Even the bottom-ranked country, Zimbabwe, left its colonial period with a thriving agriculture sector and great mineral wealth.
During the Spanish colonial period, it conducted a thriving cacao trade.
In fact, collections of "wit and wisdom" of famous rulers and politicians seem to have been a thriving literary genre in the Roman period.
So how did Pickens, 44, and Doney, 35, create such a thriving business in a relatively short period of time?
Urayasu was a thriving fishing village during the Edo (Tokugawa) period (1603 1867) but grew only slowly until coastal land-reclamation projects in the 1960s expanded its area fourfold.
Sausage-making was practiced in ancient Egypt and became a thriving industry there during the late Byzantine period, shortly before 641 A.D. Sausages were also standard fare in ancient Greece.
Thanks to Erdoğan's economic policies, Turkey has a thriving television industry, capable of staging elaborate period dramas, and a prosperous family-oriented middle class of observant Muslims eager to watch their own values reflected in a historical imperial setting.
The team hopes the discoveries, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will yield important clues about the ecology of a thriving tropical ecosystem that existed during the period scientists call the mid-Cretaceous.
Nonetheless it runs counter to the intuitions most of us have about the period, and Greene explains the paradoxical thriving of the 19th-century horse with a pleasing balance of narrative analysis and colorful detail.
