The Genius of Western Civilization, Part 5: How the West Got Rich (It Wasn’t Through Slavery)

This 43-minute video is Part 5 of the New Culture Forum’s landmark six-part documentary series exploring the history, achievements and genius of Western civilization. Inspired by legendary TV programs such as Civilisation, Kenneth Clark’s 1969 masterpiece, The West is a bold reminder of who we are — and why our culture is worth defending.

Beginning with the age of exploration, this episode plunges into the West’s tumultuous and at times traumatic expansion out of Europe. From the accidental discovery of the Americas to the British Empire’s ending of the slave trade, Marc Sidwell offers a nuanced account of the West’s imperial and colonial phase. He also demolishes the persistent myth that slavery and plunder made the West rich, revealing instead the real answer: economic growth powered by industrial capitalism.

Editor’s Note: A transcript follows the embedded video; it was automatically generated and lightly edited, so please be aware there could be typos or other small errors. The Stream is working toward a transcription service that does fast, accurate, and reliable work; thank you in advance for your patience!

00;00;00;04 – 00;00;23;17
Konstantin Kisin
I think we’ve come to a position where for some reason, we’ve elevated victimhood, and we’ve, we’ve taken away and did denigrate to terrorism coverage and all of these positive virtues, and we’ve made victimhood a virtue. And so now, there is the desire to position the West as the evil oppressors and position everybody else as the victims of our oppression.

00;00;23;17 – 00;00;25;19
Konstantin Kisin
And so I think that’s kind of how we’ve got here.

00;00;25;21 – 00;00;50;04
Andrew Klavan
This is the first time in my lifetime I’ve ever been so sincerely concerned for the West, because for for now, the U.S. remains the kind of leader of this idea of the West, and it has been attacked from within by a unified idea that has taken over our arts, our media. Our corporations, and now our government.

00;00;50;06 – 00;00;59;25
Nigel Biggar
There was racism. There was also, respect and admiration and fascination and and also, let’s be clear, racism was never invented by whites.

00;00;59;28 – 00;01;24;03
Samuel Gregg
Once you are detached from your roots, once you are told that your past, your history is one big exercise in oppression and even evil. Then your sense of who you are as a, as a part of, or a significant member of a particular type of culture starts to disintegrate and that, I think, is the threat that the West faced today.

00;01;24;05 – 00;01;49;04
Marc Sidwell
The West is under attack. We live in the freest, healthiest and wealthiest societies in human history. Yet as authoritarian and oppressive regimes threaten us from with and a new movement within tells us to feel nothing but shame for who we are.

00;01;49;07 – 00;02;29;06
Nigel Biggar
I have been dismayed and alarmed at the, at the rapidity with which, the leaders of our culture institutions, whether they whether they universities or museums or schools, have, picked up and reproduced and, and and broadcast, very negative views of contemporary Britain as being systemically racist, and Britain’s, 300 year, colonial imperial history as being a litany of racism and exploitation and oppression.

00;02;29;08 – 00;02;44;18
Nigel Biggar
I can only explain the susceptibility of our elites to these views. As I was born of ignorance. There’s there’s more than that. I think it’s there’s also a an odd willingness to believe the worst about ourselves.

00;02;44;20 – 00;03;10;27
Samuel Gregg
This West is a civilization. And that is not just significant for itself. It’s significant for humanity as a whole. Now, I happen to think that if Western civilization has lost sight of or if it morphs into something that’s a type of distortion of what it’s meant to be, it’s not just Western societies that will lose out, it will be humanity as a whole.

00;03;11;05 – 00;03;50;18
George Weigel
It’s the West that has now created the possibility that no one in this planet has to be hungry. If there’s hunger in the world today, it’s because of stupid governments, not because of resources.

The Green Revolution is a product of the West. People can live long and fulfilled lives through the development of modern medicine and medical technology. That’s the acheivement of the West. So those are things worth lifting up, and understanding for the noble achievements they are — and then understanding why it was that these things came out of the Western world and not someplace else.

00;03;50;20 – 00;04;28;29
Marc Sidwell
Well, welcome to the West. This is my take on the great and still unfolding adventure of who we are and why it matters. This is a history of how our extraordinary, unconventional civilization came to be, and why it must be defended. It’s a fascinating and often unexpected journey, stretching back 15 centuries to the shores of the flood.

