Europe’s fitness

THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS..

By David Landes.

Norton; 650 pages; $30

Little Brown; £20

DAVID LANDES does not lack confidence. His title is a self-conscious reference to Adam Smith's classic. His goal is nothing short of explaining the evolution of the world's main economies. His thesis—that cultural differences ultimately explain economic performance—is presented with a passion that leaves scant room for dissent. In short, he has written an immodest book. It is nevertheless a very fine one.

An economist and historian at Harvard University, Mr Landes is unusual in a world where success is often gauged by the quantity of papers an academic produces. He invests many years in writing a single, great book. He blurs academic disciplines at a time when the trend is towards greater specialisation. He is a gifted, witty writer in a profession prone to mistake jargon for prose. He is unafraid of provocative, even outrageous, opinion in the era of political correctness. All this ensures that “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” is a hugely enjoyable as well as educational read.

It begins with a discussion of geography. Mr Landes vigorously defends a strident thesis: that natural endowments (a temperate climate, adequate water, the absence of virulent disease) gave some areas of the world, notably Europe, an enormous economic advantage. But European exceptionalism went beyond climate. Unlike Islamic or eastern societies, Europe made a distinction between the secular and the religious, had decentralised authority, and placed far greater emphasis on private property rights. All this promoted a culture of inventiveness that set Europe on a very different path from other civilisations.

But what really made Europe exceptional—and it lies at the heart of Mr Landes's thesis—was the Industrial Revolution. To his question, why did it occur in Europe? he gives three answers: autonomous intellectual inquiry flourished in Europe; empiricism, which combined perception with measurement, had developed further there; and research was routine and respected there as it was nowhere else.

In his search for explanations, Mr Landes views the Weberian analysis most favourably. It was Calvinism that promoted the rise of modern capitalism by sanctioning a mode of behaviour—rational, ordered, hard-working—that led to business success. Other societies lacked these qualities. In the Arab world, for instance, Mr Landes sees a culture that mistrusts new techniques that come from the “enemy” West, that does not respect knowledge acquired abroad, and whose denigration of women makes it incapable of generating a capable workforce.

Balanced exposition and measured judgment, however, are not Mr Landes's strengths. His book has no time for alternative theories. Cultural relativism, “new economic history”, dependency theory—all are dismissed with equal abandon. Under any other circumstances this would have rendered Mr Landes's account simplistic and shrill. But backed as it is with a wealth of knowledge that stretches over such a broad canvas, it is a scholar's indulgence. And eminently worth reading.