Dear Reader: This is a crude draft as of August 15, 2018. The three asterisks or the bold

*** exact date of Putney debates or 17*date in Wills extreme Levellers like NNNN*** or Puritans like NNNN (***: Wills book), or even in DDDD except extreme Quakers like NNNN, thought that slavery was anything other than a misfortune applied by God to temper the slave’s soul. Robinson Crusoe sells into slavery a boy who had saved his life, and there is little doubt that Defoe had no anti-slavery irony in mind. After all, part of Crusoe’s subsequent prosperity comes from the slave trade.⁴³⁰ Similarly, no one at the time thought that poverty was somehow objectionable on theological grounds. A French official in the seventeenth century declared that “writing should not be taught to those whom Providence caused to be born peasants: such children should be taught only to read.”⁴³¹ Infinitely lived Christians have no justified complaint if their lot in this present life is a burden. Earthly life is, mathematically, speaking, an infinitesimal part of Life. Take up your cross.

But by 1800 in progressive circles in England and the United States such attitudes had fallen away, replaced by an aggressively Evangelical movement quite determined to be its brother’s keeper. The non-Evangelicals in, say, the Church of England came to similar view. The social gospel animated during the nineteenth century abolition, the missionary movement, imperialism, prohibition, and Christian versions of socialism. All of them are in one form or another still with us. Christian theology became worldly. Sometimes the worldly turn fit smoothly with bourgeois innovation—***quote Episcopal bishop of MA. And sometimes it decried the new economy. ***Quote? Yes: Paul Tillich as socialist. But anyway it affirmed an ordinary life, or recommended missionary sainthood in aid of the ordinary life of Africans or Chinese.

The preaching had changed much earlier than the nineteenth century, and so after a while the way people talked about self-interest and pleasure changed. Every Sunday in the late seventeenth century English people listened to sermons by liberal Anglicans and liberal non-conformists to the effect that Christ died precisely so that you can pursue your self-interest. The Anglican preacher Thomas Taylor said, in line with the new natural theology just emerging from Newtonian and other revelations of God’s infinite wisdom, “where an appetite is universally rooted in the nature of any kind of beings we can attribute so general an effect to nothing but the Maker of those beings.”⁴³² The historian Joyce Appleby has shown that in seventeenth century England the conviction grew among formerly self-denying Protestants that capitalist innovation and consuming delight was “rooted in the nature” of humans, and was therefore excused—nay, encouraged—by the Maker.⁴³³ In 1634 John Milton had the seducing Comus making such a worldly argument in theological form:

Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand, . . .
But all to please and sate the curious taste?

. . . . If all the world

Should, in a pet of temperance, feed on pulse,
Drink the clear stream, and nothing wear but frieze,
The All-giver would be unthanked, would be unpraised, . . .

List, lady; be not coy, and be not cozened

With that same vaunted name, Virginity.
Beauty is Nature’s coin; must not be hoarded,
But must be current; and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partaken bliss.⁴³⁴

Milton the Puritan detested the commercial claim that Nature was God’s plan for worldly happiness. On the contrary, said he: “Who best bear his mild yoke,/ They serve him best.” But later in the seventeenth century Charles II, who was conventionally pious though very far from Puritan—he who fathered seventeen admitted illegitimate children—inadvertently anticipated the new theological point (known as eudaimonism, “this-world happiness-ism”): God would not damn a man, said he, for taking a little pleasure along the way.⁴³⁵

In truth the Papists were always more relaxed about such matters. Indeed a natural-law philosophy dating back to Aquinas affirmed that commerce itself was God’s natural instrument, as was desire, too, for Nature’s bounty poured forth. Spanish philosophers of the sixteenth century and French and Italian philosophers of the eighteenth century anticipated most elements of Scottish political economy.⁴³⁶ The outbreak of eudaimonism among Anglican and even English non-conformist preachers may be viewed as a return to Catholic orthodoxy after a century and a half of experiments with the asceticism of mild or not-so-mild yokes. Eudaimonism is still Catholic orthodoxy.⁴³⁷ The Second Vatican Council declared in 1965 that “earthly goods and human institutions according to the plan of God the Creator are also disposed for man’s salvation and therefore can contribute much to the building up of the body of Christ.”⁴³⁸ There was nothing novel about the declaration—modern popes have repeatedly articulated it against the evil of socialism—and it is therefore not surprising that liberal notions of economics arose first in scholastic Spain. “Glory be to God for dappled things” is a persistent theme in Catholic Christianity, against the budge doctors of the stoic fur. In 1329 John XXII condemned the German mystic Meister Eckhart for claiming (according to John XXII’s bull In the Lord’s field, item 8) that “God is honored in those who do not pursue anything, neither honor nor advantage, neither inner revelation nor saintliness, nor reward, nor the Kingdom of Heaven itself, but who distance themselves from all these things, as well as from all that is theirs.”⁴³⁹ John burned a number of such communists and declared heretical the belief that Christ and the Apostles did not have possessions.

