Sarah Paine

And you look at things long prior, like Michelangelo and things, Leonardo da Vinci.

It's just a lot of these really bright people.

It's my guess.

It's related to all of this.

I think the Industrial Revolution doesn't begin in England.

And the Industrial Revolution isn't strictly industry.

Yeah, it's about textiles and steam engines and railroads and things, but it's also about institutions.

One of the big things for the British was insurance, so that when you do your trading vessel and the whole thing sinks,

You don't bankrupt all your investors because you've got that boat insured.

And then banking, banking rules, so you can't just rip off everybody's cash.

And so Britain, because it's surrounded with the moat, becomes a banking center because it's unlikely in a war to have

some alien army come and just open all the vaults and take everyone's money.

So there are these institutional things.

And then the British trading countries, like the Dutch Empire, want to be able to trade in peace.

So they want people to just follow laws.

So it's not surprising the founding father of international law is a member of the Dutch Republic, Hugo Grotius.

It's this gravitation, the Romans are gravitating towards law and institutions, and then these competing places so no one controls.

I think the question is, what's special about Europe rather than why it should have been somewhere else?

Well, communism is a really lousy system, so they did that.

In the 19th century, they have all these peasant rebellions where they're literally losing tens of millions of people that are just devastating the country.