Alan Ryan

Knowledge is Power

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy

By

Princeton University Press 403pp £24.95 order from our bookshop

One of the great mysteries of history is what has sometimes been called the ‘Great Divergence’ and sometimes the ‘Great Enrichment’: the economic takeoff that saw Europe, and subsequently much of the rest of the world, become vastly richer than before. Joel Mokyr opens this deeply engrossing book by saying,

The world today is richer than it has ever been. We know a great deal about the economic transformations that made it this way thanks to a vast literature examining every possible aspect of modern economic growth taking place since ca. 1800. We know what happened, and we know more or less how and where it happened. What remains very much a mystery is why.

This is a question to which Marx, Max Weber and a host of later economists offered very different answers.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • In 'Silenced Voices' reports the ongoing story of the human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who has been… ,
    • The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity has long been agonised over. But what do we know about his victims?… ,
    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    Follow Us