greed --> scientific revolution

Global expansion was forcing Europeans to address the type of questions one would ask when one needed precise measurements of standardized space, money and time. By the time two-handed clocks had become the norm in the West, Europeans would have to have been positively obtuse not to wonder whether nature itself was a mechanism. In other words, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment had to initially be a consequence, rather than the cause of the West’s rising development and geographic expansion.

- Ian Morris