Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030AD

"This is the last work by perhaps the world’s foremost qualitative economic historian. It’s more empirical than Bairoch. The two were competitors in terms of economic history studies. He’s more sanguine about the advantage of Europe over China and India achieved by 1750, and (as some recent works shows) likely right on that score. Maddison is the only person who has produced the only existent series of quantitative national account statistics, GDP per capita, for most countries of the world since 1820, and for some (like the Roman Empire) going back to the 1st century AD. Everybody who wants to do empirically based economic history has to start with Maddison. Yes. He emphasises the continuous improvement of West European economies since the 16th century, so that the gap with China was already appreciable by the 18th. (In this, as I said, he differs from Bairoch.) He completely dismisses the hedonic equations empiricists and Malthusian historians who believe that until the last century men lived as cavemen in abject poverty and could not accede to anything above the subsistence level. This is a bleak and untrue view of the world. We were not living at subsistence level. If you look at Roman aqueducts, palaces churches, roads, army, as well as Greece, Egypt – this could not have been achieved at subsistence level. Both these two books and Schiavone’s (my next choice) are included because they try to answer, using quantitative and analytic evidence, the ‘mother of all economic growth questions’: why have some countries and continents been able to launch themselves on to a sustainable growth path and others have not, and how global inequality was affected by inequality of mean incomes between countries? Well, the books are not very different in what they do. The books come with one overarching theory as to why Western Europe, particularly England, got ahead. It’s the combination of things we mentioned. Competition between city-states and countries in Europe because Europe, unlike China, was much more diversified politically, so people could move, if they were not accepted, from one country to another. Exiles would go from France to England to the Netherlands etc. Yes. Competition breeds growth, but it’s political competition that breeds growth because different political arrangements are more apt to accept growth. As is openness to the rest of the world, which started with the great exploration, and, of course, there you have the contrast with China, which started with the great explorations at about the same time, with bigger ships and more people, but then decided to stop and go into isolation. Also there’s the intellectual curiosity, which led to technological developments from the Renaissance onwards and also the inheritance from Egypt, Greece and Rome. Also, you’ve got a temperate climate (England’s cold but without the gulf current very few people would live there) and the serendipity of finding coal and so on."