World Economic History Research Articles

Explaining the industrial transition: a non-Malthusian perspective

The large-scale structure of world economic history exhibits three steady states punctuated by two phase transitions. The first transition arrived with the domestication of plants and animals; the second with the invention of engines capable of converting thermal to mechanical energy for applications in mining, manufacturing, and transportation. Yet, although both transitions led to increases in the absolute size of the economy, they affected the standard of living differently. Whereas the Industrial Revolution resulted in sustained growth in real per capita income for more than two centuries, over nine millennia the Agricultural Revolution spent itself in population growth that left per capita income insignificantly higher, and possibly lower than the level prevailing under hunting and gathering. This pattern raises three fundamental questions in economic history: why did the first great technological transition produce secular stasis in living standards? Why has the second yielded both steady growth in population and rising living standards? What triggered the transition from the stationary agricultural state to the progressive industrial state?

John R. Commons and John Maynard Keynes on Economic History and Policy: The 1920s and Today

In a pair of 1925 lectures, John Maynard Keynes described world economic history with reference to a classification of stages developed by John R. Commons. This article examines Keynes’s two 1925 lectures in the context of Commons’s writings. It spotlights lesser-known aspects of Commons’s scholarship and helps clarify ambiguities in Keynes’s two addresses. It also identifies a key document, written by Commons, upon which Keynes relied when developing his presentations. In addition, the article explains how the work of Commons and Keynes in the 1920s has relevance for the contemporary development of evolutionary Keynesianism (which can also be called Post-Keynesian Institutionalism).

THE STATISTICIAN’S GUIDE TO UTOPIA: THE FUTURE OF GROWTH

In this article I paint a concise portrait of world economic and population history. Key factors include the world population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The role of technology in relation to the environmental impact of economic activity is represented by an Environmental Efficiency Factor (EEF). It is asserted that any modern political theory aspiring to comprehensiveness should deal with four subject matters: The legitimate level of human interference with the rest of nature; the level of the human population; the nature and extent of the economy and technology. Past GDP growth rates combined with UN population projections result in a number of scenarios of future real GDP to the year 2300. In the course of inquiry, three measures of all time economic activity are introduced: All time world GDP per capita, accumulated world GDP and the annual growth rate of accumulated world GDP. In conclusion, I describe under what circumstances it is conceivable that the growth economy can persist for at least 300 more years. Directions of inquiry are offered to three groups: Those who want to maintain the growth economy for as long as possible; those who want world population to stay, in the long run, at a level comparable to that of today; and those who want to minimize environmental pressure.

Origins and growth of the global economy: from the fifteenth century onward

The global market of the 21st century came into existence to produce products and services for mass consumption. Its purpose is to create consumer cultures in nations that fully participate in its benefits. It is the product of cooperation among industrial nations following World War II. Seavoy traces out the evolution of the global market from its foundations in imperial commercial rivalries of the mid-15th century to the present. The global economy rests on the foundation of imperial commercial rivalries that began when Columbus sailed west to America and da Gama sailed east to India. Thereafter, Spanish and Portuguese global commerce was challenged by the Dutch, English, and French. During the 19th century these nations rapidly expanded into the political vacuum of Africa and elsewhere because industrialization gave them-and Germany, Japan, and Russia-the power to intrude into subsistence cultures worldwide. After World War II the political leaders of the United States and Western Europe were determined to end the imperial commercial rivalries that had contributed to World War I and World War II. Imperial commercial rivalries would be replaced by cooperative commercial politics among the principal industrial nations. Behind the shield of NATO, Western European nations and the United States devised rules and institutionalized them in the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, European Union, and NAFTA that rapidly increased the volume of global trade. As Seavoy points out, increasing trade had three purposes, full employment in industrial nations which, in turn, would create the political stability needed for democratic governance, and the production of an abundance of products so that the citizens of participating nations could enjoy the benefits of consumer cultures. The creation of consumer cultures required the dissolution of obsolete empires and concentrating production on products for export among industrial nations. Nations that failed to fully participate rapidly fell behind in acquiring the technologies and management skills necessary to produce the abundance of products that could create consumer cultures. The global market and its derivative, consumer cultures, could only have come into existence during the peace following World War II. In Seavoy's analysis the absence of world wars results in a world where global economy and peace are synonymous terms. This is a sweeping synthesis that will be of interest to scholars, students, and the reading public interested in economic development and world economic history.

