Inclusive economic institutions, secure property rights, unbiased law, open entry, plus inclusive political institutions, broad suffrage and constrained executives, form the book's virtuous circle. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 is the flagship case: Parliament's win over the Crown created the conditions for the Industrial Revolution in the same islands.
The critics' chant: the book is a just-so story where 'good institutions' explains everything and nothing, a recipe that reads 'be Britain.' Geography, culture, and colonial extraction get demoted; the reviewer from the global south notes the recipe's ingredients were often stolen.
The cynical synthesis: inclusion is extraction with a longer time horizon, the elite taxing a thriving commons rather than strip-mining it. On this read the two categories are one continuum, and the only real variable is how patient the powerful are.
Why do inclusive systems keep appearing by accident and surviving by exception?