Growth emerged slowly in the second half of the eighteenth century as the Industrial Revolution, based on major technological breakthroughs and their application in industry, took root. Industrialization in England was soon followed by industrialization in most of Western Europe and the United States. English prosperity also spread rapidly to Britain’s “settler colonies” of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. A list of the thirty richest countries today would include them, plus Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. The prosperity of these latter three is in turn part of a broader pattern in which
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