumption I made, a wildly unrealistic assumption, a ridiculous assumption, but said, well, let's assume Eastern and Western social development keep increasing for the next hundred years at the pace that they did for the last hundred years. And there's no reason to think they will, but let's assume it anyway. What then happens? And what happens is that the lines cross in the year 2103, which is a fabulous prediction. It's very precise. So if we get to 2104 and it hasn't happened, you know I was wrong. But if we get to 2104, I'll be dead. So it doesn't matter. It's a great prediction. I was also sort of a stupid prediction, because what does it even mean to say Eastern development catches up with Western in 2103? Kind of meaningless. What I think it did do was just make this a simple statement that other things being equal, if something like current conditions continue to apply, we should expect to see Eastern development catch up with Western. And I just thought this was fabulous fun doing this. And it started me thinking about the nature of prediction in a way that I hadn't done before. And that's something I've gotten increasingly interested in just over the last few years.

Yeah, partly I made the East-West opposition because it seemed to me that that was the most interesting thing going on. Partly I did it as a sort of wild oversimplification of what reality is. It's like any argument you make in the social sciences, so much depends on how you define the terms. And one of the things I learned very quickly looking at the argument over East and West was that how people define the terms largely defines the results that they reach. And often what people tended to do, it tended to be mostly European and North American historians and social scientists writing about this. And they would pick on a single thing that they like about the West, and overwhelmingly this is how they worked. And so for some of them it's democracy. So some of them say the West is defined by democracy. The rest of the world doesn't have it, democratic countries are Western. Others would say Christianity, that's the thing that defines the West. Others would say liberty. You know, a long list of things people came up with. But all of them consisted of you look back in the past to find the beginning point of what you count as democracy. So say it might be like around the 1800s, or you might look back to ancient Greece and say that counts as the beginning of democracy. Where you sort of choose the beginning of the thing that you like, and then tell a story about that, and then use that, again, overwhelmingly to show either why the West is always going to dominate the rest of the world, or why it's not. And this just seemed to me a totally circular way of reasoning, you're never going to get anywhere doing that. And so I thought, well, because being an archaeologist, I do like to think about things in the long term. So I thought maybe a better way to do this would be to say, well, at what point do we begin to see distinctively different cultures and ways of life emerging in different parts of the world? And focusing, I think, for good reasons on the old world, in particular Eurasia and Africa, because human population goes back so much further than in the Americas. Within that world, at what point do we begin to see distinctively different patterns of behavior over the eastern end of Eurasia and over the western end of Eurasia? And that, I think, is really with the end of the Ice Age, when you get the Agricultural Revolution. And eastern and western agricultural societies have got certain things in common, but they also diverge very, very rapidly from each other. And so I ended up defining east and west as societies that have descended from the original core of Agricultural Revolution at the eastern and western ends of Eurasia. And that did lead to a rather different way of looking at things than what a lot of people took. So it seemed to me completely obvious that what we now call the Middle East is very much part of the western story. And that is where agriculture began, the westernmost agricultural center, from there agriculture and complex societies spread out into Central Asia, the edges of India, also all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean, the Netherlands, and Britain. All these places descend from the same original agricultural core. And so something like the Christianity-Islam split, this is not, I would say, not the way it's usually represented, or east against west. This is a debate and an argument over what western civilization is going to be about. And I think Muhammad would have agreed with me completely. Muhammad goes off into his cave, has his vision, the archangel Gabriel comes down to him and talks to him. So far as he's concerned, there's only one God, and he's very clear on that. And the archangel Gabriel is the same one that the Christians have. And the archangel comes down, and what he tells Muhammad is not an alternative to Christianity, it's the completion of Christianity and of Judaism. And Muhammad actually writes letters to the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople and to the Persian emperor in Ctesiphon telling them, good news guys, I've now been given the answers to all of our religious questions. Why don't we all just sit down and talk about this, and we're going to work everything out fabulously. Which, of course, is not quite how it goes. And people gradually, over the next few centuries, start defining Christendom and Islam as these two radically different things. So again, I think it's a really good example of the way how you define a term totally changes the way you see things. And I remain convinced that my definition is the best one.

