The book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, “Why Some Countries Are Rich and Others Are Poor,” is one of the main political economic bestsellers of recent times, an epoch-making work comparable in importance to the works of Samuel Huntington, Jared Diamond or Francis Fukuyama. The authors ask a question that has worried historians, economists and philosophers for centuries: what are the sources of global inequality, why is global wealth distributed so unevenly across countries and regions of the world? The answer to this question is given at the intersection of history, political science and economics, with the involvement of unusually extensive historical material from all eras and from all continents, which turns the book into a real encyclopedia of advanced political economic thought.