The Rise of the West - or not? A revision to socio-economic history

The debate over the "Rise of the West" has generally been over which factor or factors-cultural, geoographic, or material-in European history led Euro pe to diverge from the World's pre-industrial civilizations. This article a ims to shift the terms of the debate by arguing that there were no causal f actors that made Europe's industrialization inevitable or even likely. Rath er, most of Europe would not and could not move toward industrialization an y more than China or India or Japan. Rather, a very accidental combination of events in the late seventeenth century placed England on a peculiar path , leading to industrialization and constitutional democracy. These accident s included the compromise between the Anglican Church and Dissenters, and b etween Crown and Parliament, in the settlements of 1689; the adoption of Ne wtonian science as part of the cosmology of the Anglican Church and its spr ead to craftsmen and entrepreneurs throughout Britain; and the opportunity to apply the idea of the vacuum and mechanics to solve a particular technic al problem: pumping water out of deep mines shafts in or near coal mines. W ithout these particular accidents of history, there is no reason to believe that Europe would have been more advanced than the leading Asian civilizat ions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.