00;04;29;02 – 00;05;04;14
Marc Sidwell
Wall. The first Westerners were primitive barbarian tribes. In time, Christianity and the power of law produced an open and innovative culture like nowhere else. Now our epic journey continues as the West enters a new phase. Economic growth was the greatest discovery the West has ever made. But first came the Age of Exploration as the West expanded out of Europe with consequences that would shake the world.

00;05;04;16 – 00;05;29;11
Marc Sidwell
On the 29th of May, 1453, the last of the Roman Empire fell. The eastern Byzantine Empire had persisted, ruled from its capital, Constantinople, for nearly a thousand years after the fall of Rome. Here in the West, like other great empires, it was far more brilliantly civilized than the West, but it also lacked the West’s distributed authority, freedom and inventiveness.

00;05;29;13 – 00;05;58;06
Marc Sidwell
In the East, clocks and even pipe organs were banned from churches by the time it fell to Ottoman forces, the empire was in decline. The loss of Constantinople presented a huge threat to the West. The Islamic Empire of the Ottomans was now poised to expand into Eastern Europe. The Ottomans would be at the gates of Vienna by 1529, and would not be decisively held back there until the 12th of September 1683.

00;05;58;08 – 00;06;27;11
Marc Sidwell
Trade was also hit hard. Black sea routes were cut off or reduced, and goods from the Indies, especially spices, were expensive and hard to get. There was another grim side effect. Western Christianity frowned on the enslavement of Christians, but Italian traders had maintained a small but steady trade in pagan slaves shipped across the Black Sea from Crimea. The Ottomans had no objection to slavery.

00;06;27;13 – 00;07;10;16
Marc Sidwell
Their imperial system was built on it, but when they cut off the West’s access to the Black Sea, they also ended its trade in Caucasian slaves. And as the West started to look for new and uncharted trade routes to the Indies from Spain, Portugal and Britain, the slaves came to.

00;07;10;18 – 00;07;35;20
Marc Sidwell
The first new world the West discovered was not in the Americas, but Africa. And the man who did most to reveal its secrets and opened the way to more ambitious ventures was Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal. He dreamed of two things a new route to trade with the Indies, perhaps even cutting across Africa by river, which he thought might be possible, and establishing contact with the legendary kingdom of Prester John.

00;07;35;23 – 00;08;07;23
Marc Sidwell
This immensely wealthy and powerful Christian land didn’t exist, but was believed by many to be waiting somewhere over the horizon. Prester John the Hope walls would join forces against the infidels now threatening and encircling Christian Europe. It was a revolution funded by princes, but the driving force behind it was the ambition and mission of ordinary seafarers, as they sought to map and voyage their way into history.

00;08;07;26 – 00;08;38;16
Emma Webb
And that interest is usually portrayed now as being sort of instrumentalized against the local populations. And it gets described, to use Edward Saeed’s term is as orientalist, because maybe they didn’t fully understand what they were looking at. Or perhaps, it was some of those early interactions were regarded as being insensitive or disrespectful, but I think the motivations of the people involved, for the most part, when you actually look at at their particular stories, was just curiosity.

00;08;38;16 – 00;08;59;27
Emma Webb
And it’s that curiosity that has created so many of the wonderful, things that we enjoy today, whether it’s cultural or whether it’s, you know, all sorts of different things. I think that, that, that curiosity is, is in many ways the foundation of the Western spirit.

00;08;59;29 – 00;09;30;01
Marc Sidwell
What that meant in practice was a series of expeditions that pushed down the West African coast. By the 1440s, Henry ships had passed the Sahara, establishing a new trade route that cut out the established overland passage used by the Arabs. Slaves came with it, some captured but mostly purchased from the well-established Arab trade. In African models, it looks easy enough on a map, but this was a remarkable technical feat and it relied on new technology.

00;09;30;03 – 00;10;01;08
Marc Sidwell
The Portuguese devised a new kind of ship light and nimble, the caravel with Latin sails, the attack against the wind. It was highly maneuverable. The voyages of discovery also relied on shipboard technology, especially the magnetic compass that was a Chinese invention inherited in the West around the 11th century and then improved. One tradition has it that the enclosed sailor’s compass used in the West, with directions marked on a rose, was perfected by an Italian, Flavio Gioia.

