The Rise of the West is currently on my to-read list, so I can't comment directly on its contents, but I have heard it characterized as an important work, but one flawed by a less-than-complete understanding of non-Western societies and one possessing a mid-20th-century bias towards the West in general. As I said, I can't speak to whether or not that assessment is entirely correct, but I do have some thoughts concerning the theory about the Viking roots of Western merchants vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

I was just reading a bit this morning about the urbanization of northern India during the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, and one of the big changes they had to deal with as a society was the rise of a merchant class, which did not fit into the earlier, more nomadic notion of social classes. From what I've read, this seems to be a common theme as societies acquire more wealth -- as the merchant class develops, it acquires more power and influence (for instance, in the early Roman Republic the patrician class was often dismayed to see plebian merchants outstrip them in raw wealth) and generally operates outside of the direct authority of the rulers -- often simply by virtue of its tendency to trade in places far away from the local ruler's sphere of influence.

Where McNeil is correct is the employ of artisans -- it isn't until the Renaissance that we begin to see artists arise as distinct individuals with unique styles, as opposed to the earlier view of the artisan as merely a form of skilled labor, crafting frescoes or statuary or whatever to suit the whim of the employer (you'll notice that until the Renaissance, we only know who commissioned important buildings, like the Marcus Agrippa's Pantheon in Rome, and nothing about who actually designed them). But artisans and merchants are not necessarily the same group.

What really made the Middle Ages in the West distinct from other societies in an economic sense is the rise of guilds, which centralized the power of merchants in an unprecedented way -- they functioned as almost combintation cabals/proto-unions. If a king angered the blacksmiths guild, then the guild was able to withold its services or charge exorbitant fees because they controlled all access to blacksmiths in the city. This is where the merchant really started to gain power and influence in parallel with the ruler, and you'll notice that the historic areas in many cities and towns in Belgium and the Netherlands -- where guilds got started -- are characterized by mercantile and not military power.

State-owned business is really more of a Leninist innovation, as prior, less-developed civilizations simply didn't have the infrastructure to manage planned economies on that kind of scale (and it could be argued that the Leninists weren't too hot at it either). Putting the Rise of the West in its time (the mid-1950s, as I recall), the Viking theory you outlined kinda reads like an endorsement of free-market capitalism as the impetus for the West's rise to power, at the expense of the communist ideal of centralized, state-owned business.
 

Thus far, I have to agree with both criticisms of the book. It's a lot more than I knew, but I'm pretty sure archaeology has found much more since it was written (as well as less-biased perspectives). I still like the picture of corporate managers/execs as Vikings as all-too-accurate, even if it's not factual.