Asher K. Sisneros
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Western Civilization From 1493
November 26, 2024
Western civilization experienced a unique level of prosperity compared to the rest of the world, and the Industrial Revolution only widened the gap. Asia took longer to match the West and only caught up through emulation. To this date, Africa has completely lagged behind and virtually stands in entire poverty.
Conventional explanations for the West’s prosperity include its vast access to natural resources, the high level of international trade, its protection of property rights, and the transatlantic slave trade. While these explanations hold some water, they do not account for the entire explanation. Natural resources indeed helped the West, but Asia and Africa had many natural resources, too. And while international trade was an important ingredient, it does not explain why the West did not experience exponential growth until the Industrial Revolution. After all, foreign trade was a long-standing Western tradition. The same goes for the slave trade and property rights. In the case of slavery, ancient civilizations had always used slaves, and property rights existed in the West before the 18th century.
While those traditional explanations touch on key points, they do not address the key, unique reason for the sudden explosion in prosperity. According to Dierdre McCloskey, the key factor was the value of ideas and a new level of respect for the middle class. In short, it was the emergence of innovation, ambition, and meritocracy.
Historically, the upper and lower classes of Western society looked at the bourgeois with contempt. The wealthy aristocrats thought they were peasants who wished to attain nobility through money rather than honor, combat in warfare, and bloodline. Thus the power the bourgeois acquired through the wealth they attained in business posed a threat to the nobles. Similarly, the lower classes and downtrodden looked enviously at the middle class. Thus merchants and innovators were universally hated in most of Western history.
Holland was the first to change and begin respecting the middle class in the 16th and 17th centuries. As a society built on trade, the Dutch respected merchants who did the trading. Moreover, with the beginning of the Dutch Republic and the overthrow of the nobility, the bourgeois ascended to the positions of power and ran the government. Naturally, the ascension of power by the middle class created an environment that was welcoming to trade and bourgeois innovation.
When William of Orange invaded England and overthrew King James II during the Glorious Revolution, he brought Dutch meritocracy with him into Great Britain. From there, the value of innovation and respect for the bourgeois spread to the rest of the West. And by the 18th century, it created a level of wealth unfathomable to the rest of antiquity. Between the years 1780 and 1860, real income per capita doubled. Adjusted for modern standards, people in France during 1800 lived on an average of $3 a day. By the Great Enrichment, they lived on $33 a day. The reason for this is meritocracy.
Asher Sisneros 