00;10;01;11 – 00;10;10;10
Marc Sidwell
The West amazing clocks, however, didn’t work on board ship yet the first explorers had to rely on hourglasses to track the passing of time.

00;10;10;12 – 00;10;36;16
Lawrence Mead
What’s special about the West is the capacity to sublimate goals, to take something that is initially outside yourself and bring it into your own psychology, such that it becomes a goal that you personally pursue. It becomes part of you in the world is made somewhat more like the vision that you have in your head. And that’s why in the book I have a painting, a famous painting by, J.M.W. Turner.

00;10;36;18 – 00;10;57;15
Lawrence Mead
It’s a great painting of, some people in a ferry crossing a harbor in the Netherlands. And they’re, they’re looking up, seeking the sun at, seeking for the sun. But the sun is behind a cloud, okay? They can’t immediately achieve that, but by God, they’re going to work on it, you know? And eventually they will find the sun and the sun will.

00;10;57;18 – 00;11;09;21
Lawrence Mead
And then their own personal vision will correspond with what they see outwardly. And that’s the great with Western quest to have the outside world correspond the vision I have in my head.

00;11;09;24 – 00;11;40;03
Marc Sidwell
On an island off the coast of Ghana. The West’s expansion into new territory truly began here in 1482 ten years before Christopher Columbus sailed. The Portuguese built the Castle of Saint George of the mine, the first European building south of the Sahara, and a trading post for gold.

00;11;40;05 – 00;12;21;16
Marc Sidwell
15 years later, in 1497, the Portuguese explorers achieved their original goal. Vasco da Gama embarked on a pioneering voyage around Africa and on to India to Gama. Left with four ships, but just two sailed into the harbor of Calicut. The locals robbed him blind, selling him poor quality goods. It mocked up prices. The ginger was loaded with red clay. The cinnamon was of the lowest grade. But when the Gama’s ships returned to Portugal with just 60 men left from the 170 who originally embarked his cargo of spices sold for about 60 times the cost of his entire two year expedition.

00;12;21;18 – 00;12;45;25
Marc Sidwell
But it would be a mistake to see the riches to be made from such voyages as the only motive. There was also a characteristically Western passion for a heroic, dangerous enterprise that pushed into the unknown. And because Westerners have always been pilgrims as well as heroes, there was also a sincere Christian motive, both for Henry the Navigator, dreaming of Prester John, and for Christopher Columbus, as well.

00;12;45;27 – 00;13;11;02
Lawrence Mead
The Western Way is not about survival. It’s about something more ambitious. Americans say “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Well, that’s a lot more ambitious than survival. And I don’t want to give that up. I want there to be the same audacity that Western culture has shown historically, where people undertake difficult tasks that are long term. And when they achieve that, they also change the world.

00;13;11;05 – 00;13;48;28
Marc Sidwell
Columbus’s plan was simple and wrong. Forget about going around Africa, he said. Why not sail straight to Japan and China, across the ocean. He called it the enterprise of the Indies. And people really did laugh at him, not because anyone disagreed about the world being round, but because Columbus thought it was so small. The experts were quite right, and in a more civilized or centralized society, Columbus’s overoptimistic sums would never have found a sponsor. But this was the West, and his wild and impossible plan sailed under Spanish backing in 1492.

00;13;49;00 – 00;14;26;10
Marc Sidwell
Three ships set out to would make it back every sunset on the voyage. The crew of each ship gathered on deck. They recited the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, and made a declaration of faith. Then they sang after their own fashion. Salve Regina, a prayer to Mary, the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven. “To you we cry, you poor banished children of Eve.” And well, they might. They were sailing off the maps and into an unknown future.

00;14;26;12 – 00;14;41;18
Marc Sidwell
Of course we know now what happened. Columbus was wildly wrong about how fast he could sail direct to the Indies, but there was a vast double continent in the way the Americas, and he ran straight into it.

00;14;41;20 – 00;15;10;18
Marc Sidwell
The discovery of the New World in the Americas and the West’s new trade routes to Asia, around Africa were both extraordinary disruptions. The world and the West had never been entirely separated, but from now on, contact was unavoidable, and something even more dangerous emerged outside the confines of Europe. What had never really been possible on a large scale in the cradle of the West quickly became inevitable.

