Eurocentric..................................

     Although I try to maintain a global perspective throughout this book, many readers will find its focus overly Eurocentric.  Were not the Chinese—the inventors of paper, the printing press, and gunpowder—the great innovative engineers of the premodern world?  Were not the early Arab empires oases of learning and culture during a time when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages?  did not mathematicians in India devise a numerical system, incorporating the concept of zero, far more advanced that the Greco-Roman letter based system?  To all these questions, the answer is a resounding yes.  Yet not one of these societies was able to turn the modern Western trick of continuously and permanently raising its citizens' standard of living.  Furthermore, the four factors responsible for modern wealth—property rights, borne on the common law, scientific rationalism, advanced capital markets, and the great advances in transportation and communication—were largely European in origin.  Although prosperity has become a global phenomenon, there is no escaping the fact that its nursery lay in the area between Glasgow and Genoa.

-William J. Bernstein, The Birth Of Plenty:  How The Prosperity Of The Modern World Was Created