How to see the world economy: statistics, maps, and Schumpeter's camera in the first age of globalization

Abstract

AbstractHow we assess globalization is largely determined by how we see the world economy. This article follows a disagreement about how to see the world economy among economists in Germany and Austria in the first age of globalization from the 1870s until the First World War. Absorbing metaphors from contemporary developments in media technologies, the debate pitted historical economists, who used statistics and cartography to make visible what they called the ‘world economic organism’, against marginalist economists, including a young Joseph Schumpeter, who rejected panoramic descriptions of the world economy for a narrow focus on prices. In a forgotten chapter in the conceptual genealogy of globalization, the debates of German-speaking economists initiated a persistent divide in how to see the world economy: either in the spatially expanding networks of communication and trade or in the wandering movement of prices on the world markets.