00;15;10;21 – 00;15;43;21
Marc Sidwell
Even small European nations began to form their own empires. The West for a thousand years, a civilization to fractured, for imperial control appeared to be turning back, like all civilizations before it, between an older and crueler path. And armed with the astonishing technology of the West, no one could stand in its way. The story of Western colonialism is a long one and often unedifying.

00;15;43;21 – 00;16;15;01
Marc Sidwell
From the start, there were also concerns and protests at its cruelties, notably from the Catholic Church and its priests, and sometimes from the monarchs involved as well. In 1495, Ferdinand and Isabella halted the sale of a group of Native American slaves, brought to their kingdom by Columbus, to determine if they could be sold with a clear conscience. Five years later, they decided the Indians of the New World were their subjects, potential Christians, and not to be enslaved.

00;16;15;03 – 00;16;49;25
Marc Sidwell
But history had other ideas. Across the New World. Millions of natives died quite by accident, as Eurasian diseases proved fatal to much of the indigenous population, and in their stead, the new empires of the West turned to the established slave markets of Africa and began to ship black slaves to the Americas. Gang slavery of a kind, long extinct in Europe and made more vicious by its increasingly racialized justification, would flourish for centuries.

00;16;49;28 – 00;17;04;17
Marc Sidwell
And yet the West retained its capacity to astonish. Its overseas empires were often appallingly cruel. No surprise there. But that wasn’t all they had to offer.

00;17;04;19 – 00;17;45;05
Nigel Biggar
The motives that led to the creation of empire were various. Yes, there were commercial motives. It was about trade. It was also about, immigrants fleeing famine in Scotland and Ireland looking for a better life. It was about, non-conformists, traveling across the Atlantic, to escape religious persecution. Later on, it was about, missionaries, humanitarians, wanting to suppress slavery and the slave trade. In 1945, the Empire — the whole the empire was involved in the war against Hitler.

00;17;45;05 – 00;18;04;00
Andrew Klavan
It was about, fending off, a massively murderous, racist Nazi state. So it. No, there was no — it wasn’t about one thing. And so I really — if ever you hear some talk about the colonial project, be skeptical.

00;18;04;03 – 00;18;25;24
Nile Gardiner
The British Empire dominated the world for over 300 years, and it was, in my view, a great force for good. And and we should celebrate its achievements. We should debate its failures and where it went wrong. But we should celebrate the achievements of the British Empire, including the defeat of slavery, for example.

00;18;25;24 – 00;18;49;22
Konstantin Kisin
We have this conversation about whether slavery should be taught in schools and so on. And my answer to that is yes. The problem is we don’t teach about slavery in schools. What we teach about is the transatlantic slave trade. And, this way of looking at the world is quite silly to me. It’s sort of like evaluating whether a sprinter is fast or slow without comparing them to anybody else.

00;18;49;25 – 00;19;10;17
Konstantin Kisin
You can’t do it. You have to understand what was happening everywhere else at the same time. And I talk about my own family history of being slaves in Russia. I talk about what was happening in my country, what was happening in Africa when the evil Western colonialists arrived. And by the way, the transatlantic slave trade was absolutely evil by the standards of the modern day.

00;19;10;20 – 00;19;34;22
Konstantin Kisin
But it wasn’t as bad as the, the trans Saharan slave trade, which was conducted mainly by Muslim and Arab traders. It didn’t last as long, didn’t take as many lives, didn’t have such a high death rate. And slavery was continued continually practiced around the world much later and only ended, by the way, thanks to the Western colonial powers putting a lot of effort and a lot of money into it.

00;19;34;24 – 00;20;04;16
Konstantin Kisin
Does that excuse the transatlantic slave trade? Of course not. But it gives you the context to understand that the Western powers are and remain some of the most progressive, tolerant societies that have ever been created. And our crimes — which are many, there is no doubt they are many — should be seen in the context of that — in the context of the fact that other great civilizations and empires around the world were doing the exact same things, and worse, at the same time. And we ended it. We stopped it.

00;20;04;22 – 00;20;21;22
Nigel Biggar
The British Empire was committed to abolishing slave trade and slavery all over the world from Brazil through Africa, Egypt, India, Malaysia and elsewhere for 150 years. That’s a big commitment and it cost.

