SUMMARY
This paper reviews the growing body of evidence on the relative economic standing of different regions of the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In general, it does not find support for Euro-centric claims regarding Western Europes early economic lead. The Eurocentric claims are based primarily on estimates of per capita income, which are plagued by conceptual problems, make demands on historical data that are generally unavailable, and use questionable assumptions to reconstruct early per capita income. A careful examination of these conjectural estimates of per capita income, however, does not support claims that Western Europe had a substantial lead over the rest of the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. An examination of several alternative indices of living standards in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuriessuch as real wages, labor productivity in agriculture, and urbanizationalso fails to confirm claims of European superiority. In addition, this paper examines the progress of global disparitiesincluding the presence of regional patternsusing estimates of per capita income.