Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this book when I read a favourable review and thought it would be interesting to explore the reasons why some states succeed economically, while others never `take off' and others take flight but stall. I smelt a rat when I started to find that the style of writing is repetitive and circular and when I found some straightforward factual errors. The authors say that the Spanish Armada was pursued (by the English) `all round the coasts of Britain'. Well no: we stopped pursuing it off the coast of Kent, and it sailed home via the North Sea and the Atlantic because there was no other way back. The Armada was largely destroyed by bad weather, off the West coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Likewise, the authors say - as if there is some significance in this - that at one time England and Hungary were ruled by the same dynasty, the Angevins. Well, it depends what you mean by `Angevin': it was a prolific house; but the Angevin dynasty in Hungary did not come to power until the fourteenth century, by which time we English call our kings `Plantagenets'. They may have been descended from Angevins, but conventionally the Angevins ruled England in the twelfth century; and they were only remotely related to those who ruled in Hungary, Naples, Anjou and Provence. The detail matters. If you can't get the facts straight, what hope is there for the grand theory? When you look at the `case studies', the history here is truly crude - almost like Sellars and Yeatman's `1066 and All That', but without the humour. Take English history, which I know something about. The authors place far too much importance on the Black Death of 1381 (feudalism did not come to an end overnight as a result of that event, catastrophic though it was). They accept Geoffrey Elton's account of the `Tudor Revolution in Government', when this was largely discredited by medievalists, almost as soon as it was formulated. They regard Christopher Hill's account of the so-called `English Revolution' of 1640-60 as being the last word, ignoring at least four decades of criticism. They overemphasize the importance of the Glorious Revolution and ignore how English society was between 1688 and 1832 (and beyond), notwithstanding the Industrial Revolution. They constantly confuse `England' with `Britain'. If the treatment of English history is so brief and sweeping as to be a caricature, it makes me wonder about the history of other countries; and I am very suspicious of the authors' treatment of Japan, Venice and Ancient Rome in particular. With regard to Rome, they take it as read that the Roman Empire declined before it fell; but there is a very respectable view that it simply fell, when invaded by the Barbarians; and the authors detect the seeds of decay as far back as the reign of Augustus. What then of Gibbon's view that mankind's happiest days were passed in the age of the Antonines, in the second century A.D.? The problem is that the authors purport to be experts on everything and on every age, when in fact they are masters of nothing but a theory; and the theory is so broad and vague as to be almost incapable of proof or disproof. Thus centralisation + inclusive institutions = lasting economic success and prosperity. I think I go along with this to some extent; but the terms are very elastic. What degree of centralisation counts as such? What is meant by `inclusive' or for that matter `extractive'? They may be right about the USSR and China; but I am not sure they have explained why the former failed and why the seemingly inexorable rise of the latter may be an illusion.