But the vast differences between the rich and the poor, which the traveller would have noted wherever he went, were much more striking than these differences across regions. An observer at the time would have noticed that people, on average, were better off in Italy, China and England than in Japan or India. 1Īt the time of Ibn Battuta’s travels, India was not richer than the other parts of the world. Three centuries later, the same sentiment was expressed by the seventeenth century French diamond merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier who wrote of the country:Įven in the smallest villages, rice, flour, butter, milk, beans and other vegetables, sugar and sweetmeats, dry and liquid, can be procured in abundance. Indeed, I have seen no region of the earth in which provisions are so plentiful.’Īnd he had seen much of the world, having travelled to China, west Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In the fourteenth century, the Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta described Bengal in India as ‘A country of great extent, and one in which rice is extremely abundant. Economics is the study of how people interact with each other, and with the natural environment, in producing their livelihoods.This process, which we call the capitalist revolution, has been accompanied by growing threats to our natural environment, and by unprecedented global economic inequalities.Under this new way of organizing the economy, advances in technology and specialization in products and tasks raised the amount that could be produced in a day’s work. This was associated with the emergence of a new economic system called capitalism, in which private property, markets and firms play a major role.Since the 1700s, increases in average living standards became a permanent feature of economic life in many countries.How capitalism revolutionized the way we live, and how economics attempts to understand this and other economic systems History, instability, and growth Global economy Inequality Innovation
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