The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

A sweeping economic history of the world's divergent paths since the Industrial Revolution, this book argues that the gap between prosperous and impoverished nations was shaped by a combination of geography, culture, and institutional choices.

David S. Landes traces the rise of Europe and the United States, the stagnation of the Arab world, and the slow modernization of China and Japan, and the rise and fall of Latin American economies, to explain why some regions flourished while others did not.

The work is a landmark of economic history, blending rigorous data with a sweeping cultural and institutional analysis of what makes a nation's economy succeed or fail over centuries.