00;20;21;24 – 00;20;37;08
Marc Sidwell
The end of slavery remains the greatest moral achievement of the West. It was a popular movement driven by individuals like William Wilberforce, but it only succeeded with the wealth and military backing of the British Empire.

00;20;37;11 – 00;21;35;05
Nigel Biggar
At a certain point in about 1830s, it’s reckoned that 13% of the total manpower of the Royal Navy was committed to patrolling the west coast of Africa to stop slave trading. And that, was a major expense. Someone, I think David Eltis, has calculated that, in about 50 years, from about 1806 to 56, thereabouts, the British spent as much suppressing the slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade alone as they had won in profits in the 50 years before abolition. And then two American international relations experts, Heim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, have looked at the cost of, abolition — the Atlantic trade abolition alone — and

00;21;35;07 – 00;21;45;00
Nigel Biggar
concluded that that represents one of the most costly international humanitarian debs in the history, in modern history.

00;21;45;02 – 00;22;17;11
Marc Sidwell
In 1840, the British went to Constantinople to try to persuade the Ottomans to end their own long established trade in slaves. We were met, in the words of our ambassador, with extreme astonishment and a smile, but the proposition of destroying an institute so closely interwoven with the frame of society. Not so long before, the West would have agreed. But where the Ottoman view had remained static, ours hadn’t.

00;22;17;13 – 00;22;52;20
Marc Sidwell
Now we were determined to change the world, and within 20 years the Ottomans were forced to bend to Western demands, banning both the Black Sea and African slave trades. Ironically, the West’s new moral mission would also help drive the scramble for Africa at the end of the 19th century. How else to root out the inhuman interior trade, which had been oppressing men and women across the continent since before the first caravel rounded Cape Bordeaux in 1434?

00;22;52;22 – 00;23;25;21
Zoe Strimpel
If every time you refer to a history, you’re told that you or the history is racist. I mean, that’s an incredibly monochromatic sort of narrowing down way to look at things. And that’s literally what’s happening now, especially in America. So the history is being winnowed down to one lens. I’m not saying that slavery is a small thing, or even that it shouldn’t be a heuristic, but to have everything reduced to the question of racism or not racist, you know, imposing contemporary morality on the past.

00;23;25;24 – 00;23;34;21
Nigel Biggar
It’s such a shame of, you know, it’s such a mockery, really, of what history — of the attitude we should have when we look with curiosity at the past.

00;23;34;22 – 00;24;04;07
John O’Sullivan
I think we have to challenge, the arguments that are made increasingly, which attempt to portray, the freest and most prosperous societies in the world as hell holes of oppression and poverty. These are absurd. And we ought to have — we not only have a kind of moral obligation, but we ought to feel a natural indignation.

00;24;04;10 – 00;24;30;14
John O’Sullivan
When these libels — these libels are against us, of course, but they’re also against our parents and grandparents. They’re saying that — the woke people are in a sense arguing that the people who lived in these islands, for the last, particularly in the modern era, have been monsters who preyed on the world. That is an utter absurdity.

00;24;30;17 – 00;24;54;19
Marc Sidwell
The West’s imperial history deserves better than the self-serving or self-lacerating versions we have told ourselves. Both are too simple. But in recent years, one myth above all others has distorted the debate and obscured the West’s greatest discovery of all. What is that myth? Well, it’s the belief that its empires made the West rich.

00;24;54;21 – 00;25;27;24
Nigel Biggar
The claim is often made that the riches, the west is rich, because of its exploitation of resources and people elsewhere in the world. Let’s just stick to the case of of slavery. That claim was made famously by, the Trinidadian academic Eric Williams in 1940, in his book Capitalism and Slavery — the claim that Britain’s industrial wealth was, derived from from the backs of African slaves in the West Indies.

00;25;27;27 – 00;26;00;04
Nigel Biggar
The consensus among economic historians of British colonialism and among historians of slavery is that this thesis has been widely discredited. And I’m there quoting David Brion Davis, the doyen of, American historians of abolition slavery. He said that in 2010. Yes, it is true that slavery and the slave trade made a contribution to the British economy.

00;26;00;06 – 00;26;19;22
Nigel Biggar
But the contribution it made was was never a driving force behind industrialization. There were a number of other important factors. So it made a contribution. But to say that the wealth and prosperity of industrial and post-industrial Britain was built on slavery is false.

