"Guns, Germs, and Steel" is probably the closest you'll get to that.
If someone can feed 10 people instead of 1 person, the rest has enough time at their hands to do other things.
So the theory goes that Middle East and East Asia basically were the lucky ones to get that bootstrap, and other bordering regions (e.g. Europe) got it from there; while Africa, Australia and the Americas were not so lucky, and by the time they got all those things, they came on ships alongside some technologically advanced and well-armed people who weren't exactly on a humanitarian mission to spread the riches.
Most of them would already went down the drain without all that money.