Higher in Athens. After the Greek Golden Age Athens was never the capital of an empire again. No doubt there were times when surplus wages for craftsmen in Constantinople before the 1890s. But most of the history of agricultural societies is of population growing as fast or faster than productivity so most people lived on the verge of starvation. This only started to change permanently with modern economic growth kicking off ~1870. NW Europe was the first region of the world to end famine and the last one was in the 1840s. Most of the history of humanity is of poverty. Thankfully we now have the social technology, capitalism, to end that, even if it is unevenly distributed.
Well part of the reason that famines were reduced in parts of Europe was precisely that capitalism/imperialism exported misery abroad, sometimes across the world, sometimes next door (see the Irish Famine). Those "NW Europe" countries you refer were the metropoles of empires or otherwise were at the top of the food chain of the economic system. It is natural they they were the first tk benefit from industrial-age exponential growth in productivity. It's funny that you say "it's just unevenly distributed", as if that wasn't a fundamental feature of capitalism ;)
Anyway, I would pin it rather on technological developments, than exactly the system of capitalism.
Misery is the natural condition of man. Its presence does not need to be explained but its absence.
Uneven distribution is a natural feature of economic systems as a subset of ecological systems. Communism can’t make economies of scale or agglomeration effects not exist by fiat.
Continued economic growth is due to technological developments, which are due to capitalism. The joint stock company and industrial research lab led to modern economic growth.
But I didn't say anything about communism, we're talking about capitalism. Though I also don't understand how communist states cannot have economies of scale x)
What I'm saying is that capitalism was concurrent with a too many developments and transformations, for us to be able to simplistically say "capitalism creates prosperity" (let alone the even stronger "capitalism creates prosperity and nothing else can").
