CONCEPT
The European Miracle
Landes's thesis that Europe's rise was produced by fragmentation, not strength — no authority powerful enough to kill innovation across the continent.
The European miracle, in Landes's analysis, was not a story of European superiority but of European fragility. Unlike China with its emperor or the Ottoman Empire with its sultan, Europe possessed no centralized authority capable of suppressing innovation uniformly across its territory. When one jurisdiction expelled Huguenots, Jews, or heterodox thinkers, they simply crossed a border. The competitive patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, and city-states produced an environment in which good ideas always had somewhere to go. This structural fragility — the inability of any single authority to coordinate suppression — is what allowed innovation to survive, relocate, and compound across generations into sustained industrial development.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The canonical case is the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Louis XIV expelled the Huguenots — skilled silk weavers, watchmakers, glassblowers, silversmiths, printers, financiers — in the name of religious uniformity. Between two hundred thousand and one million left France for England, the Netherlands, Brandenburg-Prussia, Switzerland, the Cape Colony, and the American colonies. Every