Slavery, Freedom and Business Endeavor: The Reforging of Western Civilization and the Transformation of Everyday Life

In: Palgrave Debates in Business History Series

Abstract

Intro -- Foreword -- Preface: The West and the Nature of Its Civilization -- Acknowledgments -- Praise for Slavery, Freedom and Business Endeavor -- Contents -- About the Author -- Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- 1 Introduction: Civilization and Lived Experience -- What Is Modern Western Civilization? -- 1850 and the Dawn of a New Civilization -- Not Only Economics, but Also Freedom -- Not Only Freedom, but Also State Power -- Escaping Humanity's Eternal Curse-The "Malthusian Trap" -- The Winter of Western Civilization? -- Part I The Quests that Created a New Western Civilization (and Destroyed Others): Crops, Climate, Calories -- 2 The 3-Cs: Crops, Climate, Calories -- 3 Crops and the Shaping of Civilizations -- Wheat -- Rice -- Corn -- 4 Climate: The Destroyer of Civilizations, and How Early Modern Europe Rose from Catastrophe -- The North Atlantic and El Niño-Southern Oscillations -- The Maya: A Civilization in a Terminal Malthusian Trap -- Europe: Climate and Transformative Malthusian Traps, AD 350-1500 -- The Rise of Early Modern Europe: Another Trap? -- 5 The Eternal Challenge: Calorific Expenditure and the Emergence of an Industrialized Civilization -- Slavery, Agriculture, Industry and Capital Intensity -- Transport and the Suffocation of Markets -- Energy, Iron and Escaping the Malthusian Trap -- More Than "Modernization" -- Part II Freedom, Slavery and the Rise of an Industrialized Western Civilization -- 6 Time, Scale and Understandings of Western Civilization -- 7 What Is Freedom? What Is Slavery? -- What Is Freedom? -- What Is Slavery? -- 8 Freedom, Democracy and Individualism: Cause of Business Success or Mere Correlation? -- Greek and Roman Antiquity: Bounded Individualism, Bounded Freedom -- The Premodern West: Individualism as Agent of State Absolutism-Scholarly and Aristocratic Individualism.