This book ends where most studies of European economic development begin – in the eighteenth century. By that time a structure of property rights had developed in the Netherlands and England which provided the incentives necessary for sustained growth. These included the inducements required to encourage innovation and the consequent industrialization. The industrial revolution was not the source of modern economic growth. It was the outcome of raising the private rate of return on developing new techniques and applying them to the production process.

Moreover, international competition provided a powerful incentive for other countries to adapt their institutional structures to provide equal incentives for economic growth and the spread of the ‘industrial revolution’. Success has been a consequence of the reorganization of property rights in those countries. The failures – the Iberian Peninsula in the history of the Western World, and much of Latin America, Asia and Africa in our times – have been a consequence of inefficient economic organization.

There is little new about this conclusion. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both subscribed to this view. They both saw successful growth as dependent on the development of efficient property rights. Their followers appear in the main to have forgotten this.

It would be wrong and misleading to end by agreeing unequivocally with either of the intellectual precursors of modern economic thought. Karl Marx was a Utopian.