00;26;19;24 – 00;26;37;05
James Bartholomew
Britain has lost its colonies. America hasn’t got any colonies to speak of. And they both become richer and richer and richer. So I don’t see how on earth you can claim it’s through exploitation of — certainly not of third world countries.

00;26;37;07 – 00;26;58;00
Marc Sidwell
Plunder and slavery were not what generated the West’s wealth. The reality is very different. The West grew astonishingly rich thanks to economic growth, a discovery that took the form of one of the most shattering and liberating transitions in human history: The Industrial Revolution.

00;26;58;02 – 00;27;28;10
James Bartholomew
The transformation of wealth that took place in the 19th century was incredible and far better off. I mean, people were in rags. They literally had famines. If you go back far enough, you have people eating bark in London to try and survive and dying of starvation. This is not there’s not some country idyllic, you know, Paradise that we’re comparing with. What you’re comparing with people working everyday long hours, winter and summer with one set of clothes and, you know, just horrible lives.

00;27;28;10 – 00;27;43;05
James Bartholomew
So I think it’s incontestable to anybody who seriously looks at the figures that life was far better by the end of the 19th century, and industrialization and agriculture revolution transformed for the better the lives of millions of people.

00;27;43;07 – 00;28;14;08
Nigel Biggar
There was the claim made, by Marxist Indian nationalists, and it’s been made since about 1900 that, Britain drained the wealth of India. So there’s this statistic that Shashi Tharoor, the Indian politician, likes to quote that in 1800 India commanded 25% of all global wealth. By 1900, it was it was sort of 2 to 4%.

00;28;14;10 – 00;28;54;15
Nigel Biggar
And this shows that the British drained India. Well, the I mean, Shashi Tharoor was not an economic historian. Tirthankar Roy, Bengali born, LSE based now, is an economic historian. And he says that this is a nonsense. Exactly the same happened to China during the same period. China was not colonized. What had happened, what had happened was simply that the economic power of European economies increased 4 to 6 fold in that period.

So relatively, India was less well off. But it wasn’t that the British drained wealth from India.

00;28;54;18 – 00;29;31;25
Marc Sidwell
The structures of the early industrial Revolution can seem humble and unsophisticated to us now. It was another moment when the West was able to innovate by preferring the roughness of innovation to a tradition of civilized refinement. This bridge, built in 1779, is hardly dainty, but it is also the very first of its kind a bridge of iron. Across the gorge in Coalbrookdale, Abraham Darby had developed new techniques in smelting that made the mass production of cast iron possible.

00;29;31;27 – 00;29;54;28
Marc Sidwell
As the local economy boomed, the new materials suggested a way to build a river crossing to get goods quickly and safely from one side to the other, a model that would soon inspire far grander constructions. This old flax mill, built a couple of decades later, 20 miles down the road in Ditherington, also seems unremarkable, but is even more extraordinary.

00;29;55;00 – 00;30;26;25
Marc Sidwell
The world’s first iron framed building, a total revolution in building technique. It was fireproof and allowed a more open floor plan for workers and machinery, but architects soon realized it would also allow buildings to reach unprecedented heights. This is the grand parent of the modern skyscraper. Early industrial sites could be grim, full of smoke and furnaces, and with conditions for workers in the new mills and factories that shock us now.

00;30;26;28 – 00;30;58;28
Marc Sidwell
When Robert Burns visited the Great Carron Ironworks, he scratched a poem on a window in a local pub, comparing it to hell. William Blake too, wrote of England’s dark satanic mills, but the poets did not see the whole story. This behind me here is the old clock tower of the Carron Works. The original firm closed in the 1980s, but its legacy continues in the firm Carron Phoenix, which makes kitchens, sinks, and taps.

00;30;59;01 – 00;31;40;00
Marc Sidwell
Centuries earlier, Carron became one of the greatest ironworks in Europe, producing everyday items that made ordinary people’s lives better, healthier and more comfortable. Humble items like cast iron frying pans, the Carron bathtub, stoves — Ben Franklin apparently left them a stove design when he visited. Both Britain’s pillar boxes and our iconic red telephone box, were made right here. But what first made the Carron works name were guns, like the ones that are kept on display underneath the clocktower here, dusty and half forgotten now.