In any case, whether eudaimonism in Protestant circles around 1700 was quite as original as it sounded to its proponents, the consequence for economic rhetoric in England, as the intellectual historian Margaret Jacob has argued, was large. “The most historically significant contribution of the [Anglican] latitudinarians,” she writes, “lies in their ability to synthesize the operations of a market society and the workings of nature in which a way as the render the market society natural.”⁴⁴⁰ Anglicans, note: the place for such ideas, at least in the opinion of the English, was England around 1700, with a later branch in the Middle Colonies. Anglicans insist that they, too, are of the holy, catholic, and apostolic church, and have always tried to take a third way between rigorist Calvinists and relaxed Catholics. Little wonder they found it easy to slip back into a world-admiring orthodoxy, especially under the properly Protestant auspices of Newton. Goldstone, following Jacob, argues that “only in England was the new science actively preached from the pulpit (where Anglican ministers found the orderly, law-ordained universe of Newton both a model for the order they wished for their country and a convenient club with which to beat the benighted Catholic Church), sponsored in the Royal Society, and spread through popular demonstrations of mechanical devices for craftsmen and industrialists.”⁴⁴¹ In Spain and Italy the clergy, as against a tiny group of philosophers, held back their praise for a natural life in trade.

Of course the resulting notions of “natural” economic liberty of the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith (anticipated, as noted, in Spain, and invented independently by Smith’s contemporary in Naples, Antonio Genovesi) took a very long time to become the default logic of even the elite. The recent upwelling of protectionism and anti-immigrant passion in Europe and the United States shows that it has still not become so entirely. The economist and Anglican priest Anthony Waterman has argued that until well into the nineteenth century even the policy wonks did not think in Smithian ways, even in ”free-trade” Britain. And up to the present, he notes, Christians and socialists and especially Christian socialists, rather than admiring what we economists think lovely, that delightful “spontaneous order,” hold onto an older and organic view of society—embodied for example in a book that Waterman and I hold dear, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.⁴⁴² “Take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatever else may hinder us from godly union,” the 1662 version pleads in a Prayer for Unity, “as there is but one Body, and one Spirit. . . one God and Father of us all; so we may henceforth be all of one heart. . . and may with one mind and one mouth glorify thee.”⁴⁴³

The rhetorical change was a necessity, a not-to-be-done-without, of the first Industrial Revolution, and especially of its astounding continuation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The goldsmith John Tuite’s patent of 1742 modifying Newcomen’s steam engine was, according to Margaret Jacob, the first patent to be granted that says boldly in the application that it will put people out of work, saving labor. Before that time all patents needed to claim in a medieval and then a mercantilist rhetoric that employment would be increased. In 1744 the British Newtonian, Freemason, and Chaplain to the Prince of Wales, Jean Desaguliers, of Huguenot origin, was the first person to emphasize in print, Jacob continues, the labor-saving character of steam engines. ⁴⁴⁴ Ideas and rhetoric had changed in favor of innovation.

Material circumstances mattered, too, of course. The Little Ice Age beginning in the fourteenth century put pressure on regimes from Ming China to the Spanish Netherlands.⁴⁴⁵ The rising population worldwide in the sixteenth century set one elite against another.⁴⁴⁶ The perfection by the West of a gunpowder technology invented in the East put the final nail in the coffin—or rather the final hole in the armor—of the mounted knight, although it had been anticipated in the development of the long bow and especially the crossbow, and the mounted knight (or for that matter the illiterate Spanish commoner similarly equipped) could still prevail as late as the sixteenth century when faced with Aztecs and Incas lacking steel and horses. The voyages of discovery and the resulting empires were useful contexts, as were inside-Europe trade and the long-established security of property, but only contexts, not big causes. Margaret Jacob argues plausibly for an ideal cause working through a very material one. The steam engine, itself a material consequence of seventeenth-century ideas about the “weight of air,” inspired new ideas in the 1740s about machinery generally. But without the change in ideas about the economy and the bourgeoisie around 1700, the economic society of Europe, regardless of atmospheric engines and enclosure bills and trade in sugar, would have settled into stasis, as it did in fact settle during the same period in the parallel and vigorously commercial worlds of Japan and China and the Ottoman Empire.