Yeah, I think it was overwhelmingly geographical forces that drove this. And this is actually, I'm writing another book at the moment, and this is kind of one of the big things this book concentrates on, is why, well, the question in the new book is really about why has human history conceived over now the very long term, going back at least a million years, and arguably a little bit further, too. Why has it basically been a story of growth? And it's defining growth, thinking about it the way a lot of natural scientists do when they say any structure that you look at, if you're looking at growth, you should also always be looking at growth in energy, growth in information, and growth in scale. These are the three things that really matter, that all tend to change together. And seen over the very long term, this is kind of what human history has always been about, is growth. And the rate of growth in all three dimensions has accelerated a lot recently, but this has always been the story. But within that story, there have been big inflection points, and one of the big ones, although I think less of a big one than people used to assume back when Jared Diamond was writing in the 1990s, one of the big ones is still the beginning of agriculture, domestication of plants and animals, bringing them under human control. And again, I'm sure some of you will have read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, fabulous book, but it is driven by 1990s scholarship, because he wrote it in the 1990s, so you can hardly fault him for that. One of the ways archaeology has moved since then is away from this idea of the domestication of plants and animals as being a kind of human achievement. It was always kind of clear that we probably didn't know what we were doing. Obviously, we have no conception of genomics or anything when we're doing this 10,000 years ago. But increasingly, the agency has been taken out of human hands, and people will now talk about potatoes and people co-domesticating each other, and certainly dogs and people co-domesticating each other, which I think it can get a bit silly, but it's not completely silly. The organisms interact with each other, people do things that leads plants and animals to come increasingly under their control, and the result is a massive increase in the amount of energy available to human populations. But that goes hand in hand with a transformation in the amount of information available to people. You can funnel this energy into innovation, into new ideas, new ways of doing things, and if you don't do that, you actually don't have an agricultural revolution, because you've got to invent all this stuff for this to become possible. And it also goes hand in hand with an explosion in scale, because you get all these extra calories now available, what are you going to do with them? Well, you could just eat them all, all the extra food, you could just eat it and just get enormous. But then there comes a point beyond which you cannot eat everything, so you start doing other things with it, and the main thing people do with it is make more of ourselves. We have more sex, more babies, they grow up, the scale, sheer numbers increase, the geographical scale of society increases because people have to emigrate out, and scale, energy and information, always turning tightly together. And like I say, the whole long human story, in the long run, there's been this story of relentless growth, which makes me very unpopular with some of my colleagues, who really don't think that's what humanity's stories have been about, but they're wrong, so that's okay. But it's punctuated, it's very uneven growth, uneven in two main senses. One is unevenness within any society. You will be shocked to hear, growth does not favour everybody equally. And right as far back as you can see, we see evidence of some people sucking up more of the growth than their fellows. So growth's uneven socially, uneven geographically as well, you get growth going at different paces in different places, depending on their geographical conditions. And then uneven as a process as well, you regularly run into periods where growth stalls or even collapses, and sometimes with really catastrophic effects. So that's a very long answer to your question about agriculture, but that's kind of the way I'm thinking about it now.

Yeah, well, that's a really interesting question. I think anybody who starts doing this sort of long-term history has to wrestle with this question eventually. And so yes, you're right, what is the role of institutions? What is the role of culture? And of course, the other big one, what is the role of the individual? To what extent are we just helpless pawns in the grip of vast impersonal forces? Or to what extent are we very important persons who can change everything with the decisions that we make? And I think when I wrote Why the West Rules for Now, which came out 15 years ago in 2010, in the lead-up to that, like most historians nowadays, I was a great believer in the power of culture, the power of individual agency. Writing that book, it was like the scales fell from my eyes, a remarkable experience seeing just how much is driven by these enormous forces. And so I got very enthusiastic about the power of the great forces driving history. If I were writing that book again now, I would be at least a little bit more moderate and grown up about some of the claims that I made. But at the time, I was just so enthusiastic about what I was doing that I wasn't. Although I still think it was basically right. I think one of the big things in economic history, say, over the last few decades, in your neo-institutional economic history, where people, Doug North in particular, will say what makes economies grow is lowering transaction costs. You design institutions that lower the transaction costs, make exchange more transparent. And it's that, rather than the Industrial Revolution or the beginning of agriculture even, that institutional transformation is what has made economic history what it is. And I must say, I think that's just a little bit silly. And I think when you take a larger perspective, you begin to see that this is not the whole explanation. But I have softened quite a lot on this. And the title of the most recent book that I published, Geography is Destiny, which is like a long-term history of Britain. That title suggests I have not softened at all. Geography is destiny, period. That's the answer. I now, my publisher suggested that title. And almost as soon as the book came out, I thought, oh, damn, that was the wrong title. We should have just tweaked it a little bit. The title should have been, Is Geography Destiny? Because that was actually what the book was about. I was looking at Britain's long-term history. And the book was actually sparked by the British vote to leave the European Union, which made me ask myself, all this stuff I've been talking about, long-term geography and so on, does that actually help you understand the decision like Brexit? And I decided, yes, I wouldn't have a book otherwise. I decided, yes, yes, it does. But what I felt very strongly by the time I finished writing this book is while geography is destiny, it's always up to us to decide