Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? This title tackles these profound questions and suggests a fresh way in which culture explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. "Gregory Clark has given us a very provocative work. It is economic history, but with strong implications for contemporary problems. His quantitative techniques for demonstrating such phenomena as the innumeracy of pre-industrial humanity and the evolution of the speed of information flows are clever."---Arnold Kling, Journal of Bioeconomics