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Sometimes it's necessary to dig deeply to find them, but there are economic roots to every war.

So true. Thank you for the flag, and I will Freep mail this evening. Have been incredibly busy. If there is truly no rest for the wicked, I must be very, very bad :-)

Modernity thus came as a humiliation — a shocking realization that the local culture was hopelessly backward compared with that of the new foreign masters.

What a completely arrogant and wrong-headed analysis.

Great find, thanks Fury, -- articles like this are the best of FR.

LS, you commented that, according to the article, economics seemed to be at the base of this Isamic war. -- The author sort of made this paragraph as an aside, -- but I think it needs more emphasis. -- I see this war to be about much more than just material concerns. --- This will be a cultural clash, if it goes global.
Almost authoritarian vs libertarian in the FR sense. -- And, - if I understand the author correctly, he says much the same here: --

----- "The Industrial Revolution was the economic expression of a much more general transformation, a radical new form of social order whose defining feature was the embrace of open-ended discovery:
open-endedness in the pursuit of knowledge (provisional and refutable hypotheses supplanting revelation and authority),
open-endedness in economic life (innovation and free-floating market transactions in place of tradition and the "just price"),
open-endedness in politics (power emerging from the people rather than the divine right of kings and hereditary aristocracies),
and open-endedness in life paths (following your dreams instead of knowing your place).
In short, industrialization both advanced and reflected a larger dynamic of liberalization — a dramatic and qualitative shift in the dimensions of social freedom."