The wealth and poverty of nations summary pdf

In it, Landes elucidates the reasons why some countries and regions of the world experienced near miraculous periods of explosive growth while the rest of the world stagnated. He does this by comparing the long-term economic histories of different regions of the world, giving priority to Europe and the United States, as well as Japan , China , the Arab world , and Latin America. In addition to analyzing economic and cliometric figures, he gives substantial credit to such intangible assets as culture and enterprise in the different societies he examines in order to explain economic success or failure. In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations , Landes revives, at least in part, several theories he believes have been incorrectly discarded by academics over the previous forty years:. He also spends a good deal of effort to debunk claims that the Asian miracle did not happen, was not significant, or was financed by European colonialism , and he draws a correlation between the economic level of a country and the way it treats its women. In short, he argues that the vast economic growth of the Industrial Revolution was no accident but instead resulted from several qualities of Europe, including its climate, political competition, economic freedom and attitude towards science and religion, more specifically from certain countries in Western Europe, primarily England. Critics have charged Landes with eurocentrism in his analysis, a charge which Landes himself does not deny; in fact, he embraces it explicitly, arguing that an explanation for an economic miracle that happened originally only in Europe though he deals with the later ' Asian miracle ' in Wealth and Poverty must of necessity be a Eurocentric analysis, thus siding at least at some level with thinkers such as Bernard Lewis.

David S. New York: W. Norton, Reviewed for EH. NET by J. David Landes has studied the history of economic development for more than half a century.