The book compared the long-term economic histories of different regions, specifically Europe, United States, Japan, China, the Arab world, and Latin America.

In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Landes revives, at least in part, several theories he believes have been incorrectly discarded by academics over the previous forty years: He also spends a good deal of effort to debunk claims that the Asian miracle did not happen, was not significant, or was financed by European colonialism, and he draws a correlation between the economic level of a country and the way it treats its women.

[citation needed] Landes and Andre Gunder Frank, author of ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (ISBN 0520214749), are noted for having come to very different conclusions about the long-term significance of economic developments in "the West" during the modern era and publicly debated their findings in 1998 at Northwestern University.

[citation needed] Additionally, an alternate theory relies on literacy and the gap between Protestants and Catholics as an explanation for the difference in economic results.

[2] The economist Paul Krugman remarked in "The Trouble with History", an article published on his MIT-hosted blog, that the book, while containing an enormous amount of information, offered very few ideas.