Better The Devil You Know...
The invocative ideas of liberty, equality and freedom disseminated in Europe during the Enlightenment are often credited with the dynamic growth of market capitalism to the full scale industrialisation of production that enabled European states to assert their power. The similar provenance and close historical time frame of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution would suggest that they are connected. It would seem too great a coincidence to say that they were completely unrelated, though certainly there is no simple answer to what their relationship is. This essay focuses on the interaction between ideas, technology, economic growth and social institutions. The similarities between early modern China, Japan and Britain show that the relationship between ideas, social institutions and economic growth is not simply that one leads to the other, they develop concurrently. As an interrelated progress that is in no way inevitable but contingent on many factors. The ideas of the
