Through a good degree of circumlocution, Bright and Geyer produce an alternative thesis to the traditional model of the rise of the contemporary world, specifically in regards to the ostensible nexus between Westernization and globalization. Rather than concurring with the slippery slope of reducing it to terms of “innovation” by the Atlantic core (Europe and North America, with mostly white populations) and the “catching up” of the rest of the world, they propose that the real model was one of “exploitation” followed by “survival strategies” by the exploited regions, to include “resistance, appropriation, reassertion of difference,” among others, according to a summary by the esteemed Professor Bonk of the College of Wooster. This is certainly a correct interpretation at large; much of the material and human resources necessary for Atlantic technological and societal advancement were obtained at the great cost of exploiting the people and resources of existing sovereignties. They had to choose between co-opting the colonizing powers to ensure their survival or fighting back to preserve their culture and maintain their dignity. However, the most appropriate model would take the former and latter theses and hybridize them into one unified body of understanding. It was exploitation that contributed to innovation, and the exploited had to choose a survival strategy, which in the modern world has become almost universally an attempt to “catch up,” even among nations and peoples that initially resisted the forces of globalized Europeanization and industrialism.