"This is a successor work to Why the West Rules for Now, in which Morris once again advances an ambitious account of how certain 'brute material forces' limit and help determine the 'culture, values, and beliefs,' including the moral codes, that humans have adopted over the last 20,000 years....

1. Introduction / Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara -- 2. Labour-intensive industrialization in global history : an interpretation of East Asian experiences / Kaoru Sugihara -- 3. The industrious revolutions in East and West / Jan de Vries -- 4. Proto-industrialization and labour-intensive...