The rise of the West

Christopher Chantrill:

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But the Europeans didn’t conquer the world merely with military and political prowess. Is Martin Jacques suggesting that the 200 years of the West’s hegemony had no connection with the worldwide revolution in manufacture and commerce started by a bunch of Nonconformist British tinkerers in the late 18th century? Could it be that steam-powered looms and dirt-cheap cotton textiles played a role in the power of the West?

Perhaps the amber waves of grain grown in the American Midwest and shipped across the world to sell for less than the price from the local farmers had something to do with it.

Next we focused on your economic system.

And made a terrible mistake. Politicians across the world listened to lefties like Martin Jacques and built rationally planned, centralized systems run by government bureaucracies. It took a while, and untold suffering for their peoples, for these nationalists to learn that the left’s brew of centralized economic systems was a poisoned chalice. They had to start all over again using the real western system, capitalism, built around free markets, secure property, and free labor.

But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful.

Christianity? But wasn’t it the Enlightenment that shone the light of reason upon the Dark Ages of superstition and religious wars? According to Rodney Stark in The Victory of Reason, the west’s dominance was baked in the cake during the Dark Ages, and it was baked out of the rational theology of Christianity that saw people “all one in Christ Jesus.” By the Middle Ages the Italians at the seat of Christianity had invented international banking, double-entry bookkeeping, and market-driven capitalism. But until the Industrial Revolution they did not have the power to challenge the princes of the land and their ruinous dynastic squabbles.

It was then that the West rolled out across the world with its culture, its inventions, its capital, and its arrogance in the colonial expansion that so offends Martin Jacques.

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