Cultural Orthodoxy, Risk, and Innovation: The Divergence of East and West in the Early Modern World

What separated the East from the West, in the sense that we speak of the rise of the West? Although one may wish to answer capitalism, or the rationalization of institutions and economic life, both answers would be mistaken. As we shall see, Eastern empires, particularly China, could boast specialized production for distant markets with wage labor, highly efficient and increasingly rational allocation of labor and capital, uniform laws to smooth the flow of trade, and calculable conditions for economic activity on par with contemporary European nations of about 1750. What separated the West, first England, later Europe and America, from the rest of the world was a qualitative jump in the rate of innovation.