what to do about it. And so the British case, I think British history is defined by two big, very obvious things. One is insularity, the fact that the British Isles are islands, of course. And the other, proximity, the fact that they're very, very close to Europe. And so British history, to a great extent, certainly for the last 2,000 years, I would say probably the last 10,000 years, has been this struggle between people who lean toward insularity and people who lean toward proximity. And for most of British history, it didn't actually matter because Britain was really close to Europe, about 34 kilometers, I think it is, across the English Channel. And there was no way for the first 9,600 of the last 10,000 years, there was no way anybody could ever close the English Channel to people moving back and forth across the ships, weren't sophisticated to stay at sea very long and do that. There were no governments powerful enough to build a lot of ships anyway. But then this changes, starting 500, 400 years ago, new kinds of galleons get created that do allow you to actually stay at sea for month after month after month. And if you are willing to create a new kind of government that can reach into the pockets of ordinary people and steal their money and spend it to build big fleets of these galleons, it becomes possible for rulers in England to create fleets that can simultaneously cut England off from Europe by closing the English Channel. So they blockade the Spanish fleet in Cadiz for years at a time. They blockade the French fleets in Brest for years at a time. Close the English Channel and open the oceans of the world. You transform the meaning of British geography, move it from being a second-rate player on a European stage into being a first-rate player on an Atlantic and global stage. And so you can do all this. You can embrace the new possibilities of geography if you want to do it. I think that was the big point in British history. In the 17th century, several hundred thousand people died in the British Isles in the Civil War and Revolution. There was largely over this argument of what do we want British geography to mean? Are we willing to do the things we've got to do to turn Britain into a global player? Which meant the King giving up a lot of his power. It meant the King and the Parliament surrendering a lot of power to merchants, leaving the merchants free enough to generate the wealth that made all this possible. So this was the big decision for the British. What do we want our geography to mean? And are we willing to pay the price for it?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of different main ways to think about this. One is to say, yes, the individual ideas that people have changed the course of world history. And if there had not been a Karl Marx, then history would have turned out very differently. The other way is the way that Friedrich Engels thought about it. He wrote this in a letter to this guy who was constantly writing to Engels. So these questions drove the man up the wall. And the letters that Engels writes back to him, they get more and more snippy and short tempered as time goes on. But this correspondence kind of forced Engels to clarify and put in very, very simple English and German, the bilingual correspondence, put things very, very simply what he actually thought. And so he said at one point, well, if there had been no Napoleon, it wouldn't have mattered because the historical situation called for Napoleon. So if that little short Corsican guy had been run over by a carriage when he was a baby or something, no matter, because another Napoleon would have occurred. And Engels actually says the same is even true of Karl Marx. Another Karl Marx would have occurred, which I think is about as far towards materialist as you can possibly go. I think everybody is somewhere between the pure ideas and the pure material things. I think most of us also move around a little bit in this. And so it was something like Karl Marx. I mean, a lot of this comes down to counterfactual thinking. If you're going to say the ideas, Marx himself is a decisive thing. The logic behind what you're saying is if Marx had not happened, and of course you have to specify very precisely what you mean by Marx not happening, but if Marx had not happened somehow or other, something very like Marx would have come along. And I think when you think about it that way, you don't have to go too far down this to say, wow, it would be really surprising, I think, in 1840s Europe, if no leading socialist thinker had ever come up with a batch of ideas vaguely like Karl Marx's that had at least some kind of similar set of consequences. And I think this is actually a very personal thing, a personality thing. Depending on how far you're willing to go down that path, that is where you find the answer to the role of the individual and these ideas. And actually, the one they always talk about is World War II. Because for many years after the Second World War, there was almost no historical scholarship on the causes of World War II. In shocking contrast to World War I, where even before the war was over, this huge tidal wave of scholarship was pouring out, who is to blame for what just happened? World War II, it just seemed so obvious. Hitler. One word explanation of World War II, Hitler. And then when, I mean, I only read this book years later, but back when I was a little boy, there was this English historian named A.J.P. Taylor. Some of you probably heard of him. He's a very socialist guy. And he sounds just an awful person. He just went around annoying people all the time. That's what he loved to do. And so he decided he was going to write a book that was part just deliberate provocation, but part not, part very serious. And so A.J.P. Taylor's book, The Origins of the Second World War, what he said in that book was, well, you know, Hitler, very bad man, did a lot of very bad things. And yes, the Second World War that actually happened, very much down to Hitler, the individual. But when you look at the larger picture, what you see is that Britain and France in particular were behaving in ways in the 1920s and 1930s that sort of put up a big sign saying to other European countries, whatever you do, we will never resort to force to stop you. Like an advertisement that we will always back down in the face of armed opposition. And Taylor's suggestion was that if we had not had an Adolf Hitler, we would have had somebody like him, at least in the sense of being willing to use armed force to get all these concessions from Britain and France, knowing that there was probably no limit to how far you could go. And Stalin is kind of the obvious contender, I think, to be that person. But, you know, maybe, well, maybe not Mussolini, that probably wouldn't work very well at all. But other countries, plenty of other fascistic politicians in Germany. So I think this is the way you've got to think about it. Just pitching it as a question of vast material forces or the individual, that's a bit too simplistic, that it really gets down to what is your counterfactual here? How different does it have to be if you remove a few key individuals for you to say the course of history has now changed?

