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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House

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To: Mohan Marette who wrote (1132)	5/30/1998 1:36:00 PM
From: Rational	Read Replies (1) of 12475

TOI Friday 22 May 1998 timesofindia.com How the West Won The recent G-15 summit of developing nations and the almost parallel G-8 meeting of leaders of the developed world shows that the world's two halves share little -- except perhaps for the irony of aspiration. A new book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations examines almost exactly this issue, though author David Landes has gone considerably further back in time to document and analyse the world's economic history. Mr Landes is professor of history and economics at Harvard University and he has gone pretty far down the road of geographical determinism to answer the question posed in the book's sub-title: ''Why some are so rich and some are so poor''. But he has also made a significantly bold assertion about why the world is the way it is, quoting a French historian who said that if history were to start over, it would broadly repeat itself. Though the book flirts with geographical determinism -- natural water systems, patterns of irrigation and cultivation that shape diverse structures of property rights and political authority -- the author is clear on one point. Europe earned its wealth because nothing mattered more than the fact that it ''was a good learner''. The most basic facility that Europeans mastered was, he says, the power to kill. They learnt about gunpowder from Asia -- China originally -- but they learnt to make it better and their guns fired straighter and farther. Then there was mastery of latitude -- a great advance for oceanic navigation -- something the Europeans became good at after initial coaching from Muslim astronomers via Jewish intermediaries. Mr Landes says that the last of the Big Three -- the factors that caused Europe to take the lead 500 years ago -- was printing with movable type. The Chinese invented it but didn't have an alphabet, the Islamic world and India refused it till the 19th century. The book goes on to list novelties that Europeans made or found to improve their lives and understanding of the world around -- eyeglasses, for instance, that doubled the effective life of scribes and craftsmen; watches and so on. The book celebrates the spirit of individualism and the economic shove that comes with a cohesive national identity. But what it doesn't say is where the West can possibly go from here. It doesn't -- and possibly cannot answer - - the biggest question of them all: will the developing and developed world remain antipodes of the whole?

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