In these politically turbulent times, the “illusion of democracy is fading worldwide” as one pundit wrote recently. There is a growing sense in the West that “democracy” is not working well, but there is not yet a full and clear recognition of that fact.

It’s now been nearly 35 years since E.L. Jones first published his watershed book The European Miracle. Jones’s history of Europe’s economic development examined the reasons why Europe—a comparatively poor and backward part of the world in the Middle Ages—somehow became the wealthiest and most productive place on earth in the nineteenth century. The fundamental question remains: why did Europe surpass other civilizations1such as Islam and China—which had once been much richer than the west?