These values to some extent inhibited growth: as a general rule, teaching and stipulations about legacies meant that families found it hard to accumulate capital over successive generations because inheritance was progressive and egalitarian; in Europe, primogeniture concentrated resources in the hands of one child, and paved the way for great fort

sanguine

It is easy to forget that the feast of Thanksgiving, first celebrated by Pilgrim Fathers to mark their safe arrival in a land of plenty, was also a commemoration of a campaign against globalisation: it was not only hailing the discovery of a new Eden, but triumphantly rejecting the paradise at home that had been destroyed.

grandiloquent,

Curiosity, in his words, was nothing more than a disease.

The Puritans who settled New England did so in protest against the changes that had accompanied Europe’s rise and against the affluence that followed. They were reacting to the strange stream of new ideas and goods that made the world seem a very different place—where Chinese porcelain was appearing on household dining tables, where marriage of peo

Maria-Theresa’s succession in the 1740s provoked outbreaks of fighting from the Americas to the Indian subcontinent that lasted nearly a decade. The result when matters were finally settled in 1748 was that Cap Breton in Canada and Madras in India changed hands between the French and the British.

bibulous,

There were many reasons for Britain’s ultimate success. Scholars have noted, for example, that levels of social and economic inequality were lower than in other countries in Europe, and that the bottom tiers of the population had noticeably higher levels of calorie consumption than their continental peers.29