Argentina, a 'Parasite State' on the Verge of Disintegration

Argentina has more than twice the total debt of India whilst the latter has 28 times more population in roughly equivalent territories. According to Poder Ciudadano, a local NGO, in 1999 Argentine political parties spent 440 times more than those of Chile. These gross asymmetries help to show that Argentina's financial troubles must be attributed to her own political practices rather than to adverse circumstances or foreign scapegoats. By December 2001, overspending had manifestly destroyed the Argentine financial system. Across-the-board violations of property rights followed, through bank withdrawal restrictions and a debt default that was the biggest in world economic history. This paper analyses the breakdown of federal institutions, the atomisation of power and the erosion of governability that ensued as a consequence of the financial crisis. Mafia-style political practices, an endemic evil in the background of Argentine politics, jumped to the forefront as a consequence of this institutional breakdown.

ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age

Andre Gunder Frank asks us to re-orient our views away from Eurocentrism - to see the rise of the West as a mere blip in what was, and is again becoming, an Asia-centered world. In a bold challenge to received historiography and social theory he turns on its head the world according to Marx, Weber, and other theorists, including Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel, and Wallerstein. Frank explains the Rise of the West in world economic and demographic terms that relate it in a single historical sweep to the decline of the East around 1800. European states, he says, used the silver extracted from the American colonies to buy entry into an expanding Asian market that already flourished in the global economy. Resorting to import substitution and export promotion in the world market, they became Newly Industrializing Economies and tipped the global economic balance to the West. That is precisely what East Asia is doing today, Frank points out, to recover its traditional dominance. As a result, the 'center' of the world economy is once again moving to the 'Middle Kingdom' of China. Anyone interested in Asia, in world systems and world economic and social history, in international relations, and in comparative area studies, will have to take into account Frank's exciting reassessment of our global economic past and future.

The variance of UK GDP: Reduced form estimates under fixed and floating exchange rate regimes

Macroeconomic theory suggests that the choice of exchange rate regime (or, equivalently, monetary regime) is affected by the incidence of real or monetary shocks. Anecdotally, the Bretton Woods period in world economic history is thought to have been characterized by nominal, rather than real, shocks. We examine this proposition and find some evidence for it. A reduced form equation for aggregate output supply is estimated in a cointegrating framework. The equilibrium error is identified as the conditional variance. Despite the increase in the unconditional variance of output, there is no evidence for a corresponding shift in the variance of output once proper account has been taken of supply‐side changes.

Thailand's macroeconomic miracle: stable adjustment and sustained growth

This study resulted from a World Bank study of macroeconomic policy reviewing the recent experience of 18 countries as they tried to maintain economic stability in the face of external economic shocks like rising international prices and interest rates. The project particularly focused on the periods 1974-79, 1980-82, and 1983-90. The authors describe the performance of Thailand's economy in recent decades as stunning--it has experienced rapid growth, declining poverty, and macroeconomic stability in a volatile economic and political environment. However, they soberly conclude that the Thai experience was short of miraculous inasmuch as other countries similarly situated and equally endowed could have adopted the same macroeconomic policies and achieved the same results. This book explains that the country's policymakers, most notably the conservative bureaucrats, held attitudes that caused Thailand to avoid major mistakes. This conclusion has broad implications for the world's economic history, namely that the destabilization experienced by other countries in reaction to external shocks was not a foregone conclusion; instead it was in part a consequence of those countries' own policy responses and could have been averted. Part 1 describes the economic and political setting for Thailand's macroeconomic achievement while Part 2 examines the shocks themselves and Thailand's adjustment to them.

The Economic Crisis in Russia

The Russian economy has been going through an extremely grave crisis in the last few years on a scale that is unequaled in modem peacetime world economic history and that in terms of the decline of production and living standard is comparable to the rigors of wartime and the occupation of part of the country's territory, as was the case in the Soviet Union during the Patriotic War. Contrary to the hopes of many ordinary citizens and scientists, the dimensions of the crisis are growing with the expansion of the market and private property. The more capitalism there is, the worse matters become in the economy. There is no end to the crisis in sight. That the worst is yet to come is evidenced in particular by the grain-procurement crisis, which has brought the country to the brink of starvation and financial catastrophe.