All right. Yeah, the very last bit of that question, that made it a much more difficult and complicated one, because I absolutely agree that it's a good idea to look at all of the might have beens and what ifs. And again, this brings us back to the counterfactual reasoning, which I think is so important for anyone trying to draw lessons out of history. You have to think counterfactually. And again, I think some of this comes down to personalities. When you start thinking about counterfactuals, different people react to their own logical process of thinking in different ways. And so some people, I think, are impressed by just how many possibilities there are, if things had gone just a little bit differently. Others, and I'm much more on this side, others are impressed by, wow, a lot could have gone very, very differently, but it wouldn't have actually mattered. Like, we all know, we've all got free will. We all make lots of choices each day. We could all make these choices differently. And every choice we make differently will change history. So like when I got up at 4.30 this morning in London, I groped around with my eyes all stuck together in the room, in this little Airbnb I'm in, and found this pair of socks. I could have found another pair of socks and worn them today, and it would have been a difference, but it would not have mattered in the least. And one of the truly depressing conclusions I have come to, that I suspect many of you are going to come to this as well as you get older, is very little that you do is really going to change anything very much. I think we have, and again, you've got to think of what that means. You know, each of us, we've got our own lives. So if you decide to step out in front of that speeding truck, it's going to change your life dramatically. And we've got a circle of people close to us, and again, parents, family, loved ones, you get run over by a truck when you leave. I shouldn't say these things, should I? But if you do, that's going to change their lives dramatically. I gather, I'm so ignorant, I didn't know this until just now, I gather you have a national election coming up here. You getting hit by a truck is not going to change the outcome of that election. You getting hit by a truck is not going to change what Donald Trump or Xi Jinping does. And obviously, this is a slightly silly example. Not if you get hit by the truck. I have a slightly silly example I'm talking about. But just an awful lot of stuff didn't make much difference. And when I was writing Why the West Rules for Now, I was thinking very much about some of the great characters in my story, people who really changed things. Mohammed, again, I mean, there's a guy who really changed stuff. I think we can probably all agree on that. But for the purposes of the question I was asking in that book, why did social development rise higher in the Western region than in the Eastern region for most of the course of the last 15,000 years? Mohammed and Islam didn't actually make much difference to that. And like the period when Mohammed is first preaching, and when Islam is at its greatest as a world force, this is the period when the Eastern world, especially China, has the most developed society in the world. And I think had it not been for Islam, Western societies would have been even less developed, because the Muslims pretty much scoop up what's left of Greco-Roman civilization, keep much more of that going than they do in Europe. So Mohammed, for that particular question, Mohammed didn't make that much difference, I think. And I do stand by that. I think the first time I would say that one or two individuals actually changed the course of global history at the largest scale is 1962, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a couple of individuals had either of them made different choices from the ones that they made, we could very well have had a nuclear war. And in 1962, we didn't have enough weapons to destroy the whole of humanity or end all life on the planet, but we had enough nuclear weapons to make a really, really big difference to this. So I do think thinking about the might have beens and what ifs is important, if only for clarifying your own understanding of what you think about agency and what you think about vast impersonal forces. But the last bit of your question about using this for political change, I guess I tend to be a bit old-fashioned on this. I tend to think it's nuts to think you can separate your politics from your scholarship. It's crazy to think you're ever really going to be value-free. But I think there's good ways and bad ways for the two to be intertwined. The good way is when something about the world as you experience it really bothers you. Like maybe it's racism or globalization or socialism or whatever it is you pick. Something really bothers you. And that prompts you to go out there and look in a serious scholarly way to try to understand this thing, make sense of it. And that, I think, is the good way that the politics and the scholarship come together. Your scholarship becomes interested in the good sense of the word. Your interest in the past is driven by something that you feel strongly about. And your work becomes interesting to other people because it's about something a lot of us care about. Where it becomes bad, I think, is when there's something in the world you want to think about and you already know the answer. And you then go to social sciences or history to reinforce that answer. And that, I think, that's bad. That is ideology. That is lying. People, academics who do that should be fired on the spot. I should be in charge of deciding, by the way, who is doing that. Be fired on the spot. And I think the Graeber and Wengro, I'm sure, again, many of you will come across this book, The Dawn of Everything. Fascinating but wonderful book. Wrong on every detail in the entire book is wrong. But fabulous book, which I recommend highly to you. And then after, you have to read mine after so you know how wrong they are. But their scholarship, they are very, very explicit about the political goals of their book. And I think they do stray at least a little bit across the line. They are, obviously, Graeber were, very serious scholars. I've known David Wengro quite a while. Very serious scholars, very good scholars. But I think they stray a little further across the line turning their scholarship into activism than I am entirely comfortable with.

