In this book, based on the 1995 Ohlin Lectures, Deepak Lal provides an accessible, interdisciplinary account of the role of culture in shaping economic performance. Lal's first major theme is the interaction of factor endowments, culture, and politics in explaining modern intensive growth in the West. The other major theme is the role of individualism - an inadvertent legacy of the medieval Catholic Church - in promoting this growth, and the strange metamorphoses this has caused in both the West's cosmological beliefs and the interaction between "the West and the rest."