For ten thousand years, almost nothing happened. Empires rose and fell, religions spread, art and philosophy reached heights never surpassed — and through it all the ordinary person stayed poor, as poor in the age of Newton as in the age of Pericles, living on the rough equivalent of a few dollars a day. Then, in the space of a few generations, in a few places, the oldest fact of human life quietly ended. Output per person began to rise, and kept rising, and the descendants of the poor became rich beyond any prior reckoning. Nothing else economics studies is remotely so large; beside it, the booms and slumps of the previous volume are weather passing over a climate that had, for the first time, begun to change.
The difficulty, for anyone raised inside the enrichment, is to feel how strange it is. Begin with the flatness it ended. For the whole of recorded history before about 1800, the material condition of the average human being hardly moved: a peasant under the Caesars and a peasant in the France of Louis XVI ate much the same food, wore much the same cloth, and died at much the same age. Improvement, where it came, was swallowed; the good harvest fed more children rather than richer ones — the grim arithmetic Malthus would make famous — and the wheel turned back to where it had begun. Against ten thousand years of that, the last two centuries are a detonation. Output per person in the countries that grew has risen perhaps twenty or thirty times over; lives have lengthened by decades; the famines and the routine death of children that haunted every prior age have, in the enriched world, all but vanished. The dry phrase "economic growth" names the most dramatic change in the material conditions of human life that has ever occurred.
This reframes the central question of the subject, and the reframing is the first thing to get right. Economics has long posed its great development question in one direction: why are some nations poor? But the history runs the other way. Poverty was not an aberration to be explained; it was the condition of essentially every human being who ever lived. What needs explaining is not the poverty, which was universal, but its opposite — the sudden, sustained, compounding wealth that a handful of societies began to enjoy and that has, unevenly, spread since. The question that organizes this volume, then, is not why some places are poor, but why any place is rich — the question Adam Smith set at the head of the whole science when he made his subject the wealth, and not the poverty, of nations: why the oldest fact of human life ended at all, why it ended where it did, and why it ended when it did. Get the question backward, and every answer will be wrong; for one will be hunting the causes of a disease that was in truth the natural state, and overlooking the causes of the cure.
To see what was genuinely new, one must distinguish a height from a slope. The world before 1800 was not without its prosperities. Rome at its zenith, the cities of Song China, the Dutch republic in its golden century — each climbed to a comfort that the surrounding ages could not match, and each, in time, subsided. But these were levels: a society would rise to some plateau of wealth and there remain, or from there decline, the gains held for a while and then surrendered. What began with the great enrichment was not another, higher plateau but something the world had never seen — a rising slope that did not level off, growth that became, for the first time, perpetual. The standard of living did not merely jump; it began to compound, doubling within a lifetime and doubling again within the next, as though the rising were now the normal condition and the standing still the thing that would have to be explained. The novelty was not wealth, which the old world had known, but growth without end.
Yet the ascent was not the world's all at once, and its unevenness is as important as its fact. It began in a corner of northwestern Europe, spread to the lands of European settlement, reached parts of Asia late and in a rush, and has touched some regions barely or not at all. The very same two centuries that multiplied the wealth of some nations many times over left others close to the subsistence that had always been universal — and so tore open, between rich lands and poor, a gulf of a kind the old world, uniformly destitute, had never contained. A peasant of 1700, wherever he lived, was poor in much the same way as every other; the citizen of a rich country today is richer than one of a poor country by a factor the ancient world could not have imagined. The enrichment, in other words, did not merely lift humanity; it divided it, and in dividing it called into being the categories — the developed and the undeveloped, the first world and the third — through which we now sort the earth.
And here, at the largest scale the subject affords, the governing error of the whole work waits to be made. For the enrichment is now so complete, so much the medium in which the fortunate live, that they take it for the natural condition of mankind. We speak of "developed" and "developing" nations as though wealth were a stage that every society climbs in the fullness of time, as a child grows tall; we feel, without quite saying it, that the prosperity of the rich world is simply how things are. It is the master mistake of these volumes, on the grandest possible canvas. A price is a verdict on a hidden contest, mistaken for a fact of nature — and the wealth of the modern world is the same verdict, taken for the same kind of fact. But two centuries weigh nothing against the ten millennia the enrichment broke; the wealth that feels eternal is, in the long reckoning, brand new — not the natural order but a recent and precarious exception to a poverty that had every appearance of permanence. To call it natural is to forget that it was made — and that what was made can fail to be made elsewhere, and can yet be unmade where it stands.
The claim that the enrichment is the central fact must be made honestly, against everything that can fairly be said to qualify it. And much can. The measure is crude: output per head says nothing of how a life is lived, and a rising figure can mask a coarsening world. The gains were shared with a cruelty that shadows the whole story — between nations and within them, the ascent of some was built, in part, on the enslavement, the conquest, and the plunder of others, so that what the ledgers record as growth was, for millions, catastrophe. And the enrichment has run up a debt against the planet that bears it, a bill in carbon and exhaustion not yet fully presented. Each is true, and none to be waved away. But none unmakes the fact. The descendants of the poor, in the places the enrichment reached, live longer, eat better, and bury fewer of their children than any people who came before. That this is unevenly shared, and in part ill-gotten, and perhaps not sustainable, are facts about the contest over its fruits and its costs — grave ones, taken up in later plates — not refutations of the enrichment itself.
Set the fact and its qualifications side by side, and the plate's real claim emerges. The wealth of the modern world is at once the largest thing economics has to explain and the thing most easily mistaken for a feature of the landscape. It is not a property of certain peoples or a gift of certain places; it is recent, contingent, and made — the residue of contests over the rules a society keeps, the ideas it generates and rewards, and the power that decides who may keep what they produce. And the poverty that still grips much of the earth is not the natural lot of the places that suffer it. It is the old condition, the condition that once gripped everyone, persisting where the escape has not yet been won. The map of the world's rich and poor is not a map of soil and climate and blood. It is a record of contests — a few of them won, and a great many lost.
Why insist so hard on this? Because almost everything that matters follows from it. If the wealth of nations were a fact of nature — written in the climate, or the soil, or the supposed character of peoples — then the poverty of billions would be a sentence handed down by the world itself, beyond appeal, and the only honest counsel would be resignation. But a price is a verdict on a hidden contest, mistaken for a fact of nature; and so, at the scale of nations, is wealth. If the prosperity of the rich is the outcome of contests over institutions and ideas — contests that were fought, and won, and might have gone otherwise — then the poverty of the poor is no more eternal than those contests, and what was achieved in some places is, in principle, achievable in others. This is not a fine point of doctrine. It is the whole difference between a world whose vast inequality is the verdict of nature, fixed and final, and one in which that inequality is the verdict of contests still open — and so, however hard, still subject to being refought.
Poverty was never the riddle. It was the rule. The riddle is the wealth — recent, uneven, and made — that a few nations wrung from it.
This plate has done only the first and most necessary thing: it has named the fact. It has not explained it — has not said where the rising productivity came from, why the slope began in one corner of the world, what settlement of power and rule lay beneath it, or whether the ascent can or should go on. Those are the questions of the plates to come, and the volume is the attempt to answer them. But the explanations are worth nothing until the thing to be explained is seen for what it is: not the natural prosperity of favored lands, but the strangest and largest event in the economic history of the species — the moment when the poverty of almost everyone quietly began to end. The booms and the slumps of the cycle were the economy's weather. This is its climate, and the long contest that set it. The argument remains open.