Yes, well, the four things you mentioned, you'll probably have to remember what they are. So it's energy capture, organizational complexity, war making and something else, information technology. Yeah, those do not capture the complexity of history. And that is the whole point of choosing them. And this is something I think historians often fail to understand about a really basic point about what a model is. Your model is not sort of a re-description of reality. A model is the deliberate creation of a utopia that does not exist in the real world. You take a limited number of things, you try to reduce as much as possible the teeming complexity of reality to a handful of things that you can observe and measure that capture something about reality that answers the question that you've got. And so like this Social Development Index that I came up with, I shamelessly stole my ideas from the United Nations. They have a thing, again, I'm sure many of you will have come across this, the Human Development Index, where the UN went out, I think in the 1980s, and hired a bunch of really clever economists and said to them, OK, guys, what we want is a simple index that basically measures how well each nation is doing at creating conditions that allow their citizens to realise their human potential. And the economists, I presume, all rolled their eyes and said, good grief, that is so hopelessly fuzzy and shapeless, it's ridiculous. What you've got to do is back away from all the messy reality of what is human potential and so on, and just say, well, are there a couple of things that we could look at that don't really describe human potential, but describe two, three important dimensions of it? And also, they are measurable and comparable. And the Human Development Index, what they came up with, there's years of education, GDP per capita, and then, forget it, they had a third one which relates specifically to gender differences. Three things they came up with, and they said, this does not describe human development, but it does give you a way to generate a single number that you can put in the chart for each country, measure how well they're doing from year to year, and that will tell you something about human development, and give important information to donor organisations that are potentially thinking about investing, help them decide where in the world they will make their investments to get the biggest payoff in terms of improving human development. So, it's like it's not a matter of trying to capture reality. In a sense, it's sort of the opposite from that. It's how do we simplify things to the point? Well, there's this great line that Einstein is supposed to have said, and apparently, he didn't. No one has ever found any evidence that he said it. But he said, in science, you should make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. And I think that is absolutely, whichever nameless person came up with that, that is absolutely right. And that actually also allows me to swivel back to the first part of your question about the statistics. I think, overwhelmingly, the big things in history have been driven by the mass collective decisions of vast numbers of ordinary people acting out their everyday lives. And that's something that is often best summarised and captured statistically. It's made most vivid by individual anecdotes, but the big statistical patterns, that's what really tells you something. So, like, one of the biggest things that happened in the last 100 years was the decision of billions of women after the Second World War to have more babies. And obviously, their husbands probably have at least a little input in this as well. But billions of ordinary people decided this. Nobody's telling them to do this. They decide to do this as a baby boom. This transforms human history. One of the things that transforms it. And then, it's all gone backwards since then. Billions of people have decided not to do this. And obviously, in some places like China, the government did actually tell them, don't have all those babies. And now, well, we all know the consequences of the one-child policy have really not been quite what anyone was foreseeing in Mao Zedong's time. But I do think this, if you ask me, where does the agency lie in history? It's with the huge, shapeless decisions made by millions and millions of people, driven as much by unconscious as conscious factors. And I think this is the way we work. We are all engaged in this back and forth with an external reality, all making our own individual decisions about it, that collectively add up to vast, powerful trends. And let's see, I'll annoy all the historians in the room now. What most historians study, it's like in my graphs, it's all about my graphs. My graphs have lines in them. And those lines, those are the signal. That's the important stuff that happened in history. What most of my colleagues study is the noise around the lines. They don't want to look at the vast trends. They want to tell you about some particular shopkeeper in Jakarta in 1832, who decided to stock something very, very unusual, which is really interesting, but it tells you absolutely nothing about world history, in my opinion.

