ABSTRACT
This book revolves around Europe in general and Western Europe in particular. There is a simple reason for this. In the modern era, Europe ran away from the other great civilizations of Eurasia with respect to affluence and technological development. The European head start made it possible for Europeans to colonize large parts of the rest of the world and, after the mid-nineteenth century, to dominate the few areas that had been able to resist European colonization. More specifically, in the last phase Europe ran from East Asia, which, at least economically, had been the most advanced region in Eurasia for the previous one thousand years.