The Economic Crisis in Russia: Possible Ways Out

The Russian economy has been going through an extremely grave crisis in the last few years on a scale that is unequaled in modem peacetime world economic history and that in terms of the decline of production and living standard is comparable to the rigors of wartime and the occupation of part of the country's territory, as was the case in the Soviet Union during the Patriotic War. Contrary to the hopes of many ordinary citizens and scientists, the dimensions of the crisis are growing with the expansion of the market and private property. The more capitalism there is, the worse matters become in the economy. There is no end to the crisis in sight. That the worst is yet to come is evidenced in particular by the grain-procurement crisis, which has brought the country to the brink of starvation and financial catastrophe.

No escape from the laws of world economics

The artificial division of the world into ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ does not correspond to the reality of contemporary world development; the real struggle is between the US, the EC and Japan, as the world is becoming increasingly divided into three or more blocs. But nothing can ensure independence from the process of world economic development and history: neither ‘policy’ nor ‘ideology’. For all regimes, democratic and non‐democratic alike, it is dependence within the global system which establishes the framework for policy and political practice. Even the ‘choice of the people’ is determined by economics. The development of political social democracy in the West has been much less the cause than the consequence of success within the capitalist world‐economy. As long as the debt burden continues and mounts, the debt‐ridden economies of the South will suffer and their democratic development be prevented or threatened. The same is valid for Eastern Europe's new or aspiring democracies. But freedom of the market does not equal democratic freedom: on the contrary, in the market it is ‘one dollar, one vote’, so that ‘many dollars means many votes and no dollar – no vote’. In the absence of economic power or electoral political democracy, the people of Eastern Europe were obliged to organise themselves in grassroots social movements of participant democracy. In the South also, the economic crisis and lack of electoral political democracy obliges the people to organise and mobilise among themselves to create a civil democracy.

Third world incomes before World War I: Some comparisons

Existing estimates and conjectures concerning per capita incomes in the Third World before World War I are summarized and are augmented with new ones derived from the work of the United Nations International Comparison Project (ICP). Inspection of the older estimates reveals that they present a misleading picture of the level and distribution of Third World incomes historically and are an unsound basis for some generalizations about Third World economic history. The radical revisions of the ICP for recent times are held to apply to the past as well, raising questions about existing accounts and overviews of the economic history of the Third World. The alleged desperate poverty of India and China before World War I is treated with particular skepticism. The historical estimates also are used to address questions of international economic convergence raised by W. Baumol 1986, ( American Economic Review, 76, 1072–1085).

Ming observers of Ming decline: some Chinese views on the “seventeenth century crisis” in comparative perspective

Most students of Middle Eastern history in the West will probably recognize the title of this paper as an allusion to Bernard Lewis's well-known article “Ottoman observers of Ottoman decline”. The allusion is meant to be more than a mere play on words, however, for Professor Lewis's discussion of the reactions of Ottoman statesmen to the crises that rocked their society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries contains much that is relevant to an understanding of Chinese reactions to similar crises in the Ming (1368–1644) empire at about the same time. Indeed, whether or not one accepts the still controversial notion that there was a “general crisis” in seventeenth-century world economic and political history, it has become increasingly clear in recent years that during the period from approximately 1550 to 1680, a revolution in world monetary history, sharp fluctuations in the levels of international and domestic trade, dramatic increases in governmental expenditure, significant changes in the growth rates and geographical distribution of population, deteriorating climatic conditions, and outbreaks of epidemic disease affected many economies, including those of the Ming, Ottoman, and Spanish empires, in ways that rulers, officials, clerics, and political commentators from London to Edo found deeply disturbing.

The third world economic history and development group: A selection of recent papers

The third world economic history and development group: A selection of recent papers

Économies des vivres, vies de l'économie. Présentation.

Cette présentation développe les motifs qui ont conduit la rédaction de la revue à réunir des contributions concernant les évolutions actuelles de différentes économies vivrières. Elle en retient trois : l'importance de la question dans l'histoire économique mondiale ; le mouvement de mondialisation des flux économiques et donc des flux vivriers ; la spécificité des évolutions d'économies pourtant comparables dans leur structure. Elle insiste sur la nécessité de descriptions plus empiristes des économies vivrières ; sur la nécessité de spécifier les catégories de l'économie politique selon les situations historiques ; elle s'interroge sur les dimensions anthropologiques de l'histoire économique.

S S R C/Third World Economic History Group

S S R C/Third World Economic History Group