Anatomy of an Economic Revolution

The Industrial Revolution resulted from a repudiation of the ancients—but not just the ancients. The “Great Enrichment” of the late 18th and 19th centuries was a fully “modern” rejection of the cultural inheritance of the Renaissance, to say nothing of the medieval synthesis. The product of cultural innovations in Western Europe, and particularly England and Scotland, a new and paradigmatic culture took form that would produce a global revolution. Human history had witnessed nothing like this cultural rupture that, in an epochal blink of an eye, rendered so much of the past irrelevant.