In the world before 1950 it was rare for a poor country without significant natural resources to become rich. The moves led by the United States to cut tariffs in the 1950s prompted the ‘Economic Development’ report in 1958 in which T.K. Whitaker (1916- ), Ireland’s then top civil servant, proposed the end of protectionism and the embracement of re-emerging globalisation by attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) to boost exporting. In a 1957 memorandum on the failure of Irish economic policy and the general sense of hopelessness in the country, Whitaker warned that “without a sound and progressive economy, political independence would be a crumbling facade.” Two decades later in 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) also faced a choice as it had been over a century since China had been the world’s biggest economy — Angus Maddison (1926-2010), the renowned economics historian, chronicled the grim intervening times here.