The book "How the West Became Rich" by N. Rosenberg and L. Birzdell is considered one of the best explanations of the "European miracle" - explosive rates of economic growth at first in England in the first third of the 19th century, and then in other countries of Western Europe and in the USA. Prior to this, for several thousand years of written history in all human civilizations, the vast majority of people lived in a gloomy Malthusian world of need, illiteracy, unsanitary conditions, epidemics and periodic hunger in lean years.