The bourgeois turn was a probing, as the loyalty to rank broke down, as the holy, catholic, and apostolic church fragmented, and indeed as the loyalty to sex altered in character, of what people believed they ought to believe about ordinary life. It changed the way influential people offered warrantable beliefs to each other about exports of cotton textiles or the dignity of inventors or the basis of legitimate power, or for that matter about sophisters, economists, and calculators. In the metaphor of the linguist George Lakoff, it altered the frames that people used to speak of the economy, by laying down new neural pathways in their brains.⁴⁴⁷ The alteration was completed by 1776 in the brains of elite intellectuals such as Smith, Hume, Turgot, Franklin, or Kant. The Sentimental Revolution of the 1780s and after was an aspect of its spread. The Separation of Spheres between bourgeois men and women was another.⁴⁴⁸ The historian Dror Wahrman has argued that the reaction against the French Revolution was crucial to the formation of the idea of the middle class in Britain.⁴⁴⁹ It was not aristocrats but middle-class people, especially educated ones such as William Wilberforce, descended from a long line of merchants at Hull, who led the radical and evangelical agitations, especially in Britain—though actual cabinet posts in Britain, understand, were for a long time reserved mainly for dukes and their cousins, with a sprinkling of Celtic commoners to keep up the standard of eloquence. By 1848 the idealism of ordinary life (though incomplete and always under challenge from older rhetorics of king, country, and God) was the rhetoric of the times in which we still live, the Bourgeois Era.

In a France without the nearby and spectacular examples of bourgeois economic and political successes in Holland and then in England and Scotland, modern economic growth probably would have been so throttled—even in a France blessed with clever advocates of free trade such as Voltaire and Turgot and Condillac. Consider how very anti-bourgeois and anti-libertarian most of France’s elite was until late in the eighteenth century. Among the French a number of reactionary parties have prospered for two centuries after the Unfinished Revolution. Even nowadays the charmed students of the École Polytechnique in France march under a banner that would strike graduates of such bourgeois institutions as MIT or Imperial College as absurdly antique and unbusinesslike: Pour la Patrie, les Sciences et la Gloire. Indeed, that they march at all would give the same impression. In Spain for different reasons (though again reasons that continue to trouble the country) economic growth was in fact throttled until very recently, despite the Dutch and British and then even the French examples.⁴⁵⁰ But in the bourgeois countries, which eventually included France and even in the very long run Spain, the circumstances made a new rhetoric, which made new circumstances, which then again made new rhetoric.

The theme is that also of the Cambridge School of historians of English political thought (such as Laslett, Pocock, Skinner, Dunn, Tuck, Goldie), that ideas and circumstances are intertwined. The Cambridge/Johns Hopkins methodological point is that you may not omit the ideas—as historians in many countries were very inclined to do during the historiographic reign of Marx and materialism, 1890-1980. The monotheistic, universalist religions of the Axial Age, 600 BCE to 630 CE, arose it seems from the conversation of ideas between different civilizations, made possible by the material condition of improved trade.⁴⁵¹ But monotheism after all is an idea, spreading for example from Temple Judaism to Christianity to Islam, with remoter contacts in Zoroastrianism and Hinduism and Buddhism. When given a chance by trading contacts, or even by one holy man speaking to another (pre-Socratic philosophers for example mulling Persian ideas), the intellectual prestige of a search for The One turns out to compete rather well in people’s minds with the vulgar particularism of tree worship and witchcraft. That a material base can of course have an influence does not at all require that we reduce mind to matter. Mill wrote later in the same essay mentioned, speaking of the sources of sympathy for the working class in the 1840s, that “ideas, unless outward circumstances conspire with them, have in general no very rapid or immediate efficacy in human affairs; and the most favorable outward circumstances may pass by, or remain inoperative, for want of ideas suitable to the conjuncture. But when the right circumstances and the right ideas meet, the effect is seldom slow in manifesting itself.”⁴⁵² The Industrial Revolution and the rhetoric of respect for ordinary life, for example, made possible the rise of mass democracies—Mill speaks especially of the British Reform Bill of 1832, which was an extension if not exactly a democratization of the franchise. But if the specifically rhetorical change had not happened, modern economic growth and therefore modern democracy would have been throttled in its cradle, or at any rate starved well before its maturity—as it had been routinely throttled or starved in earlier times. Our liberties and our central heating would have been denied.

