ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by surveying a sample of civilizations, including ancient Mesopotamia, India's Mauryan Empire, Tang-dynasty China, and fourteenth-century Maghreb, in each case parsing documents and other evidence that provide insight into behavioral and ideological phenomena that, prima facie, resemble the modern growth paradigm. It charts the advent of a new conception of time: abstract, infinite, and uniform, locked to the metronome of capital investment and increasingly connected to a social concern with quantification. The chapter also examines the interconnections between three major developments that were unfolding in seventeenth-century western Europe: maritime-colonial expansion, the scientific revolution, and the rise of capitalism. It explores their relationship to early scientific economics and to the 'Eden project': the crusade to create paradise on Earth by means of 'improvement' and colonial plantation. These processes put wind in the sails of the idea of Progress and, simultaneously, facilitated the discursive construction of 'the economy' as an entity subject to law-governed dynamics of growth.
