What Caused Capitalism? - Foreign Affairs
Once upon a time, smart people thought the world was flat. For a while, it seemed as if the West’s political and economic ways really had won out. The economic shock of 2008, the United States’ political paralysis, Europe’s financial quagmires, the dashed dreams of the Arab Spring, and the specter of competition from illiberal capitalist countries such as China have doused enthusiasm about... Even the erstwhile booster Francis Fukuyama has seen the dark, warning in his recent two-volume history of political order that the future may not lie with the places that brought the world liberalism and democracy in the past. So does a map produced in 2012 by the McKinsey Global Institute , which plots the movement of the world’s economic center of gravity out of China in the year 1, barely reaching Greenland by 1950 (the closest it ever got to New York), and now... Chances are, if a historian’s narrative of the European miracle and the rise of capitalism is upbeat, the prognosis for the West will be good, whereas if the tale is not so triumphal, the forecast will be more ominous. A recent spate of books about the history of global capitalism gives readers the spectrum. Source: www.foreignaffairs.com
