Ebook: Capitalism and Modernity: the Great Debate

This important new book investigates how the West attained its current position of economic and social advantage. In an incisive historical analysis, Jack Goody examines when and why Europe (and Anglo-America) started to outstrip all other continents in socio-economic growth. Drawing on non-Western examples of economic and technical progress, Goody challenges assumptions about long-term European supremacy of a 'cultural' kind, as was a feature of many theories current in social science. He argues that the divergence came with the Industrial Revolution and that the earlier bourgeois revolution.;Cover; Dedication; Title page; Copyright page; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the Notion of Capitalism and the Rewriting of World History; 1 Culture and the Economy in Early Europe; 2 The Sixteenth Century; 3 The Other Side of the Coin; 4 Malthus and the East; Kin groups; Kinship; Individualism; Malthus and the East; 5 The Challenge of China; 6 The Growth and Interchange of Merchant Cultures; References and Bibliography; Index.