An interesting exercise is to go through the wikipedia lists of the richest people in different countries. Follow the links for the the top 5 or 10 individuals

An interesting exercise is to go through the wikipedia lists of the richest people in different countries. Follow the links for the the top 5 or 10 individuals listed, and see how they made their fortune. It's a rather high-entropy information dump - you can infer a lot about different parts of the world, from not much reading.