I'm a historian and a cultural anthropologist. Thank you.

The "quasi miraculous" bit is a well established epistemological idea in the social sciences. When Max Weber wrote his famous book about the relationship between capitalism and protestantism, he added that his thesis could not be explained by ordinary historiographic techniques, but only by relying on such non-rational factors as "fate", "chance" and "pure indeterminacy".

About the linkages between catholicism and mercantilism: that's a very well established hypothesis, dating back to at least the Annales school studying the longue durée of cultural economics (basically Braudel).

And the same for China's mystery: China had everything to make it as a colonialist empire, but it didn't use these resources. For a good read on the "Why Not China?" problem, see Gilles Deleuze's "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia".

-The point I'm trying to make is that many cultures don't have the expansionist idea embedded in them. The dynamics of many (most) cultures is so that they are explicitely self-limiting and abhorr the idea of permanent, progressive and linear expansion. All kinds of mechanisms are built in to assure this. (Just read any basic 101 in anthropology). Most cultures even have myths dealing with expansionism as inherently "evil".

-You shouldn't confuse cultural "exchange" in its broadest sense, with imperialism. Exchange mechanisms are essential for the survival of cultures (the exchange of women and the incest taboo as driving factors; economic exchanges, gift systems, etc...). But going from there to linear expansionism and colonization is another matter alltogether.

-In this sense, the greco-latin cultures (symbolically best represented by Christianity or Rome) are an exception. Even the great Asian despotic systems were not driven by "extensivist" logic, but by an "intensivist" logic: install the despot in your own people, as deep as you can (intensification), and not in others (expansion/extensification).