&Chapter 21:

It Led to a Hockey Stick of Growth

It had never happened before. In 1798 Robert Malthus (1766-1834), an Anglican clergyman irritated by the extravagant and anti-clerical claims of the French revolutionaries and their British friends that a new day had dawned, explained for the first time why the enrichment of the poor had not yet happened. He said in his great book An Essay on the Principle of Population that it was not a divine malevolence but human sin and economic scarcity after Eden that kept people poor. The pressures of population (assuming only modest technological improvement), Malthus argued, had kept our ancestors living on about a $3 a day (the figure is Angus Maddison’s estimate of world income before 1800 in 1990 prices, brought up to 2010).⁴⁵³ If income got a little higher, as when potatoes were introduced from Peru into Europe and China, the people had more children, and anyway more of their children survived to adulthood. The supply of labor therefore grew, and in a generation or so the real wage went down again to subsistence. If it got lower than subsistence, then more children died, and in a while the real wage rolled back up to a dollar or two a day. The $3 was in engineering lingo a “homeostatic equilibrium,” and worked the way your thermostat does.

A sad business. But our cheerful little joke in economic history when we lecture to undergraduates is that the story of welfare among humans is a “hockey stick” (many economic historians are Canadians). That is, the amount of food and education and so forth per person ran along at subsistence on a straight handle with little change at $1 or $3 during the fifteen hundred or so centuries since Homo sapiens sapiens first walked in Africa. Or during the five-hundred centuries or so since the invention of language. Or during the hundred centuries since the invention of agriculture. Or during the ten centuries since commerce revived in the West. Pick whatever length of handle you want. Anyway, for a long, long time not much happened to the economic well-being of the average Jack or Jill. Think of that $3 a day, with ups and downs—all right, in the richest parts of China and Europe perhaps $2.00 a day. Well-being would go up for a while (people were not by any means always “starving,” as Goldstone points out). But after a while it would go down.⁴⁵⁴

In other words, until a couple of centuries ago, the economic historians have recently discovered, Europe and Asia were about equally poor, pegged to $3 a day pretty much regardless of where they lived.⁴⁵⁵ And so was everybody else in the world. The imperialist vision of China and India as always and anciently terribly overrun with paupers is a modern misunderstanding (with consequences in the eugenic excesses of the family-limitation movement after the 1950s). For most of history, that a place was densely populated was a sign it was doing reasonably well, though not all that well for Jack or Jill—the Ganges Plain, for example, or on a smaller scale the Low Countries in Europe. But no one stuck much above the rest of the poppies for very long. Marshall Sahlins and other anthropologists have observed that hunter gatherers often had an easier life, working fewer hours a week for their food, than people tied down to the abundance of agriculture—the abundance of which went, according to the inexorable Principle of Population, to priests and knights rather than to our ancestors the peasants.⁴⁵⁶ Why for the long length of the hockey stick did ordinary people do no better? Because of the long-run homeostatic equilibrium.

Until 1750 or even 1850 Malthus looks right. Then history reached the business end of the hockey stick. Suddenly real income per person started growing at an astounding rate. The growth started slowly first in a few countries in northwestern Europe, during the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth other countries joined at a higher rate the blade part of the stick, and during the twentieth century many others worldwide at still higher rates of growth. In other words, modern economic growth emerged only in the last couple of centuries out of 1500 centuries, or out of 500, or 100, or 10. Humankind broke out of the homeostatic equilibrium. Ironically, the Malthusian constraint dissolved just about the time that Malthus so persuasively articulated it. (Environmentalist still take the Malthus of 1798 as their guide.)

