Finalist for the 2017 Hayek Prize, The Manhattan Institute Honorable Mention for the 2017 PROSE Award in European and World History, Association of American Publishers One of MIT Technology Review's Best Books of 2016 "[Joel Mokyr] reminds us that the skirmishing of philosophers and their ideas, the preoccupation of popular historians, is in many ways a sideshow--that the revolution that gave Europe dominance was, above all, scientific, and that the scientific revolution was, above all, an artisanal revolution."--Adam Gopnik, New Yorker "[A] fine book... One of our country's great economic historians has helped us better understand the greatest transformation in human welfare our planet has ever seen."--Richard Vedder, Wall Street Journal "Wide-ranging and erudite... Mokyr offers a useful corrective to excessively deterministic and materialistic treatments of economic history, emphasizing ideas--the West, he argues, had a uniquely positive view about subjugating nature to human control--and individual agency in shaping broad socioeconomic shifts."--Publishers Weekly "Ultimately, without the impetus of science, economic growth would have fizzled out after 1815. A Culture of Growth is certainly making me rethink."--Brad DeLong, Nature "A Culture of Growth is a brilliant book. You should buy it and even read it. It's long, but consistently interesting, even witty."--Deirdre McCloskey, Prospect "In pointing to growth-boosting factors that go beyond either the state or the market, Mokyr's book is very welcome."--Victoria Bateman, Times Higher Education "What stands out from Mokyr's approach is the highly contingent character of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. They happened because a lot of different things happened to fall into place; small deviations in the course of events could have given us an entirely different world of technological and economic power."--Diane Coyle, Financial Times "Mokyr ... dives into the mystery of how the world went from being poor to being so rich in just a few centuries... Drawing on centuries of philosophy and scientific advancements, Mokyr argues that there's a reason the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe and not, for example, in China, which had in previous centuries shown signs of more scientific advancement: Europe developed a unique culture of competitive scientific and intellectual advancement that was unprecedented and not at all predestined."--Ana Swanson, WashingtonPost.com's Wonkblog "The sheer elegance of Mr. Mokyr's theory ... has much to commend it. And it is refreshing that an economist is taking seriously the idea that ideas and culture make a difference to economic growth."--Economist "Mokyr has written a book to read slowly and chew over thoroughly... He is a wonderfully well-read lucid and continuously interesting guide to a vast literature and invariably thought provoking."--Alan Ryan, Literary Review "Someone needed to write a book like this, and there could have been no better author to do so than Mokyr."--Peer Vries, Foreign Affairs "Economic historian Joel Mokyr has written a capstone work on the dynamics of the industrial revolution."--Arnold Kling, Econlib "It is not often that a book leaves me gasping in admiration for the breadth and depth of an author's reading and knowledge, but this one did."--Ted Nield, Geoscientist Online "This book is the latest example of Mokyr's ability to explicate complex issues, illustrating his big-picture thesis with a myriad of fascinating details. He writes with clarity--enjoyable for the general reader as well as for the specialist in economic history. A Culture of Growth is a must-read for anyone interested in how Western society got where it is today and what this implies for the spread of technology in the global economy of the future."--Finance & Development "A Culture of Growth is a book of immense importance for us Indians especially when we are getting comfortable, forever playing victim to the depredations of British imperialism instead of wholeheartedly focusing on beating the West at its game as the Chinese are doing... Well worth tackling."--Uday Balakrishnan, Hindu Business Line "A Culture of Growth is an insightful quest into the economic history of the last five centuries. Mokyr's historical laboratory is early modern Europe, when a small mass of highly skilled artisans, entrepreneurs, financiers and merchants laid the roots of what was to become the Industrial Revolution."--Progressive Post "One has to admire the depth of knowledge and the subtlety of Mokyr's argument... For serious students of the Enlightenment itself, Mokyr's magnum opus will be required reading for a long time to come."--Nicholas Crafts, History Today