A Short History of Progress

2004

Each time history repeats itself, so it’s said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water—the very elements of life.

The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have unleashed but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment’s inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Order A Short History of Progress, An Illustrated Short History of Progress, or the audio CD A Short History of Progress: 2004 Massey Lecture
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Honours

Libris Nonfiction Book of the Year Award, 2005
Finalist for British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

Reviews

“I don’t care if you have never read and will never read any kind of book at all, but you must read this one. [Wright] achieves in a mere 132 pages what another author couldn’t manage in 1,300… Wise, timely, and brilliant.”
Paul Williams Roberts, Globe and Mail
“I was thoroughly shaken up by Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress… a brilliant analysis of everything humanity has done to ruin itself down the ages.”
Jan Morris, Books of the Year, Independent on Sunday

“Provocative… Already a bestseller in Canada, Wright is now making his biggest mark since his debut novel (A Scientific Romance, 1997) attracted wide attention… illuminating and disturbing, and expansively documented.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Ronald Wright, one of this country’s intellectual treasures… takes his readers on a sweeping educational tour of history and every continent’s previous civilization… The excellent book should be required reading at the White House.”
Brownwyn Drainie, Quill & Quire

“An elegant and learned discussion of what the rise and fall of past civilizations predict about our own: nothing good.”
Maclean’s

“The author sifts the findings of archaeology and anthropology with thoughtful grace to build a potent argument.”
Guardian

Format: Paperback, 176 pages

Publishers in English: Canongate (UK); Anansi (Canada); Text (Australia); Carroll & Graf (USA)
Foreign editions in 14 languages