The lecture given in Beirut at Saint-Joseph University in four sessions in February and May 2005 focused on Europe and the Muslim world in the 19th century.
His starting point was the major break that occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Europe became a " hyper-power " in relation to the rest of the world. This break can be explained by the accumulation of knowledge capital due to the printing press over the last three centuries (during this period, the world of print merged with Europe), and by the constitution of the State as a machine for waging war, hence the need for increasingly egalitarian taxation to drain the necessary resources. The unequal, hierarchical social order was subverted.
Lecture