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This is a very important book for understanding historical socio-economics. I plan on re-reading it again someday, but the one and only negative I can point out is that my copy has oversaturated typeset that is not crisp, almost like it was all written in bold, and that limits how much my eyes can take in a sitting. I might have to seek out a better copy in hardback; the book is worth it.

This book completes a trilogy of books, the first published in 1994, the second in 1996, and this in 1998. The original thesis was developed in the 1980's. All three are worth reading but this can also stand by itself. The book follows the various cultures of the world and describes how geography, governance, leadership, and cultural identity (including language and religion) determine how and why some societies have flourished while others have faltered (or never even fully developed). Sound familiar? It seems that Jared Diamond’s hugely acclaimed book Guns, Germs, and Steel, derives much of his central thesis from Sowell’s trilogy, and never gives any credit.

One difference is that Diamond paints broadly in terms of differentiation from the time of mankind’s emergence from Africa, whereas Sowell is focused in more detail on what happened after the fall of the Roman Empire, when much of humanity was plunged backward a thousand years, and how we crawled out of that period of barbarism. Sowell’s approach means we can rely on more accurate historical documents rather than speculate on anthropological findings. But the same ideas of trade routes, disease, transfer of ideas, and religion are straight out of Sowell and yet Diamond does not reference Sowell at all in his extensive bibliography.

One example: why do so many people across the world (and throughout history) begrudge the Jews their success? The simple answer (distilled from Sowell masterful explanation) is that people hate a middle man. You see it now in direct-to-market advertising: "Skip the middle man, buy direct!� Yet, before Amazon and global worldwide shipping, middle men were absolutely essential to keeping the wheels of trade turning. And why is trade important? Because it is easier than conquest and subjugation of foreign cultures. Simply put, the Jews made a name for themselves providing this middleman function. Bonus feature: see how this all plays in in modern Ukraine with its tension between Slavic and Germanic historical influences.

With either Diamond or Sowell I like that history is not reduced to wars, treaties, inter-marriages of the royal courts and such, but is more profoundly influenced by the realities of everyday issues such as food supply, skilled labor, or public versus private innovation and development. The advantage of reading just the last of the three books is that it also includes a fifty page concluding summary that ties all three books together. It really puts history and economic theory in a whole new light. This and Emmanuel Todd’s The Explanation of Ideology are probably the two most important books I’ve read that show how the world really works (as opposed to the artificial constructs of political or economic theory).