Nesta invited Ian Morris to Nesta for a discussion on global rule and superpowers.

Ian's book, Why The West Rules - For Now, surveys over ten thousand years of human development and innovation and explores such questions as why has technology conspired to help the West dominate the world for the past two centuries? What determines how fast societies develop technologically and socially? Why do calamities sometimes befall them? And what might the future hold for China and the West?

It also explores the forces that link the birth of cities at the dawn of history, why the Industrial Revolution happened in Birmingham rather than Kaifeng or Rome, and what the next century might hold.