 I was invited to deliver the wider annual lecture after I seized being chairman of the board, which is as it should have been. And I thought about the theme, I think for more than three months. I decided on this unusual subject of developing countries in the world economy situated in long-term historical perspective. Essentially, because it was an unexplored domain, it was an untold story. And I had an intuition that the world was changing, that the significance of developing countries in the world economy was undergoing change. But we had not quite comprehended that changing reality. It was also an experiment, an adventure about choosing a theme that was different, that was new, that did not answer provide answers or all the answers but posed some important questions that people would follow in terms of more research and think about it further. And I must add that I have in the past decade being engaged with economics for much of my lifetime been working at the intersection of economics and politics, economics and philosophy, economics and history. And this was at the intersection of economics and history that was promising. So as I said, it was an experiment. At the time after I finished the lecture, I was thinking of ways of how to reduce it to 7,500 words so it would be a paper in a journal. But many people, the feedback on that lecture from across the world where I traveled through the internet was enormous as people downloaded it from the wider website. And people raised questions, some people raised questions, others asked, why did I not take it further? Some things were left hanging in a tantalizing mode. And a little over two years after I had done the lecture, I decided that it was perhaps worth doing more substantive research on this theme. You know, the intersection of economics and history was an exciting prospect. Yet it seemed more than ambitious to do a book that spans centuries in time and straddle continents in space to engage with so many debates, contemporary debates in development. I consoled myself with the idea that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Yet on a more serious note, I must say as a scholar I enjoy sketching the big picture with bold strokes on a wide canvas. And I could not have thought of a wider canvas. So it is not a book about joining the little dots. It's a book that attempts to sort the wood from the trees. And I can only hope it's not for me to say it is for readers to judge whether I have succeeded. Because this book transformed its nature in process as it were because when it was commissioned by Oxford University Press it was meant to be a long scholarly monograph. And then I was approached by Oxford University Press to consider doing what they described as a trade book, shorter at 75,000 words, without copious footnotes, and accessible to the non-specialist reader. On some reflection I decided it was worth doing. And that is what you have read. The distribution of income and population in the world economy between 1000 AD and 1500 AD remained almost unchanged. And that we saw the beginnings of change in the three centuries from 1500 to 1800. And that was a part of the graduates but discernible economic and social transformation in the West. It was also a period in which Asia, China and India experienced little change in terms of social and economic organization. But if you were to single out the most important factors that led to the beginnings of change in these three centuries in the world economy, I would say it was the voyages of discovery and the colonization of the Americas which essentially came from the search for silver to finance Europe's growing balance of trade deficits with Asia, essentially China and India. But it was also part of a larger process where state power and naval power played an important role in the evolution of countries. And you had a period when this process was led by the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, the voyages of discovery and the colonization of the Americas that was followed by a short period with Holland in the lead. Ultimately, England captured that lead. And this mercantilistic expansion, state power, naval power were among the factors but among that were responsible for the occurrence of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. You know, high wages in Britain compared with other countries, the substitution of coal for wood, the deforestation in England all made a difference. But that Industrial Revolution was to transform the world economy in ways that people living then could not have imagined. That Industrial Revolution spread from Britain to Europe through the first half of the 19th century but also coincided with the second phase of colonialism, this time in Asia and Africa. And what did strike me as something that most people were not conscious of, that even as late as 1820, less than 200 years ago, China and India, two countries in Asia accounted for 50% of the world's population and 50% of the world's income. The period from 1820 to 1950 saw a dramatic transformation of the world economy, which could be most simply described as the rise of the West, Europe, in particular Britain until about 1870, and while Britain and Europe continued to prosper, the rise of North America, in particular the United States thereafter. But this period was also associated with two other changes. The first has been described by many distinguished economic historians as the great divergence when the gap in per capita incomes between the West and the rest widened enormously so that if we consider 1820, the per capita income of Asia was about half the per capita income of Western Europe and North America. By 1950, the per capita income of Asia was one tenth that of Western Europe and North America. And if we were to extract China and India from that, then the asymmetries look even starker, the change between 1820 and 1950. The second characteristic attribute of this change was what I describe as the great specialization, so that Western Europe, North America, and then Japan specialized in the production and export of manufactured goods, whereas Latin America, Asia, and Africa specialized in the production and export of primary commodities. Now, this created an international division of labor that perpetuated under development in what we describe now as the developing world. There is one exception worth noting that the period from 1870 to 1950 was not one of regress for Latin America. It was for Asia and Africa. For Latin America, it's shared both in world population and in world income, increased steadily and in proportion. Now, that was not entirely because of, but it could be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that independence came to Latin America in the early 19th century, between 1810 and 1820, so they could pursue national development strategies and industrialization strategies with more freedom. But that, in essence, is what happened, and there was a kind of cumulative causation, bunch of circles for Europe, vicious circles for Asia. And the politics of imperialism imposed free trade on Asia, and the economics of the transport revolution took away the natural protection that was implicit in geographical barriers in distances as a consequence of which China and India de-industrialized. And slowly but surely, they lost their skills embodied in people, they lost the technological capabilities that were embodied in their economies, and you got the industrialization of Western Europe and you got the de-industrialization of Asia, two sides of the same coin. This is something that was a journey in exploration and discovery in terms of research. I had an intuition that the world had been changing, but it was the research that established for me how much the world had changed. That between 1950 and 2010, the share of Asia, Africa and Latin America had taken together in world population, of course returned to its 1080 levels that had to do with population expansion and demographic transitions in Europe, but its share in world income rose very significantly from less than one fourth in 1950 to almost one half in 2010 in PPP terms. But it is more appropriate to compare it in terms of at current prices and market exchange rates where the share went from something like less than 10% to more than 30%. But that was not all. We also saw in the period from 1970 to 2010 a transformation of the world economy in terms of how manufacturing was distributed across countries in the world. In 1970, developing countries accounted for 8% of world manufacturing value added in constant prices and this proportion was 33% by 2010. In current prices at market exchange rates, this proportion rose from 12% in 1970 to 40% in 2010. At the same time, their share in manufactured exports also multiplied by 5% from 8% to 40%. Now, this was a massive transformation that had gone almost unnoticed. It was in a sense an adult story. But the divergence in per capita incomes persisted. That gap remained wide. The divergence stopped around 1980 and a very modest convergence began then for a few countries and in the early 2000s this was more discernible but even so it was concentrated in a few countries and the income gap between rich and poor countries remained large.