"The development of a market economy of course favours those who can read and write. It is therefore no accident of history that readers came to occupy what were now becoming the globe's wealthiest lands... For above all, it was the ability to read that created the Modern Human, and it was no coincidence that this emergence occurred at the intersect of the most-frequented land, river and sea routes that bore printed books and other reading material: widespread literacy is everywhere foremost a geo-economic occurrence. In more affluent eighteenth-century Europe, within a well-defined network of roads and ferriage, the escalating ability to read brought about the Enlightenment, which gave to the world, among other things, the three crucial concepts of the free use of reason, empirical method of science and universal human progress. For where there was wealth, there were schools; where there were schools, there was great literacy; and where there was greater literacy, rapid advances occurred in all human endeavours."
From the book A History of Reading by Steven Roger Fischer, Page 254
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