How the West Came to Rule offers a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. It argues that contrary to dominant wisdom, capitalism's origins should not be understood as a development confined to the geographically and culturally sealed borders of Europe, but the outcome of a wider array of global processes in which non-European societies played a decisive role. Through an outline of the uneven histories of Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the colonies, and bourgeois revolutions,...