I had a very difficult time bonding with this book from the very start. The author puts forth an interesting premise for the book—to show what it was about the "Western European" intellect that led to its dominance of the world. What he ends up mostly doing, however, is not explaining the why, but rather the what—and unfortunately he does it with mind-numbing historical minutiae that reads more like an overly long term paper filled with footnotes. The closest he gets to telling us why Western European imperialism was dominant was his interesting theory of the relative obscurity of Western Europe in the 1100's and 1200's. The tribes of Western Europe, relative brutes compared to the advanced societies of the Middle East and the Orient, were not weighted down by rigid caste structures. Thus, as Western Europe became more urbanized, certain groups, like merchants, had the freedom to advance their financial and class status by staking out new ways of acquiring wealth. Competition for wealth spurred the need for quantification, measurement, and the search for raw materials for currency, building, etc. That seemed to be it for his theories of why. The rest of the book is vignette after vignette of the progress in counting, measuring, a little about maps, etc. I'm sure Guido of Arrezo, St Isidore of Seville, Marsilio Ficino, Theodoric of Freiburg, and Simon Stevin were swell people. But simply brief mentions of their contributions to western thought in a long line of other equally obscure names makes for a very boring and pretentious book.