Economics was born when some people asked the questions: How can society improve its living standards? What are the conditions of prosperity? Those questions define the essence of growth theory. It is no wonder that in the Western world they were raised – rather timidly – at the end of the Renaissance only, by Botero (1589, 1598), and then by Sully (1639) and Child (1668). Why not earlier? Because economics, as any science, is founded on observation; no sign of growth had ever appeared in the Middle Ages – and how could it have after the endless wars and plagues that ravaged Europe, particularly in the fourteenth century? Those times carried no hope, and it would have taken a bold thinker to entreat the question of development. As the French historian Pierre Gaxotte very well put it, “the man of the Middle Ages does not know of time and numbers”.

It is not surprising therefore that we owe to Arab civilization the first comprehensive description of the fundamental causes of growth. In his Muqaddimah (1377), the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun went even further and set himself to explain the causes of the rise and decline of civilizations. This is a good place to recall what Arnold Toynbee (1934, p. 321) had to say about Ibn Khaldun's magnum opus:

Ibn Khaldun's contribution encompasses not only the description of the growth process, but also what needs to be done to set it in motion. His essay therefore is not only positive or descriptive; it is normative as well, and it shares that characteristic with Adam Smith's “Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations” that came four centuries later.