ABSTRACT
There have been many distinct jumps in man's material condition since his emergence from pre-history. The domestication of animals, the abandonment of nomadism for settled agriculture, the control of fire and the invention of the wheel, the birth of writing and systematic numeration, the invention of money and its influence on the spread of organized trading and banking relationships, and a whole series of similar innovations have each marked notable forward steps up the foothills of progress that lay before the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concentrated cluster of events which made up that Revolution raised human productivity to an entirely new order of magnitude, quickly making it possible for the world's surface to support far greater numbers of people, at much higher levels of living, than had ever been known before. However, the uneven spread of the Industrial Revolution throughout the world has resulted in the present division of the world into the Developed and the Less-Developed Countries (DCs and LDCs).