00;31;40;03 – 00;32;04;28
Marc Sidwell
But in 1805, Carronade guns made here helped save the West at the Battle of Trafalgar. Two long cannons behind me here actually were used in the great Battle of Waterloo. The success of the Carron Works took a long period of trial and error. The owners were inspired by the innovations of Coalbrookdale, but their early cast iron was poor quality and their cannons were erratic at best.

00;32;05;06 – 00;32;45;13
Marc Sidwell
In 1773, the Royal Navy removed every Carron gun it had from service. But the company experimented and improved, picking up a new invention, a machine that bored cannons from solid metal. By 1776, the Carron Works had begun to master this revolutionary firearm, and three decades later, at the Battle of Trafalgar, it was a salvo from two aid Carronade guns aboard HMS Victory that helped to win the day. Later on, Carron guns would also be used by American forces against the British in the War of 1812.

00;32;45;16 – 00;33;19;11
James Bartholomew
The real source of wealth through capitalism is through the incentive to produce the best possible object at the cheapest possible price — or service. And that’s where the productivity comes from. And going back to the agricultural revolution, who used to have a field it would take, say, 30 people to harvest over a week. Now it takes one person to harvest with a combine harvester and so you got these — the cost of the labor has gone down hugely.

00;33;19;14 – 00;33;43;09
James Bartholomew
It’s gone down. You know, it’s literally 1/30 of what it was. Food becomes cheaper. That means everybody who consumes food — and that is everybody — is richer suddenly. That is the fount of wealth created by capitalism, productivity — productivity through innovation, invention and greater efficiency.

00;33;43;11 – 00;34;14;17
Marc Sidwell
The story of Carron is, in miniature, the story of the Industrial Revolution — constant experimentation and improvement driving growth and increasingly to the benefit of all. All those stoves and pans and pillar boxes weren’t luxuries for the rich. And already in 1776, just as the Carron Works was beginning to perfect its canon, 30 miles from here in Kirkcaldy, one man began to see what was going on.

00;34;14;19 – 00;34;51;19
Marc Sidwell
The father of political economy, Adam Smith, published The Wealth of Nations, which helped explain how the emerging system of division of labor in factories, combined with open markets, could make everyone rich. And in the same year as The Wealth of Nations was published, the United States declared its independence from the British Empire. The New World had a great Western nation of its own, and as so often in the history of the West, to outsiders that experiment in freedom seemed poor and primitive, and often lacking in civility.

00;34;51;21 – 00;35;21;00
Marc Sidwell
But it would become the greatest power in the world, and industrial growth was key. Soon, as Adam Smith understood, the new industrial economy was increasing wealth for everyone. It was a new economic world in which ordinary people could access products that had once been the exclusive preserve of the rich. Even Robert Burns celebrated the comfort and warmth the Carron stove brought to his home.

00;35;21;03 – 00;35;36;29
Marc Sidwell
And it wasn’t just about everyday items. Portraits had once been the ultimate luxury, requiring the skill of a trained artist. By the mid 1800s, photography allowed anyone that taste of immortality at the press of a button.

00;35;37;02 – 00;36;09;22
James Bartholomew
The prime virtue of capitalism is that it has made the world vastly richer. When Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1840, he predicted that the working class would get poorer and poorer, and this would lead to the crisis which led to communism. That so spectacularly was a spectacularly wrong forecast. Instead of getting poorer and poorer, the average income of British people is multiplied by eight times.

00;36;09;25 – 00;36;42;22
James Bartholomew
So we got spectacularly richer, and that’s because of capitalism. We’ve had also in — China still calls itself communist, but actually has moved to a capitalist or semi capitalist state. And as a result, its wealth has increased dramatically, and hundreds of millions of people since Deng Xiaoping introduced capitalist reforms in around 1980, hundreds of millions of people in China, and then subsequently also in India, have been brought out of absolute poverty.

00;36;42;25 – 00;37;13;15
Marc Sidwell
Meanwhile, the iron building techniques once pioneered in rural Shropshire were producing architectural marvels. And towards the end of the 19th century, the West’s capacity for transformation picked up pace again. With a second industrial revolution and the spread of railroads and telegraphs, electrification and telephones. This time it was centered in America. There were losses with the arrival of our industrial age.

