In Bourgeois Dignity, McCloskey offers a different story of economic growth than the common one of capitalism and markets. The West grew rich, she argues, not simply because it embraced trade, but because its cultural ideas shifted, specifically in granting a sense of dignity to the bourgeoisie. It is that dignity—and the rhetoric surrounding it—that sparked the Industrial Revolution and, in turn, lead to the modern world. Bourgeois Dignity traces the influence of these changing ideas—and uses them to explain not just the rise of the West but also the recent, monumental growth of India and China. The book is the second in a four-volume series, “The Bourgeois Era.”