Yeah, like anybody who makes predictions, I immediately run for cover when someone asks me a question like that. Because I think we make predictions not because we're necessarily confident that they're actually going to come true, but because the process of making predictions, I think that is where you start to really learn something. It's like the great German strategist, von Moltke, the Elder, is supposed to have said that plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Your plan will... He also said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Any plan you make, it's going to turn out to be disastrously wrong. But the process of having done the planning, that is what allows you to react to the way the world changes, and that is what actually informs you. And with this prediction, yeah, my prediction was other things being equal, these lines, development lines will keep converging as they've been doing in the later 20th century, will keep converging in the 21st, crossing the year 2103. Now, one of the questions that, of course, puts right in front of you is, well, why on earth would you think they will carry on doing what they've already done? When you look back over the run of the history I was looking at in the book, we rarely get two centuries in a row where you get the same sort of trend lines continuing. And also, I think the book had made me much more conscious of how... Very Marxist, again. There's a dialectic in history, and forces of development regularly generate the forces that undermine them. And particularly rapid growth in development regularly produces forces that undermine it. And so, in our case, with this spectacular increase in the rate of development in the 20th century, I thought there were two interesting things about the prediction that I made. The first is the 2103 thing, the date, which I do think it makes a certain amount of sense to think, late 21st century, we're going to see the Eastern world catching up with the West. But the second thing, that first prediction, if you think of it as a graph with time along the bottom, the first prediction is about the time along the bottom, 2103. Second prediction was about what happens on the vertical axis. Because on this index that I'd got, I won't bore you with all the details, although I'm happy to if anybody asks. The index is built on this assumption that the maximum possible development score that anyone could achieve in the year 2000 AD was 1,000 points on this index. If the lines keep shooting up at 20th century rates, the point at which they converge in 2103, they've reached 5,000 points. So that means you think of all the change from Neanderthals sitting around in caves during the Ice Age to us sitting in here in a room for discussion in Amsterdam in 2025, that's about 900 points of change on this index. We're talking about more than four times as much change in the coming century. And so I thought about that a little bit in the book and realised if anything vaguely like that happens, we're talking about a transformation of what it means to be a human being. It is as difficult for us now to imagine what people are going to be like in 2103 as it would have been for Neanderthals to imagine what we are like. And I'm delighted to say that the revolution in artificial intelligence over the last couple of years has made me think I was righter than I thought about this. I think we are on the verge of a profound transformation in the human condition and what it means to be a human being. So having said that, do I think other things are going to be equal across the whole of the 21st century? No, of course not. There are so many things that could happen to derail this constant onward and upward convergence of these lines. So I wrote about possibilities a little bit in the book. And in one sense, this is just replaying what's happened in the past over and over again. Anytime you get periods of rapid development, they tend to run into a kind of ceiling at a certain point that they can't get through unless there's some really gigantic transformation like the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution. And I think we perhaps are pressing up against a similar ceiling now. So in some ways, maybe we're just rerunning what has happened again and again in the past. But there is one big way in which we, or two big ways in which we differ from all other previous experiments of this kind. One of them is globalisation. That in the past, the world has always been very fragmented. So if any one part of the world really screws up and sort of has a collapse and plunges back into a dark age, there are lots of other parts of the world where things are continuing, people are still trying to work things out. Now we really do have one world. Everything is tied together. And the second thing which makes our world different is simply nuclear weapons. And I know a lot of people are very worried about climate change. Don't worry about climate change, worry about nuclear weapons. Worry about climate change insofar as it makes for a world where the possibility of someone reaching for nuclear weapons is increasing, which it does, of course. When the nuclear arsenals reached their heights in 1986, there were more than 70,000 warheads in the world. And Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident physicist, Sakharov thought that if they were all used in the space of a day or two, that would probably end all life on the planet. Now the good news is that there are now, it depends how you count, but ballpark about 10,000 warheads in the world. If we had World War III today, it's not going to end all life on the planet, although you might wish that it had. So I think the nuclear weapons are the big way in which we radically change the outcome of this game. Going way beyond any kind of social collapse the world has ever seen, possibly a biological collapse, even beyond, there's that one where 90 odd percent of the life forms on the planet went extinct relatively quickly. We might manage to do it to 100%. We might outdo everybody here. So am I confident in my prediction? No. But I sort of, I think we all have our scientific grownup mind and then our gut feeling as well. My gut feeling is the world is going to shoot up to 5,000 points. We are going to see this transformation of humanity, but it's not something I would care to bet heavily on.

