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Culture Makes All the Difference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Om Prakash
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Extract

David Landes addresses in his latest book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor (London 1998), an issue at the very heart of the global economic history of the latter half of the millennium now coming to a close. This issue is an analysis of the circumstances that have brought into existence a world characterised by a fast-growing disparity in economic performance and levels of living across its different segments. According to Angus Maddison, one hundred and fifty years ago the gap in mean per capita share of gross domestic product between the richest and poorest global regions, namely Western Europe and Africa, was probably three to one. Today this gap between a rich country such as Switzerland and a poor country such as Mozambique is a mind boggling four hundred to one. How this state of affairs has come about is the basic question asked by Landes.

Type
David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
Information
Itinerario , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , 1998 , pp. 90 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1998

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References

Notes

1 Landes, D.S., Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt (London/Cambridge Mass, 1958).Google Scholar

2 Landes, D.S., Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modem World (Cambridge Mass 1983).Google Scholar

3 Landes, D.S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge 1969).Google Scholar

4 Landes, D.S., The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor (London 1998) 516.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 26.

6 Ibid., 126.

7 Boyajian, James C., Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640 (Baltimore and London 1993).Google Scholar

8 Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, 537.

9 Ibid., 157.

10 Ibid., 157.

11 Ibid., 228.

12 Ibid., 229.

13 Ibid., 363.