The author has spent most of his professional life either developing technology or helping developing countries develop their industries. After twenty years of successful development work, he realised that technology and economics were not enough and that, if one were to be able to answer requests for advice on more general policy matters with a clear conscience, one had better learn about what had worked and what had failed in the past. After fifteen years reading history he had reached the stage where it seemed to be worth writing a book on the subject, and ten years further on here is the result, a combination of development, technical, economics and history know-how. This unusual but possibly useful combination may be a reason not only for his ideas on development but also for his novel, but hopefully plausible, explanations of causes of historical events such as the decline of the Dutch Republic during the last third of the 17th century and the "Golden Age" and its end in the early 1970s.