Winner of the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize 2013

In 1412, Europe was a miserable backwater ravaged by plague, bad sanitation and incessant war, while the Orient was home to dazzling civilizations. Yet, somehow, the West came to dominate the Rest for most of the next half millennium.

In this vital, brilliant book, Niall Ferguson reveals the six 'killer applications' that the Rest lacked: competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. And he asks: do we still have these winning tools? Or is this the end of Western ascendancy?

"Ferguson is the most brilliant British historian of his generation ... he writes with splendid panache" - The Times

"One of the world's leading historians" - Hamish McRae, Independent

"Civilization is another masterpiece ... a pulsing energy suffuses his account [and] fascinating facts burst like fireworks on every page" - Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times

"This is sharp. It feels urgent. Ferguson, with a properly financially literate mind, twists his knife with great literary brio" - Andrew Marr, Financial Times

"A dazzling history of Western ideas" - Economist

Niall Ferguson is one of Britain's most renowned historians. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His many other prizes include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013). He writes a weekly column for the Sunday Times, for which he was named Columnist of the Year at the 2018 British Press Awards.