ABSTRACT
Friedrich List was not the first to write about the development in his lifetime of the English Industrial Revolution. But he was the first to clearly identify the problem of increasing asymmetries that the process of industrialisation and development created between those economies that were here in the lead, and those that became at best followers, at worst left behind. Friedrich List would have been astonished, quite possibly disgusted, by the amount and degree of division in a world that today can only be called deeply divided. List’s own insights were directed to just one section of the world; today he would have to take account of the world as a whole. The experience of development over the last 150 years, and especially the last few decades after the Second World War, also make plain the conditions under which Listian developmental catch-up is either improbable or, conversely, possible.
