The Great Enrichment Was Built on Ideas, Not Capital

The modern world was made not by material causes, such as coal or thrift or capital or exports or exploitation or imperialism or good property rights or even good science. It was made by ideas from and about the bourgeoisie - by an explosion after 1800 in technical ideas and a few institutional concepts, backed by a massive ideological shift toward market-tested betterment, on a large scale at first peculiar to northwestern Europe.