Yeah, well, that's a great question. I think it's one that everybody who's thinking about a lifetime in a university environment, one that we all have to think about at least a little bit at some point in our lives. And I think you're absolutely right, obviously, about the forces, the pressures for specialization. And in a way, of course, this is a really good thing. I think probably all of us would agree, specialization is a really good thing. There would be no scientific thought, in the larger sense, not just the natural sciences, no scientific thought unless we specialize. And so like with historians, we often talk about history becoming a scientific subject in the early 19th century, von Ranke, and other people too, but he's the one who became famous out of it. And what von Ranke pushed people to do was say, people like me, me, myself, not me, von Ranke, people like me who sit around waving our hands and talking about 15,000 years of this and that and the other, we are terrible people. We're going to destroy the discipline of humanity, of history, not humanity, because to be serious, what a scholar's got to do is go into the archives. And it's like you go to the bottom of the well, you go as deep as you possibly can, you read everything that is relevant to what you're doing. And unless you do that, you are a fraud, you are a liar, unless you can confidently say, yes, I have studied everything that is relevant to this topic. Now, it was easy for von Ranke to say that in the 1830s. And when he was studying overwhelmingly political history, narratives about states, he said, you're famous, he said, a state is the manifestation of the will of God. So nothing was more important than studying the history of European states. And this was just at the point when governments were organizing their archives. So people could now go and study what the archives said. And it was a lot easier when the questions were kept to this rather narrow range. Of course, as the 19th century went on, people get interested in more and more, it becomes more and more difficult to do the Rankean thing. And particularly anything that involves you working in more than one language. Because to be a paleographer, to read these medieval or ancient manuscripts, this is really difficult. To be good, you've got to commit your entire life to learning these skills. And if you do that, then somebody else coming along and saying, well, that's all very well and good. But what was happening in India? What was happening in Japan? You cannot possibly talk about that if you first have to learn all the different medieval Indian languages and scripts to do it. So there is this real tension, which I think von Ranke's era, people didn't think about it all that much because it wasn't yet a problem. It very quickly became a problem. And I think two different things happened. One was that the academic profession of historians increasingly said, we are gonna follow the Rankean type path, and we're just not going to do the broad sweeping generalizations. The other response was what some social scientists thought, because this is in late 19th century, it's just when the social science university departments are getting formed. So guys like Weber come along and Max Weber says, well, this is okay. We have a division of labor here. The historians go to the bottom of the well and find the facts. So we social scientists put them together and generalize because at one point I was a Dean in my university at Stanford in charge of multiple departments. And I discovered that in the Dean's office, they had this very unkind saying that they would use to talk about the differences between political scientists and historians. And they would say, what you've always got to remember is political scientists are ignorant, but historians are stupid. Because historians, you don't have to be very clever. Let's see, people in other disciplines think you don't have to be very clever to go and read these manuscripts. You just got to work really hard at it. And for political scientists, you don't have to know very much to generalize sweepingly. You just got to be clever. And I think I have really seen this going to events in the economics departments. Economists, I don't know how many of you are economists. My God, those people are clever. Their ability to think on their feet and see to the heart of the problem terrifies me. I never want to say anything around economists, but they really don't know anything. The ignorance that they bring to the table is mind boggling. And yet my own colleagues in the history department, boy, they are clever. They know an awful lot of stuff. But then some of the things they will say are so profoundly stupid, I'm embarrassed to be a member of the history department. And I am delighted to say that like all compromisers, I bring together the worst of both worlds. I'm both ignorant and stupid. At least this is what some of my book reviewers have said. But so I think it's an insoluble question, the one that you asked. It's a matter of personal taste, what you do. And I think it would be a terrible thing if all historians and political scientists suddenly became like me. There'd be more competition for me and also we would not have anybody who actually knew anything. But it would also be a terrible world because if we all became traditional humanistic scholars where we knew so much stuff, but it's all fragmented and scattered and nobody's really got anything to say about something. And I think the academic market has worked reasonably well to produce a small number of people who like to generalize and hand wave and a much larger number of people are concentrating on getting the facts straight. But I do think one interesting thing that's come out of this is the audiences for the big generalizing stuff largely lies outside universities. So people like Jared Diamond, again famously, there was no good position for Jared Diamond in any American university. He ended up in a geography department, which is the most peculiar place for him to be. But previously he'd been in a department of entomology studying insects, which again, a rather peculiar place for him to be. So yeah, we figure it out. In short answer, we figure it out.

