Ocidente Versus Oriente

Timur Kuran critica o novo livro de Ian Morris, Why the West Rules, e corretamente remarca que:
By itself, of course, the lucky geography of the West and the resources it generated through global exploration cannot explain the explosive growth of modern times. Morris' index has the East ahead of the West until the eve of the Industrial Revolution. But for centuries, Europe had been building a new type of economic infrastructure, based on impersonal exchange and a commercial life dominated by large, durable, and structurally complex profit-making enterprises. Those are the developments that fueled Europe's global exploration in the first place and prepared the ground for the Industrial Revolution. They also set the stage for the West's colonial empires. In fact, the roots of the West's economic modernization stretch back to the beginning of the second millennium, when, according to Morris' development index, China under the Song dynasty led the world. It is then that Italian families in the West started forming private medieval "supercompanies," or firms that pooled the resources for dozens of investors over generations, to conduct finance and trade. These enterprises enabled private capital pooling and accumulation on an unprecedented scale.
As they grew, these supercompanies faced coordination, communication, and enforcement problems, which induced experimentation with ever more complex organizational structures and business techniques. By the sixteenth century, profit-making European enterprises were already using a corporate form of organization. Comparably complex private enterprises could be found nowhere else, not even in the rest of what Morris defines as the West. Thus, by the time Europe started benefiting from the resources of its colonies and its own conveniently located coal deposits, it already had the economic infrastructure necessary for mass production, industrialization, and mass transportation. Geographic advantages were not enough to propel Europe forward; the institutions invented in the West were necessary to exploit those advantages