FAITH AND FORTUNE IN THE CREATION OF OUR MODERN WORLD

Vijg, a geneticist, explores the history of the Western World in this sweeping nonfiction work.

Given the rise of global capitalism centered around technological advances in transportation and communication (in addition to a 500-year history of colonialism), the author asserts that “The West truly reshaped the world in its image.” Europeans historically used pseudoscientific racist ideology, jingoistic ideas of inherent superiority, and religious authority to justify colonialism; Vijg is careful to emphasize that their dominance “had nothing to do with being naturally smart or having a superior culture.” Per the book’s intriguing thesis, Europe’s rise to global power can be boiled down to a single, if multilayered, factor: “luck.” The continent was naturally blessed with a temperate climate and abundant waterways, and its history since the Roman Empire was unique in that it remained politically fragmented throughout the medieval era. The author posits that this fragmentation into a myriad of fiefdoms combined with Christianity to foster a cultural drift toward individualism, reason, and equality under the law. Divided into two parts, the book begins with an exploration of how Europe’s roots as a fringe outpost of the Roman Empire laid the foundations for its future success. The second part explores the snowballing effects of Enlightenment-era technology on shaping European economics and militaries, empowering the region for world domination. Noting that European industrialization was “a fluke of history,” the book concludes with a philosophical rumination on how humanity today can take the best elements of this Western inheritance (technology and democracy, for instance) to forge a new “benevolent world civilization.” Vijg, a professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, backs his work with an impressive body of scholarly footnotes, though academic historians may question the book’s overdrawn, teleological conclusions about Western dominance that often ignore the ways in which non-Western civilizations contributed to Western ideas. The book should be applauded, however, for its careful avoidance of stereotypical tropes of innate European superiority.

A well-researched if incomplete history of Western civilization since the Roman Empire.