00;37;13;17 – 00;37;37;15
Marc Sidwell
Turner’s painting The Fighting Temeraire shows one of the tall ships that fought at Trafalgar, being pulled into the sunset by a steam tug. There’s a romance to the image, which has made it one of Britain’s favorite paintings, alongside images of rural life like Constable’s Hay Wain. But we shouldn’t be too sentimental. Agricultural labor, for most people, was no picnic.

00;37;37;18 – 00;38;00;16
Marc Sidwell
While industrial work was often hard, people chose it over isolated, impoverished, backbreaking drudgery in the fields. And we shouldn’t forget that our victory at Trafalgar already depended on industrial age cannons, invented by the same irrepressible Western spirit that animated Nelson’s strategic genius.

00;38;00;20 – 00;38;38;11
James Bartholomew
It was absolutely worth it for the for the peasants of the past to shift to towns. And yes, it’s true that some of them worked in horrible factories which damaged their lives — lived in horrible circumstances. Not all. But what have got to compare it with is what they were in situation previously, in that they were overwhelmingly, desperately poor prior to the industrial and agricultural revolutions. Desperately poor. Life expectancy was, I don’t know, half what it is now?

00;38;38;14 – 00;39;13;01
James Bartholomew
I mean, they literally did not live. That’s how bad things were. You only have to read even, Lark Rise to Candleford, which is set in the mid 19th century, to see how desperately poor the peasant population was — how they would struggle to have one set of clothes. One set of clothes! The mechanization of textile production, for example — that meant people had clothes. The 19th century started with people wearing clogs. It ended with them wearing shoes.

00;39;13;03 – 00;39;38;24
Zoe Strimpel
Nobody seems to appreciate how capitalism is not the fall guy here. Like capitalism is basically the only sort of honest broker of everything else — that obviously needs to be tempered by some degree of taxation. And I think welfare state, you know, not everyone is able to benefit from capitalism. So you can’t have people dying on the streets, and nor should you, and you shouldn’t have people but who are allowed to slide below a certain standard.

00;39;38;24 – 00;39;54;02
Zoe Strimpel
But I mean, wealth generation and dynamism and opportunity, individualism, ambition, these things are at merit. Capitalism is the only thing that ensures merit. Capitalism is the only thing that goes against very entrenched class systems.

00;39;54;04 – 00;40;26;21
Marc Sidwell
The West’s greatest discovery was a means to grow the economy to the benefit of all. It is imperfect, like anything real, but the scale of its success is hard to comprehend. In 1890, eight in ten of the world’s people still lived in absolute poverty. By 2015, the proportion living in absolute poverty was less than 1 in 10. The Western innovation of free market industrial capitalism was the key.

00;40;26;23 – 00;40;59;24
Marc Sidwell
And for all the undeniable crimes of the West’s imperial failings, the result was a better world. For the first time in history, the West came to recognize slavery as a moral abomination and work to end it everywhere it could. At the same time, it discovered something else that had never been achieved before — a way to make everybody much, much richer. The West hadn’t worked out how to make people any less selfish, but it had at last discovered a way to turn that self-interest to everyone’s benefit.

00;40;59;27 – 00;41;21;11
Konstantin Kisin
Without capitalism, we don’t really have that. You don’t have the unleashing of human creativity, whether that’s in the cultural field or whether that’s in science or anywhere else. The, you know, the reason that the West won the Cold War, for example, is its extraordinary ability to make scientific progress, to win the arms race.

00;41;21;11 – 00;41;48;05
Konstantin Kisin
And that comes from, an economy that generates so much wealth that you can pour all this wealth into the research that you need to to win the war like that. So, capitalism is a system that is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. And anything, any system comes with tradeoffs. But it’s the thing that gives you freedom in an economic context, in the same way that, you know, freedom of speech and all these other things give you freedom in a more cultural and human context.

00;41;48;08 – 00;42;12;19
Andrew Klavan
Every culture commits atrocities. All people are broken and sinful. You know, Solzhenitsyn’s line, the line between good and evil runs straight through the human heart. But only certain ideas improve the life of man.

Only certain ideas improve them, certain ideas destroy them, and lessen it, and limit the life and consciousness of man.

00;42;12;21 – 00;42;36;14
George Weigel
The West is worth defending because for all of its faults, it has created a civilization more conducive to human flourishing than any other in the history of this planet.