Rich Nations, Poor Nations: The Long-Run Perspective.

• Author: Wright, J.W., Jr.

According to the introduction, the authors use a "European Mirror" to study why "Europe, along with its overseas appendages, has been the dominant force in economic development since the sixteenth century," as well as "the historical experience of the world's first industrialized continent" [p. xii]. Based on these comments, I expected to write a Blautian rebuke of eurocentricism's centrality in economic development literature. After the first chapter on "the penalty of lateness," I remained prepared to be critical because of the eurocentric position it presents.

However, my opinion quickly changed as I found the remaining essays full of original ideas and interpretations of economic data explaining the historical movement of economic dominance from East to West, and in some cases back to the East. Chapters address regional development issues important to the study of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin. American, the Pacific Rim, and the Indian sub-continent. The authors also discuss comparative institutional factors affecting market liberalization, and in doing so address the negative legacy of colonial interference. Some authors recognize, either directly or by implication, that World Wars I and II left Europe and Japan without their historical economic agencies. This situation allowed them to create a new sense of regional unity revolving around trade rather than ethnicity and led to the development of the modern institutions that dominate world trade. In other cases, where peoples have not taken pragmatic views of human trading interactions, historical enmities and conflicts have impeded the building of modern institutions.

The collection includes nine chapters that build on two main themes, colonial interference and market liberalization. The most prominent of these is the lingering effect of colonialism, which is mentioned in almost every chapter. For example, in the third chapter, Werner Baer and Joseph L. Love link colonial trade regimes and the development of Latin America's "backwardness," focusing on the difference between cooperation and interference. They assert that in Latin American countries, where U.S. and European interference remains substantial, such as in Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras, that effective economic agencies have yet to develop and that incomes remain persistently low. However, in countries where economic cooperation has been fostered, such as in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela, that U.S. and European assistance has...