Europe’s history in the book is not a story of uniform or inevitable advancement. It is a region where political struggles over monarchy, trade, and institutional power shaped the emergence of sustained growth, while European commercial and colonial expansion also altered economic paths far beyond the continent. The contrast between Europe’s own institutional changes and the consequences of its outward expansion makes the region central to the book’s account of global inequality.

A Continent of Divergent Paths

The book identifies England, or Britain after the union of England, Wales, and Scotland in 1707, as the first country to experience sustained economic growth. That growth emerged gradually in the second half of the eighteenth century as technological breakthroughs and their application in industry took root in the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization then spread through much of Western Europe and the United States, while prosperity also extended to Britain’s settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

This trajectory does not mean that Europe had always been economically or politically exceptional. In 1588, England, Spain, and France were all governed by relatively absolutist monarchs, and each monarch faced assemblies pressing for rights and influence. The English Parliament and Spanish Cortes had authority over taxation, while the French Estates-General did not. Those differences mattered in practice: Spain’s American empire gave its Crown substantial access to gold and silver, whereas Elizabeth I of England had less financial independence and had to seek taxes from Parliament. Parliament used that dependence to demand concessions, including restrictions on royal power to grant monopolies.

Over time, these initially modest contrasts became consequential. European states entered an expanding period of Atlantic trade and colonization after 1600, and the new commercial opportunities strengthened different groups in different political settings. In England, traders with few ties to the Crown gained wealth and pressed for institutional change; in Spain and France, monarchs retained much greater control over trade. The book presents this divergence as contingent: institutions and political conflicts shaped who could benefit from commerce, rather than geography alone dictating Europe’s future.

Monarchy, Trade, and Political Conflict

The rise of Atlantic commerce sharpened existing conflicts over royal authority. English colonization began at Roanoke in 1585, the English East India Company was formed in 1600, and the Virginia Company founded Jamestown in 1607. The Dutch formed their own East India Company in 1602; France expanded across the Atlantic, founding Quebec City in 1608; and Barbados was occupied in 1627. These developments created new commercial interests and increased the stakes in disputes over who could control trade and its profits.

In England, traders who resented royal control became an important force for restricting royal prerogatives. They played a critical role in the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. France also experienced resistance to royal power in the Fronde Rebellion of 1648–1652, but the book emphasizes that opposition to absolutism was more likely to prevail in England because its opponents were relatively wealthy and numerous. Political institutions thus helped determine whether the gains from economic expansion could create constituencies capable of challenging concentrated power.

The book also describes eighteenth-century European aristocracies as threatened by industrialization. Landed elites relied on landholdings and trading privileges protected by monarchs. Industrial growth shifted resources away from agriculture, reduced land rents, increased the wages landowners had to pay, and allowed new merchants and business owners to erode established privileges. Urbanization and the growth of middle and working classes further challenged aristocratic political dominance. The old elites therefore faced both economic losses and the prospect of losing political power, making resistance to industrialization intelligible as a defense of their position rather than mere ignorance.

Artisans faced a different but related threat: mechanization displaced skills and livelihoods. Some organized, rioted, and destroyed machinery. The Luddites became associated with opposition to technological change; in 1753, the house of John Kay, inventor of the flying shuttle, was burned, and James Hargreaves, inventor of the spinning jenny, also faced hostility. These conflicts show how growth could increase aggregate wealth while imposing concentrated losses on particular groups, and why those groups might oppose institutions and technologies that promised broader prosperity.

The Geography Hypothesis in Question

The book challenges the claim that climate explains the division between rich and poor societies. The apparent pattern is striking: many poor countries lie between the tropics, while many rich nations occupy temperate latitudes. In the late eighteenth century, Montesquieu interpreted this distribution as evidence that tropical climates fostered laziness and limited curiosity, which he connected to low productivity, weak innovation, and despotic government. Modern versions of the geography hypothesis instead emphasize tropical diseases, especially malaria, and the agricultural limitations of tropical soils, but retain the claim that temperate regions enjoy an advantage.

The book argues that this explanation cannot account for the historical record. The growth of Singapore, Malaysia, and Botswana challenges the idea that hot climates are intrinsically poor. More fundamentally, the book points to Nogales: the dividing line between its two parts is the United States–Mexico border, not a difference in climate, geography, or disease environment. In this account, the geography hypothesis mistakes a visible correlation for a sufficient explanation and misses the importance of political and economic institutions.

An earlier English judgment about colonial prospects offers a contrasting example of how latitude could be treated as a guide to wealth. In the eighteenth century, Arthur Young compared the value of staple products across British colonies and reported higher per-capita amounts in the West Indies and southern continental colonies than in central and northern settlements. He concluded that the scale suggested avoiding colonization at northern latitudes. The book’s broader argument, however, does not treat such climatic or agricultural differences as an explanation for enduring global inequality.

European Expansion and Unequal Consequences

European commercial expansion created new sources of wealth within Europe while also imposing or reinforcing extractive institutions abroad. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, used commercial agreements and military force to pursue control of the spice trade. Its expansion into Southeast Asia illustrates how European power could disrupt local economic development: the company sought to eliminate competitors and restrict production and trade, while colonial systems intensified tribute and forced labor.

The book places this case within a wider contrast. European expansion into the Atlantic helped fuel the rise of more inclusive institutions in Britain, where independent traders pressed against royal monopolies. In other regions, European colonial power could suppress emerging commercial activity or strengthen institutions that blocked industrialization. The same broad process therefore had sharply different effects depending on the political arrangements and power relations it encountered.

The book describes the European colonial empires’ profitability as often resting on the destruction of independent polities and indigenous economies, or on extractive institutions built from the ground up. In parts of the Caribbean, after the near-total collapse of native populations, Europeans imported enslaved Africans and established plantation systems. For Southeast Asian states, the book acknowledges uncertainty about what development might have occurred without Dutch intervention; they might have continued on their existing paths or moved gradually toward more inclusive institutions. European intervention foreclosed those possibilities and redirected local histories.

Europe’s significance in this account is therefore double-edged. Institutional change within parts of Europe helped make industrial growth possible, but European expansion also helped produce poverty elsewhere by undermining local autonomy and strengthening extraction. The region is neither a simple climatic success story nor merely the source of industrial innovation: its different trajectories, and the unequal connections between them, are part of the explanation the book offers for persistent world inequality.