"In Volume 3 of Capital Marx had described Venice and Genoa as urban republics where the merchants ‘subordinated the state more securely to themselves’, and implicit in some combination of Ruthven’s argument with my own is the further crucial thesis that this singularly failed to happen anywhere in the Islamic world. This ties in with a second and to me even more self-evident explanation , which is the one Mielants proposes in his book The Origins of Capitalism and the “Rise of the West” , namely, that the failure of commercial capitalism in the Islamic world was essentially a failure of mercantilism. It is a striking fact that there was never any Islamic counterpart of the West’s violent mercantilist expansion. Again, the decisive factor here is the very different ways in which commercial capital and the state were linked to each other. The powerful state backing that English merchants received from the monarchy, what Brenner calls the ‘Crown-company partnership’,...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51