So yeah, the next 40 years. Yeah, it was a prediction. Are we on the right track? Well, I think we're on the right track for making my prediction come true, making them the most dangerous in history. Are we on the right track generally? And here, of course, we're sort of straying a little bit from my academic work into my personal political views. No, we're not on the right track at all. I mean, I think one of the things I learned about the predicting game is predictions tend to have a better chance of being somewhere near the truth. It's like the more general, the bigger the scale you predict about, the more likely you are to be close to the truth. The more you get down to small scale where individual decisions really matter, the more likely you are to be completely wrong. And I did sort of say this a little bit in the book. So I think that the broader trends of history have been toward more globalization, more energy flowing through our hands, more information, more scale, all of these things. But it's a very wavy long-term trend line. We've had a lot of periods, like say in Europe, between 1914 and 1989. We have a period, 1914 and certainly the 1970s, a period when we are generally moving away from integration and globalization toward a much more fragmented world. I think we're now very much back in a period of fragmentation. And I think some political observers were a little bit silly. They will look at the history of the last five years or six years and say, oh, well, clearly the whole course of history has been changed. We're moving toward a more nationalistic era, an anti-global era, anti-immigrant era. The world has changed profoundly. This is now the shape of the whole future. That is not the lesson history teaches. The lesson I think history teaches is that, yes, these things are going to happen fairly regularly in the historical process, but they never last forever. The long-term trend is to a more integrated world. So in terms of stuff I like, I say, no, the world is emphatically going in the wrong direction. In terms of my larger predictions, I say, nah, it'll all work out.

Yes, yes. And actually that brings me back to the first part of your question, which I kind of forgot about as I got going. Yes, I think one of the main reasons that the world is going to be so dangerous and has become more dangerous in the last 15 years, will go increasingly more so in the next 25, is if this larger prediction of a shift in wealth and power from the Western world to where the Eastern world is true, then we are by definition going to see the breakdown of the Western American hegemonic global order. And when you look at world history, every time there's been a big shift in the distribution, the geographical distribution of wealth and power and the breakdown of a stable order like the Roman Empire, Han Dynasty China, it has always been accompanied by mass violence on a shocking scale. And again, comes back now to the terrifying difference between our world and all the other times we have nuclear weapons. And I don't think I'm in any way being a scaredy-pants in saying that the world has become dramatically more dangerous than it used to be. And nuclear strategists like to say that the world used to be terrifying, but simple. You had two great nuclear powers that each had enough warheads to destroy all life on the planet, but there were only two. And they kind of worked out how each other worked. And increasingly, it got more and more difficult to actually get to the point where somebody would start a nuclear war. We did have scares, a big one in 1983, but we didn't have a nuclear war. And more and more people understood how you avoid going all the way to war. And the whole point of having nuclear weapons was not to use them, to get what you wanted by having them without actually using them. And of course, Cold War nuclear diplomacy is such a fascinating topic. But then after 1989, that broke down. And initially, we enter a world that is not only even simpler, because now we've got one great hegemonic power. And I mean, I lived through the 1990s, the possibility, nobody was talking about a nuclear war in the 1990s. It was just insane to think there was gonna be a nuclear war. As we've seen the American global order breaking down, we've seen more and more countries saying, we need nuclear weapons. And again, I don't think I'm being unduly scaremongering and saying, we need to be ready for a world of 20 or even 30 nuclear powers. There are a lot of countries out there now, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, European Union, collectively, definitely, Japan, South Korea, are just a lot of countries that if they decide they want nuclear weapons, they can cross that threshold within a year or two. We've got an American government that is openly signaling that it would not necessarily consider that a bad thing. If it reduced American defense expenditures by allowing the US to withdraw tens of thousands of troops from South Korea, if the South Koreans got their own nuclear weapons, maybe that's not such a bad thing. I personally think it is a disastrous thing, a terrible thing. But in a way, the world we are creating, it's sort of less terrifying than the old world in that we don't have enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life forms. And also, some countries seem to have been thinking about how we wage a nuclear war that stays under the line that would trigger a global nuclear war. We're saying the Cold War, if either superpower uses nuclear weapons, game over. Everybody knows that, game over. Now, maybe not game over. And India and Pakistan in particular have been very careful about not deploying thermonuclear weapons, like hydrogen bombs, with payouts in the millions of tons equivalent of TNT. They stuck more to what we normally call just atomic bombs, with payouts like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, merely like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the tens of thousands of tons of TNT equivalent. The thinking apparently being that if Pakistan and India were to go to a full-scale war, and of course, they just had a little one that went on for a week or so, if they ever go to full-scale war, they might be able to use their nuclear weapons without triggering intervention on the nuclear front by the United States and China, which potentially kills everybody. And if you're not scared by that, I don't know where you're living or what you're thinking. You really, really should lie awake at night worrying about India and Pakistan. And there's a book, if you don't like to sleep, if you want to be too scared to sleep at all, there's a book that I've read, my God, I'm forgetting the name of the author now. I'm sure some of you will know it. A book called, Nuclear War, a Scenario. Read that book and never sleep again.

Thank you. Thank you very much.