In many countries income per person has risen by now to 20 times its former level. More. The English colonists in North America in 1700 managed on a mere $1.40 a day in 1990 prices. Visit the historical reconstruction of the Plimouth Plantation *** to get a sense of what such a figure means: drafty, unplastered house walls without glass windows, enclosing one room with a sleeping loft for six people (in northern Europe there were animals in the back for additional heat); one skirt for Sunday and one for the rest of the week; in America ample food, usually, though trusting to the harvest; smallpox and dysentery routine; life expectancy low. Yet by 1998 the average resident of the United States consumed $75 a day, that is, over fifty times more housing, food, education, furniture than in 1700.⁴⁵⁷ Fifty times.

Nowhere in the world 1800 to the present did real income per head actually fall, except in places with the misfortune of tyrants on the model of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or entirely uncontrolled robbers or pirates as in Somalia. When as in Argentina during the 1930s [***check] or East Germany during the late 1940s or Venezuela during the 2000s a naïvely populist or socialist policy took hold, such as subsidies to inefficient industries or regulatory attacks on markets and property, income grew slower than it could have. But worldwide from 1800 to the present the material welfare of humanity per average human rose by a factor of about 9.

And it has accelerated, rising faster and faster and faster, albeit with a sickening slowdown during the anti-bourgeois disorders of Europe and its imitators, 1914-1950.⁴⁵⁸ By contrast the years 1950-1972 after the disorders, writes Angus Maddison, “were a golden age of unparalleled prosperity.”⁴⁵⁹ World domestic product per head rose at nearly 3 percent a year, implying a doubling of material welfare of ordinary people every 24 years—that is, in a single long generation. The later, less vigorous growth of 1973-1998, Maddison points out, was nonetheless higher than any earlier period except the postwar boom.

Right now, with China and India taking up 37 percent of world population, and income per head in the two free-market and innovative places growing at 7 to 12 percent per head per year, the average income per head in the world (all the economists agree) is rising faster than ever before in history. ⁴⁶⁰ It seems likely to continue doing so— in their long socialist experiments during the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s China and India were so badly managed that there is a good deal of ground to make up. Certainly no genetics implies that Chinese or Indians should do worse than Europeans permanently. No limit is in sight. Rising income at such heady rates is understandably popular with ordinary Chinese and Indian people. As their incomes go up they, like the Westerners, will come to value the environment more. Oil is no long-term limit to growth, as the repeated failures of limits-to-growth predictions have shown. If we take 9 percent as the China-India annual per capita growth rate, the rest of the world could have literally zero growth per capita and still the world’s growth per year of real income per head would be (.37) x (9), or 3.3 percent per head per year, faster than the great postwar boom of 1950-1972. If the rest of the world were to grow instead merely at the subdued rates of 1973-2003 (namely, 1.56 percent per head per year), the resulting world figure, factoring in the Chinese and Indian miracles, would be (.37) (9.0) + (.63) (1.56), or 4.3 percent per year.⁴⁶¹ A sustained growth rate of 4.3 percent per year per capita results in a doubling of the welfare of the average person within a short generation of 17 years, or a quadrupling in about 34 years.

The resulting spiritual change has been just as impressive. Consider the move to democracy in Taiwan and South Korea, other places enriched by setting up free trade zones in which innovation was permitted and honored. Let us earnestly pray for China, which has done the same. Or consider the emergence in the West by 2000 of a Nature-worshipping environmentalism that would have been thought absurd in the straited times of 1700. It was made possible by enrichment. Rich places like Sweden, though contemptuous of such absurdities as the worship of the actual God, have found their transcendent in the worship of Nature, and spend their Sundays gathering mushrooms in Nature’s forest. Or consider the present flourishing of world music and world cuisine. And imagine the future explosion in world art and science when India and China become fully rich—not to speak of old Africa, whose genetic diversity promises when it too enters upon the hockey stick of growth a crop of geniuses unprecedented in world history. Today a Mozart in western China follows the plow; an Einstein in East Africa herds cattle. Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest. “Full many a gem of purest ray serene/ The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:/ Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” We await during the century to come a world spiritual change enabled by gigantically higher incomes. In fifty years at 4.3 percent per year (it will probably be higher, as more and more countries see the Chinese and Indian light, lit first in Holland and Britain) world income per head will rise by a factor of about eight and a half—750 percent. That is about what it has risen in the past 200 years. In fifty years, in other words, if tyrants and robbers and populists and socialists do not win, the businesslike blade of the hockey stick will eliminate the worst of human ignorance and poverty, the malaria-crippled, soldier-raped, zero-schooling life of the poorest among us. By the middle of the twenty-first century it will result in a big bang of world culture, with Africa in the twenty-second century leading all.

