Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

television stations to banks. And, like so many tinpot dictators in Latin American history, he makes a mockery of the rule of law by changing the constitution to suit himself – first in 1999, shortly after his first election victory; most recently in 2009, when he abolished term-limits to ensure his own indefinite re-election.
    Nothing better exemplifies the contrast between the two American revolutions than this: the one constitution of the United States, amendable but inviolable, and the twenty-six constitutions of Venezuela, all more or less disposable. Only the Dominican Republic has had more constitutions since independence (thirty-two); Haiti and Ecuador are in third and fourth positions with, respectively, twenty-four and twenty. 73 Unlike in the United States, where the constitution was designed to underpin ‘a government of laws not of men’, in Latin America constitutions are used as instruments to subvert the rule of law itself.
    Yet before we celebrate the long-run success of the British model of colonization in North America, we need to acknowledge that in onepeculiar respect it was in no way superior to Latin America. Especially after the American Revolution, the racial division between white and black hardened. The US constitution, for all its many virtues, institutionalized that division by accepting the legitimacy of slavery – the original sin of the new republic. On the steps of the Old Exchange in Charleston, where the Declaration of Independence was read, they continued to sell slaves until 1808, thanks to article 1, section 9, of the constitution, which permitted the slave trade to continue for another twenty years. And South Carolina’s representation in Congress was determined according to the rule that a slave – ‘other persons’ in the language of the constitution – should be counted as three-fifths of a free man.
    How, then, are we to resolve this paradox at the heart of Western civilization – that the most successful revolution ever made in the name of liberty was a revolution made in considerable measure by the owners of slaves, at a time when the movement for the abolition of slavery was already well under way on both sides of the Atlantic?

Medicine
     
Let us first consider what state of things is described by the word ‘civilization’. Its true test lies in the fact that people living in it make bodily welfare the object of life … The people of Europe today live in better-built houses than they did a hundred years ago … Formerly, they wore skins, and used spears as their weapons. Now, they wear long trousers, and … instead of spears, they carry with them revolvers … Formerly, in Europe, people ploughed their lands mainly by manual labour. Now, one man can plough a vast tract by means of steam engines and can thus amass great wealth … Formerly, men travelled in wagons. Now, they fly through the air in trains at the rate of four hundred and more miles per day … Formerly, when people wanted to fight with one another, they measured between them their bodily strength; now it is possible to take away thousands of lives by one man working behind a gun from a hill … There are now diseases of which people never dreamt before, and an army of doctors is engaged in finding out their cures, and so hospitals have increased. This is a test of civilization … What more need I say? …
This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed. According to the teaching of Muhammad this would be considered a Satanic Civilization. Hinduism calls it the Black Age … It must be shunned.
Mahatma Gandhi
It is a people which by its sons (Robespierre, Descartes, etc.) has done much for humanity. I do not have the right to wish it evil.
Senegalese student
     

BLACK SHAME
     
    In April 1917 Demba Mboup and his comrades in the French Colonial Corps, part of General Charles Mangin’s Sixth Army and General Denis Duchêne’s Tenth Army, faced the heavily