According to the standard narrative, Europe’s rise was driven by superior institutions, rational governance, and scientific advancement. Wealth, power, and modernity are seen as the natural outcomes of internal European virtues—innovation, efficiency, and discipline. Implicitly or explicitly, social sciences – economics included – are built on these foundations.
Yet this account is misleading—not because it is entirely false, but because it omits too much.
It leaves out the institutional machinery that made conquest and exploitation economically viable. It ignores the ideological work that redefined violence as civilization and plunder as progress. And most crucially, it forgets that economics itself was born within this imperial context—emerging to make sense of, and legitimize, the transformation of European society under capitalism, colonization, and industrial war. As Geoffrey Hodgson argues, when economics cast off its historical roots in favor of timeless models and universal laws, it also forgot the very conditions that produced it.
What followed was a science unmoored from its origins—projecting European historical experience as a universal template. As Timothy Mitchell puts it:
“The possibility of social science is based upon taking certain historical experiences of the West as the template for a universal knowledge.”
This essay is an invitation to reconsider that template. We will examine how conquest was made profitable, how its moral costs were abstracted away, and how a discipline meant to understand human welfare became complicit in its erosion. By recovering the history of the origins of economics, we may begin to imagine a morally grounded, globally relevant economics.
Section 2: Wealth as a Moral Goal — The Enlightenment Turn
Today’s economic discourse often treats the pursuit of wealth as self-evident, a natural expression of human behavior. But this framing is historically contingent. It emerged during the Enlightenment, when European thinkers sought to redefine the foundations of morality in a secular age. What replaced religion was not amorality, but a new moral logic—one that recast wealth, utility, and efficiency as virtuous ends in themselves.
The book’s argument is that in straining to peer through the chaos and confusion of the world to the underlying mechanisms, too much economic thinking, both in Ricardo’s day and ours, mistook a small, unrepresentative sample as the whole picture. This has distorted the vision of generations. If your scientific ideal is a simple, logical model, there is a tendency to focus on those parts of reality that are more regular or can be easily counted. The awkward aspects more difficult to capture in formal laws or mathematics the fact that humans are a diverse group of emotional and social primates, for example, or the natural, political, and legal contexts in which markets are born and function— tend to get filtered out, set apart, and eventually forgotten. One physicist-turned-financial modeller, Emanuel Derman, has compared the process of creating a model to forcing the ugly sisters’ feet into Cinderella’s glass slipper by cutting off the toes or heel (as in early versions of the tale). Whatever does not make it into the elegant slipper often disappears in the mind’s eye and some begin to say it never existed at all …
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