Rise of the West

1. Geography theory critique - If Europe enjoyed a natural geographic advantage from ancient times, then why during the thousand years between 500 A.D. and 1500 A.D., the West was a civilizational laggard and showed no signs of becoming the world's dominant civilization?

2. Oppression theory - Using war, imperialism, and slavery, the West colonized the rest of the world and got rich in the process; nothing innately superior of Western culture or civilization that enabled it to dominate the world. Critique - ethnocentrism, war, imperialism, and slavery are not unique to the West 

Resolution - the West became rich because it invented three institutions: science, democracy, and capitalism. These did not exist anywhere else in the world, nor did they exist in the West until the modern era. All three institutions are based on human impulses and aspirations that are universal, but these aspirations were given a unique expression in Western civilization.

Capitalism is based on a universal human impulse—the impulse to barter and trade. All societies have engaged in some form of exchange. Even the use of money is not Western in origin. But capitalism—by which I mean property rights, and contracts, and courts to enforce them, and free trade; in short, the whole ensemble of arrangements that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations—is a Western institution.

Moreover, there is the psychology that is critical to capitalist success. Capitalism is based on the belief that the calling of the merchant or entrepreneur is a worthwhile one. In most societies merchants and entrepreneurs were regarded as lowlife scum and only in the West did their status improve.

Technology then arose out of the marriage between science and capitalism. Science provides the knowledge that leads to invention, and capitalism supplies the mechanism by which the invention is transmitted to the larger society, as well as the economic incentive for inventors to continue to make new things.

Colonialism and imperialism are not the cause of the West's success; they are the result of that success. The wealth and military power of the European powers made them arrogant and stimulated their appetite for global conquest: thus the British, the Dutch, and the French went abroad in search of countries to subdue and rule. These colonial possessions added to the prestige, and to a lesser degree to the wealth, of Europe. But the primary cause of Western affluence and power is internal—the institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism acting in concert. Consequently it is simply wrong to maintain that the rest of the world is poor because the West is rich, or that the West grew rich off "stolen goods" from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, because the West created its own wealth, and still does. The doctrine of oppression ignores this fact, and continues to fuel anti-Western resentment around the world and within the nations of the West.