A Long-Forgotten Algorithm for Europe's Rise to Greatness: The Hörnigk Strategy

How does a country grow rich? Why do some countries grow rich much faster than others? Why do some nations experience growth and prosperity, while others don't? Why did Europe eventually overtake the rest of the world, becoming the first region to industrialize and experience a progressive economic advantage over the rest of the world? These are the big questions asked in the modern social sciences, not only in more recent times (as witnessed by the post-2000 Great Divergence debate fuelled by two books by scholars working at the University of California), but also since the days of Karl Marx or Max Weber. Philipp Wilhelm von Hornigk's ‘Austria Supreme’ provides a concise and powerful answer to them. People had even raised them way before. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourses, these questions were at the core of the ‘rich’ country versus ‘poor’ country debates. All major epigones of the Scottish Enlightenment, including David Hume and Adam Smith, would comment on this problem. But this discourse was even older than that. It had been raised in early modern European political economy discourse at least since the sixteenth century and the days of Giovanni Botero, the Italian author who wrote a major treatise on cities and economic development. It is not usually acknowledged that the big rift that developed in economic fortune between Asia and the West around AD 1800 had a prehistory that predates the industrial revolution – one major element and cause of the Great Divergence – by centuries. Nor is it well understood what role ideas played in this process – that is, the intellectual history of industrialization and Europe's eventual economic supremacy. With the present text, written by a seventeenth-century diplomat living in Habsburg, Austria, who no schoolchild and social science student of today would be expected to have heard of, we have an answer at last, however partial or incomplete. It was the ‘Hornigk Strategy’ that made European nations rich. Perhaps, there is something to be learned from this. At least, this man should receive the fame he deserves.