Joel Mokyr – "moh-keer" – is a Nobel-worthy economic scientist, right down to his wingtip shoes. But he is at the same time a brilliant historical scientist. Economics and history have very different intellectual values. Mokyr combines them to give us here an intellectual history of "the origins of the modern economy" back to the times of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon and before.

At Northwestern University in the United States, Mokyr is an honour-draped professor in both the department of economics and the department of history, and teaches also at the University of Tel Aviv. If you didn't know much about how modern economics operates as a field, you would imagine that such combined skills were routine.