Summary: Niall Ferguson is the most brilliant British historian of his generation. In his latest book, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, he asks how Western civilisation, from inauspicious roots in the 15th century, came to dominate the rest of the world. His answer is that the West developed six “killer applications” that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six things. If it has and the Rest of the world can successfully download these apps, we may be living through the end of Western ascendancy
