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To accompany the Channel 4 series, the book Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson is out now through Penguin.
If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe, you would have been most impressed by the dazzling civilisations of the Orient.
By contrast, England would have struck you as a miserable backwater ravaged by plague, bad sanitation and incessant war. The other quarrelsome kingdoms of Western Europe - Aragon, Castile, France, Portugal and Scotland - would have seemed little better.
The idea that the West would come to dominate the rest for most of the next half millennium would have struck you as wildly fanciful. And yet it happened.
What was it about the civilisation of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient?
In Civilization: The West and the Rest, Niall Ferguson argues that the West developed six "killer applications" that the rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic, and takes readers on an extraordinary journey around the globe with a defining narrative of modern world history.
