Why some groups outperform others in academic and professional achievements? Why some countries’ economies grow faster than others? Why are the fastest-growing economies located in East Asia? What role does Confucian heritage play in helping countries in this region to outperform others economically? How do culture, institutions, and policy interact to influence each other?

Two propositions motivate this book. First, a country’s culture influences its economic performance and, second, its economic performance determines its position in the international pecking order. Economic vitality is imperative for sustaining a country’s leading position in world political economy. This vitality depends critically on its mass culture which is not static but rather evolves in response to changing socioeconomic environment.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, members of an established, English-speaking middle class built a new category of work for themselves. This book uses US, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand occupation statistics, archives, professional journals, and newspapers to understand what the history of nursing, accountancy, teaching, medicine, law, engineering, journalism, and social work can tell us about class in the ‘long twentieth century’. This chapter gives a historical and theoretical introduction to the rise of the professional class as a distinctly transnational event. The Anglo world is not a matter of comparative ‘case studies’, but a network of English-speaking communities that were regionally distinctive but operated as part of a shared cultural and economic world. It was a world built on Indigenous dispossession. Settlers brought their moral frameworks to bear on the ‘civilizing’ that they believed they needed. The virtues that they built into each profession, such as duty, probity, and charity, were performed as real, embodied work in every settlement. Their morality was made material and invested for social and economic profit. They became virtue capitalists.

On 31 October 1517 a thirty-three-year-old priest in the small German town of Wittenberg wrote a letter that would change the course of history. Addressed to the bishop of his parish, Martin Luther’s letter complained about the Roman Catholic Church’s selling of indulgences, the practice by which the Pope would grant remission from the punishment of sin. The more Luther read the Bible, the more he became convinced that it was not by performing good deeds that one obtained salvation, but by faith alone through God’s grace. It was wrong to claim, he argued in the Ninety-Five Theses contained in the letter, that indulgences could absolve buyers from eternal punishment and grant them salvation.

These indulgences were, of course, a valuable source of income for the Church, especially at a time when Pope Leo X planned to rebuild St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Chapter 7 further elaborates and defends the idea that it is Confucian culture’s emphasis on hard work, savings, and education that has enabled China (and other East Asian economies influenced by Confucian culture) to rapidly accumulate both physical and human capital and to absorb existing Western technologies and develop indigenous innovation capacity better than other developing countries, leading to its rapid economic rise. It addresses some of the common objections to the cultural theory as well as some misunderstandings of the theory. This chapter also shows that there has been a cultural awakening in economics in the past two decades and that an increasing number of leading economists have explored both theoretically and empirically the role of culture in economic growth and development. The last section of the chapter considers the role of some other Confucian values such as benevolence and trustworthiness in helping to promote economic growth in a society with a weak rule of law.