ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a mathematical reason for beginning with the premodern world. It did not generate self-sustained growth. The chapter helps to identify the specific elements that brought the two centuries of self-sustained growth that began in the late eighteenth century. The traditional societies did not generate inventions and innovations as a regular flow into the economy. One can draw an economic portrait of the typical traditional society which suggests persuasively its structure, the poverty of the peasant and the concentration of all income in the hands of landowners and the state-would inevitably damp any incentive for invention arising from the expansion of commerce. More passive and fatalistic views of man's relation to the physical world, therefore, prevailed. Inventors were irrepressible, but the structure of traditional societies did not permit the two-way fertilizing ties of the inventor to scientist and entrepreneur.
