ABSTRACT

The “Great Divergence” is a term used to describe the widening gap in per capita incomes between Europe (and European settler societies such as the United States) and most of the rest of the world. In this chapter, the authors engage the question of why Europe simultaneously achieved military dominance. In exploring both economic and military divergence, they look at many political and economic phenomena but also elements of the non-human environment, population, culture, and technology and science. The authors briefly apply evolutionary analysis to institutions, scientific standards of evidence, and the idea of Western Civilization. One of the challenges of speaking of Western Civilization is that the region “the West” is ever moving, albeit usually westward: from Mesopotamia to Greece to Rome to northwestern Europe to the Americas. For a variety of reasons, then, it makes sense to place “Western Civilization” within a global perspective.