On the Wealth and Poverty of Nations
Landes, David S. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. pp. 658. Paperback.
“As the historical record shows, for the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity.”
This is precisely the opposite of what the historical record shows. Surely Europe has been a prime mover in the last half-millennium, and perhaps THE prime mover in the last two hundred years, but certainly not before. I apologize that I’m not going to go too far in depth on this one, others have done it much better than I ever could, but I will say that Landes is patently wrong.