Economic History and Economic Underdevelopment

Abstract

Discussing the economic backwardness of Ireland in the late seventeenth century, Sir William Petty delivered himself of an apt, if indelicately worded, opinion. “Their Lazing,” he wrote of the Irish, “seems to me to proceed rather from want of Imployment and Encouragement to Work, than from the natural abundance of Flegm in their Bowels and Blood.” He continued this somewhat unorthodox analysis by listing the factors which destroyed or frustrated the incentives to increase production in Ireland; and, in the process, he succeeded in anticipating more than one modern idea on the subject. He even dealt with visible and disguised unemployment, and recommended, along lines fashionable today, that the surplus labour be employed in the creation of capital: improving rivers and constructing roads, bridges and buildings–“works,” as he succinctly put it, “of much labour and little art.”Although this article concerns neither Petty nor Ireland directly, the former's observations on the latter provide a useful introduction to its principal topic–the historical nature of economic underdevelopment. If we study the earlier history of today's highly developed economies, what sort of economic and social landscape do we find, and how does it compare with the structure of preindustrial economies in the mid twentieth century?