Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, industrialization has been the key to modern economic growth. The fact that modern industry originated in Britain, and spread initially to north-western Europe and North America, implied a dramatic divergence in living standards between the industrial North (or "West") and a non-industrial, or even de-industrializing, South (or "Rest"). This nineteenth-century divergence, which had profound economic, military, and geopolitical implications, has been studied in great detail by many economists and...