--- title: Why some places grew rich — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Why some places grew rich», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Look at a map at night from space and the bright spots sit on coasts and rivers: water gave drinking water, fish and the cheapest road there was --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / Why some places grew rich # Why some places grew rich Lesson 72 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 15 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/0/) — Look at a map at night from space and the bright spots sit on coasts and rivers: water gave drinking water, fish and the cheapest road there was, so goods and people gathered there. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/1/) — In Europa Universalis, Venice grows fat on its trade node and Spain fills its treasury from American silver mines; the game even makes prices rise, called inflation, when you dig too much gold, and real history did something similar. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/2/) — Real wealth came from many things at once: geography, trade, skills, schools, good laws, inventions and sometimes taking from others; historians still argue which mattered most, and the answer is different for each place. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/3/) — Rich places also change: China and India were the biggest economies for centuries, Europe pulled ahead in the 1800s, and Singapore and South Korea went from poor to rich within one lifetime. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/4/) — So ask not only «what did they have?» but «what did they do with it?» - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/5/) — Most old cities grew beside rivers, lakes or seas, which gave water, fish and cheap transport for goods. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/6/) — In «Guns, Germs and Steel» (1997) Jared Diamond argued that geography, plants and animals gave some regions an early lead; many historians reply that he left out people's choices and politics, so the idea is contested. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/7/) — Venice had little farmland but grew rich from trade between Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, from about 1000 to 1500. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/8/) — Silver from Potosí, in today's Bolivia, flowed to Spain from the 1500s; much was spent on wars, prices rose, Spain's kings ran out of money several times, and much of the silver ended up in China, which wanted silver. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/9/) — In the 1600s the small Netherlands grew rich through trade and banking; in Amsterdam people bought and sold shares, small parts of the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, which gave them a piece of its profits. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/11/) — By some estimates China and India together made about half of the world's goods around 1700; Europe pulled ahead in the 1800s. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/12/) — Singapore became independent in 1965 as a poor port; with trade, schools and clean government it became one of the richest places in the world, and South Korea, poorer than many countries in the 1950s, also grew rich. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/13/) — Norway puts most of its oil money into a huge fund for the future; some other oil countries did not grow rich for most people, which some economists call a «resource curse», an idea that is debated. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/14/) — After 1868 Japan studied factories, schools and laws from other countries and built its own versions, becoming an industrial power within decades. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/15/) — Some countries grew rich partly by taking land, goods and labour from colonies and from enslaved people; how much this explains today's wealth is still debated by historians. - ← previous: [What trade carried: tomatoes, tea, horses, words, religions and diseases](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/) - next →: [Cities: why they grow, and how water and sewers made them safe](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/73-cities-why-they-grow-and-how-sewers-made-them-safe/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)