If they are right, it suddenly becomes much harder to explain why Looty came to London rather than Albert heading east. Some short-termers, like the maverick economist Andre Gunder Frank (who wrote more than thirty books on everything from prehistory to Latin American finance), argue that the East was actually better placed to have an industrial revolution than the West until accidents intervened. Europe, Frank concluded, was simply “a distant marginal peninsula” in a “Sinocentric world order.”
