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The Origins of Capitalism and the "Rise of the West"
- Narrated by: John Skinner
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's summary
Eric Mielants provides a fresh, interdisciplinary interpretation of the origins of modernity in general and of capitalism in particular. He argues that, contrary to established thinking, the "Rise of the West" should not be examined through the lens of the Industrial Revolution or of the colonization of the New World but viewed through long-term developments that began in the Middle Ages. A fascinating overview of civilizations in East Asia, South Asia, and northwestern Africa is provided and then systematically compared to developments in Europe at the same time. Utilizing this analysis, the book addresses some of the most important current debates in world history, comparative sociology, political economy, sociological theory, and historical sociology. Mielants uncovers the ways that existing theories (such as Marxism, World-Systems Theory, and Smithian Modernization Theory) have suffered from either Eurocentric or limited temporal and spatial analyses, preventing them from fully explaining the reasons behind the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe.
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In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark advances a revolutionary, controversial, and long overdue idea: that Christianity and its related institutions are, in fact, directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium. In Stark's view, what has propelled the West is not the tension between secular and non-secular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason.
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Absolutely incredible history book!
- By Daniel on 01-02-20
By: Rodney Stark
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Empire of Cotton
- A Global History
- By: Sven Beckert
- Narrated by: Jim Frangione
- Length: 20 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially recast the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia. We see how industrial capitalism then reshaped these worlds of cotton into an empire, and how this empire transformed the world.
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A New History of Global Capitalism
- By Lucian of Samosata on 03-17-15
By: Sven Beckert
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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
- A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
- By: Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore
- Narrated by: Simon Mattacks
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism.
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A remarkable exposé & synthesis of the Ponzi scheme that capitalism is and always has been.
- By Scott on 02-10-18
By: Raj Patel, and others
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The Revenge of Geography
- What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world's hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands.
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Painful to listen to
- By Bookworm on 12-27-13
By: Robert D. Kaplan
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The World
- A Brief Introduction
- By: Richard Haass
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The World is designed to provide listeners of any age and experience with the essential background and building blocks they need to make sense of this complicated and interconnected world. It will empower them to manage the flood of daily news. Listeners will become more informed, discerning citizens, better able to arrive at sound, independent judgments. While it is impossible to predict what the next crisis will be or where it will originate, those who listen to The World will have what they need to understand its basics and the principal choices for how to respond.
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Excellent Primer for young adults
- By Howells on 05-24-20
By: Richard Haass
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Owning the Earth
- The Transforming History of Land Ownership
- By: Andro Linklater
- Narrated by: J. Paul Guimont
- Length: 17 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The history and evolution of land ownership is a fascinating chronicle in the history of civilization, offering unexpected insights about how various forms of democracy and capitalism developed, as well as a revealing analysis of a future where the Earth must sustain nine billion lives. Seen through the eyes of remarkable individuals - Chinese emperors; German peasants; the 17th century English surveyor William Petty, who first saw the connection between private property and free-market capitalism.
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Interesting
- By S. Olsen on 06-30-15
By: Andro Linklater
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A Concise History of Italy
- By: Christopher Duggan
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Since its formation in 1861, Italy has struggled to develop an effective political system and a secure sense of national identity. Christopher Duggan's acclaimed introduction charts the country's history from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West to the present day, and surveys the difficulties Italy has faced during the last two centuries in creating a unified country. Duggan successfully weaves together political, economic, social and cultural history, and stresses the alternation between materialist and idealist programs for forging a nation-state.
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Concise indeed
- By nikex on 03-22-21
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Blood and Money
- War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire
- By: David McNally
- Narrated by: Tim Getman
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In most accounts of the origins of money, we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money's origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money's emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war.
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Blood Money
- By Tyrone on 03-19-22
By: David McNally
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Seapower States
- Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict That Made the Modern World
- By: Andrew Lambert
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Andrew Lambert, author of The Challenge - winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal - turns his attention to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain, examining how their identities as "seapowers" informed their actions and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size. Lambert demonstrates how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these nations begin to decline.
