John Cassidy
28 February 2011
- The Wealth and Poverty or Nations (1998). With the rise of the West, Landes and other scholars say, the Islamic world developed an inferiority complex, rejecting European inventions such as the printing press and retreating into scholasticism.
- Setting aside the oil industry, the Middle East scores badly on basic economic measures, such as productivity, foreign investment and trade.
- In addition to selling spices and metals, Islamic entrepreneurs developed successful manufacturing industries, such as papers, carpets, etc---and all of this when much of Europe was in the Dark Ages. As the centuries passed, many Muslim regions fell behind the West, yet the most immediate explanation involves not Islam but predatory governance and colonialism.
- In the 16th Century, European ships were sailing around the Cape of Good Hope reducing their dependence on overland trading routes to Asia, which was the traditional economic base of the Arabs.
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