A rhetorical and ethical change caused the up-curve of the hockey stick in the seventeenth century and will transform the world in the twenty-first century. Without the change and the resulting material improvement, the politics would not have changed. If ordinary people had not started after 1848 benefitting from industrialization the politics would have turned even nastier than it in fact did. The various novel darknesses since 1848, such as communism or fascism, racism and nationalism, theorized imperialism and theorized eugenics, would have stopped the gain. They almost did, especially from 1914 to 1950. The darknesses came out of nineteenth-century theorizing about nationalism and socialism and race, with a hangover in large parts of the world down to 1991. And likewise for that matter the gain from 1848 to the present could have been stopped by any of the old darknesses—of royal tyranny or aristocratic presumption or peasantly envy or religious intolerance, or simply the reign of robbers into whose clutches we could have fallen. It always had.

Ideas and rhetoric mattered here, too. The uniquely European ideas of individual liberty, generalized from earlier bourgeois liberties as it might have been in other parts of the world but was not, could protect the material progress. Admittedly the ideas were double-edged, encouraging progressive redistributions that killed innovation (think again of Argentina), yet keeping social democratic countries from the chaos of revolution, too (think Germany).⁴⁶² But in any event the ethical and rhetorical change that around 1700 began to break the ancient trammels on innovation was liberating and it was Enlightened and it was liberal and it was successful. As one of its enemies put it:

Locke sank into a swoon;

The Garden died;

God took the spinning-jenny

Out of his side.⁴⁶³

Joel Mokyr has noted that Jews were not innovative in capitalism, especially in machines. They were he argues until their emancipation too devoted to honoring the past. "Inventions and scientific [and religious and political and marketing and literary and philosophical and sociological] breakthrough have a character of rebellion against cultural authority and the canon."  NNNN has made a similar point about the origins of the French Enlightenment in the debate between the ancients and the moderns. The cheekiness of imagining that one can indeed innovate is the connection between invention and (English) revolution, (Dutch) revolt, (German) reformation: it results in a revaluation of innovation, such as in the Age of Exploration or the Scientific Revolution or the Industrial Revolution.  Similar backward-looking conservativism explains the other, non-Jewish cases of successful merchants and financiers who also did not innovate: the Old Believers in Russia were good at commerce but not especially good at the mechanical invention necessary for an industrial revolution.  The "large amount of obedience and respect for tradition and the wisdom of the past generations" Mokyr observes in pre-haskala Judaism strikingly characterizes China in general, and would apply to overseas Chinese, too. "There are . . . prominent orthodox Jewish scientists, [but] their number has remained smaller than one would expect given the qualities of human capital involved in a Jewish orthodox education."  Against the capital-obsessed economists, education can be a conservative force. And as David Mitch has shown, early education for the masses was anyway not a big factor in productivity.

&Chapter 22:

The Rhetoric Was Necessary,

and Maybe Sufficient
We live, that is, by words as much as by bread. Such a claim is “weak” in the sense of not requiring much demonstration. It asserts merely what few would deny when reminded, though many forget—in the present case that an anti-bourgeois rhetoric, especially if combined with the logic of vested interests, has on many occasions damaged societies. Rhetoric against a bourgeois liberty, especially when backed by violence, prevented innovation in Silver Age Rome or Tokugawa Japan. It stopped growth in twentieth-century Argentina or Mao’s China. It suppressed speech in present-day Burma or Saudi Arabia. Such words-with-guns in 1750 would have stopped cold the modern world being born in Holland and England. In the twentieth century the bad rhetoric of nationalism and socialism did in fact stop its later development, locally, as in Italy or Russia. Nationalism and socialism can to this day reverse it, with the help of other rhetorics such as populism or environmentalism or religious fundamentalism, by way of politics.

Yes, the politics in the eighteenth century depended on material power, such as on the material freeing of many ordinary people from the idiocy of rural life. Yes, the imperial adventures of the Europeans depended on the military revolution—drilled firing of muskets and naval guns. One can grant material causes that much. But the politics also depended heavily on rhetoric, the very words and ideas, such as the widespread translation of Prince NNN’s of the Netherlands manual for drilling infantrymen in massed gunfire, and the widespread use of Italian plans for cannon-resistant fortifications.