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only got 1 hour or so through
- By fm2 on 01-14-19
By: Andrew Lambert
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A Brief History of the Future
- A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-first Century
- By: Jacques Attali
- Narrated by: Alan Robertson
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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What will planet Earth be like in 20 years? At mid-century? In the year 2100? Prescient and convincing, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future. Never has the world offered more promise for the future and been more fraught with dangers. In this powerful and sometimes terrifying work, Attali analyzes the past and pinpoints nine distinct periods of human history, each with its world center of power and prestige, and predicts what the tenth will bring by the end of this century.
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feels like a popular mechanics article
- By Robin on 07-11-17
By: Jacques Attali
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Empires of the Weak
- The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World
- By: J. C. Sharman
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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What accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? The conventional answer asserts that superior technology, tactics, and institutions forged by Darwinian military competition gave Europeans a decisive advantage in war from 1500 onward. Empires of the Weak argues that Europeans had no general military superiority in the early modern era. Sharman shows instead that European expansion is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default.
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Dull Revisionism
- By Alan Kane on 08-20-24
By: J. C. Sharman
What listeners say about The Origins of Capitalism and the "Rise of the West"
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Philo
- 06-10-15
A bit dry and academic; debunks common myths
If your taste runs to a dry and academic style (which fits fine here), and the topic seems interesting, you will find yourself rewarded. This did broaden and deepen and flesh out my impressions and views of the times and people covered, in Europe and Asia. The approach is a more modern one which openly addresses itself to various other historical schools, and employs an updated view of the development and big picture regional and global economies.
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- John Gathly
- 12-23-20
narrated by a robot. author is somewhat confused.
This isn't bad for a short introduction to different theories of the origins of capitalism. It does good overviews and is indeed short. However, the criticisms within miss out on something fairly critical in understanding the method and intention of the authors criticized. When Adam Smith or Karl Marx is not covering the wide variations of pre-modern development, and every single conceivable case involving the roots that later developed into capitalism, it is not because they didn't know they existed or missed them in their analysis. They are deliberately omitted because the authors have a specific goal in their texts, which are polemical. They are modeling the outlines of a process over time to highlight certain key elements of that process and to create a model.
These systems are made up of people and regions that have differences, but the goal is to simplify that as much as possible to show the general trends. Adam Smith is trying to show the model the system as a bunch of buyers and sellers in a market. They clearly had other roles, purposes, tasks and obligations within the political economy of the day, but he's trying to model why a mercantile system of protectionist tariffs actually leads to worse outcomes for people in all countries than allowing different nations to do whatever they did best and compete globally to get the best and cheapest products for all. Anything outside of that polemic are not relevant to his analysis, so they are left out.
Marx is taking Adam Smith (and David Ricardo and others) and using their analysis of the 'everyone is a buyer and seller' model to refocus his analysis on the role of production, and the relationships there, and how the production of commodities is the basis of the capitalist mode of production, and working out from there. His modeling of the pre-capitalist period is trying to trace how it gets to that point, commodity production dictating everything else, and thus uses broad strokes of feudal development to show the general trend. He's also using the same models of previous authors of political economy like Adam Smith as a beginning to trace what they get right and wrong, so is also bound to the limits of their models in his own. He's not setting out to write a history of all variations that may have occurred earlier than most others, or to explore how actually there were some pre-capitalist regions that were slightly ahead of others in the forms of pre-capitalist development. The same is true of Brenner's peasantry arguments and world systems theory. These are simplified models of development, not histories.
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- Edward Baiamonte
- 07-18-18
Can’t say i learned a thing from this book
Capitalism is a thoughtful philosophy. The men and ideas that originated this philosophy were not mentioned nor were historical forces and events that freed men to conduct voluntary economic exchanges.Instead you find 100’s of actives all over the world at many times that are very vague and not organized in any systematic way that i could discern leaving me with nothing to take away.Maybe in some extreme academic circles somewhere there would be something relevant in this book.
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