ABSTRACT
Carlo M. Cipolla intended to illustrate the rates of growth and the pace of change in economic and social structures: not completely static, but certainly very slow before the Industrial Revolution, and increasingly rapid, at times even frenetic, thereafter. To a great extent, the change of pace derives from the transformation of prevalently agrarian economies into industrial economies. This chapter aims to briefly describe the structural characteristics of pre-industrial agrarian economies and their semi-immobility, which only a wide-ranging trauma could shake. In comparison with the Neolithic Revolution, the urban revolution was much more local, and initially limited to Europe and Asia. This was essentially the start of a sort of proto-divergence between Eurasia and the rest of the world. Much of traditional historiography has underlined the differences between West (Europe) and East in order to explain the emergence of European supremacy, forgetting that essentially all contenders for the leading position in pre-industrial economic development are in Eurasia.
