Niall Ferguson opens with a puzzle: in 1420 China's Forbidden City dwarfed anything in Europe, yet within five centuries a handful of small Western states came to rule most of the planet. He travels from Ming dynasty China to the printing shops of Reformation Germany, tracing what he calls the West's decisive advantages, competition among rival states, the scientific revolution, property law, modern medicine, consumer society, and the work ethic that grew out of Protestant Christianity. Ferguson stands in the ruins of failed colonial ventures and the halls of European institutions, using each location to argue how a specific mechanism, not luck, tipped the balance. The film also turns the question forward, asking whether the same advantages are now transferring to Asia and what that means for Western dominance going forward. Ferguson narrates throughout, building his case like a lawyer, and the documentary works as both a history of the last five hundred years and an argument about which forces actually move history.