Efficiency is the quiet force behind civilisation’s greatest transformations. It determines whether societies merely survive or steadily move toward abundance. It shapes how food is grown, how cities are built, how medicine is delivered, and how time itself is valued. Yet despite its central role in human progress, efficiency is rarely examined as a historical driver in its own right. The Origins of Efficiency in Civilisation tells the long, overlooked story of how humanity learned to do more with less. Moving from early survival strategies to agriculture, industry, automation, and the digital age, this book traces how improvements in process, coordination, energy use, and organization quietly reshaped the world. Rather than focusing on famous inventions or heroic figures, it reveals how incremental changes, standardization, learning curves, and system design produced outsized results over centuries. With clarity and depth, the book explores why efficiency accelerates dramatically in some domains while stubbornly stalling in others. It explains why manufacturing costs collapse while housing, education, and health care remain expensive. It examines how global supply chains, automation, and software unlocked unprecedented scale, and why the same forces also introduced fragility, inequality, and new social tensions. Throughout, efficiency is treated not as a slogan, but as a complex, evolving process shaped by institutions, incentives, and human constraints. This is not a book that argues for efficiency at all costs. Instead, it asks harder questions. When does optimization improve human life, and when does it undermine resilience, dignity, or fairness. Who benefits from efficiency gains, and who bears the risks. And what does it mean to pursue progress in a world where many of the easiest gains are already behind us. Bringing together history, economics, technology, and systems thinking, The Origins of Efficiency in Civilisation offers a unifying framework for understanding how the modern world came to be and where it may go next. It is a guide for readers who want to understand not just what changed, but how change actually happens. For anyone seeking to make sense of abundance, stagnation, and the future of progress, this book reveals efficiency as what it has always been: the hidden architecture of civilisation.
