Creative innovativeness in full bloom

This chapter reviews the situation at the end of the pre-modern economy. It considers the nature of the human agent, emphasising how a number of regions, were ready for the decisive move into modernity. It concentrates attention on release from the Malthusian trap, achieved by a combined fall in the birth rate and accelerated rise in agricultural productivity. Until the advent of the modern economy, innovation resulted in population expansion but not an increase in income per head; after the entry, the outcome was increasingly a rise in income per head. The chapter discusses the nature of market capitalism and the way it drove economic movement, but was subject to weaknesses, for example the conversion of an entrepreneurial economy into a rentier economy. It concludes by looking at the case of the Netherlands, the leading commercial economy, which failed to be the pioneer industrialiser.