Victoires et Déboires (Successes and Failures). Histoire économique du monde du XVIe siècle à nos jours

"This is a magisterial three-volume economic history of the world from Columbus to Gorbachev. Bairoch covers the entire economic history of the world and he provides lots of numbers, estimates and, at times, indeed guesses, but lots of numbers nevertheless on many things like income, wages trade, urbanisation, income distribution, population and so on. This is crucial for economic historians who want to build on these numbers. He also provides a narrative about development and what made Europe get ahead of China and India , and he talks about the role of the colonies, an issue which has been rather forgotten – whether, for example, colonies contributed to the European metropoles’ development and whether the colonies themselves did not develop precisely because they were colonies. There is a very interesting point that Bairoch makes, which is that colonisation was very bad for the colonies but on the other hand did not fundamentally matter for the metropoles. For sure, the metropoles imposed economic rules which favoured themselves, and thus, under what Bairoch calls ‘the colonial diktat’ they would ban manufacturing production in colonies and would require that colonies only import goods from the metropole and they required that colonies ship all the goods on ships belonging to the metropole. This is a view that many people hold, particularly when you look at Africa after 1960, because there is no doubt that there was disappointment with what Africa accomplished since decolonisation. There was another argument that colonisation set up structures that were inimical to growth. But, on the other hand, it’s not true that colonies were crucial to the growth of the West. Western Europe and America had independent engines of growth already and the contributions of the colonies were not that big. Bairoch argues that China and India were not significantly poorer than England in the 18th century and, in fact, he attributes the rise of Western Europe to its openness to the rest of the world, to political competition between the states, favorable climate, and intellectual curiosity from the Renaissance onward. The industrial revolution, he argues, was less a ‘revolution’ and more a steady evolution. He also shows how meaningless is the idea that the metropole (as Niall Ferguson claims today) followed a policy of ‘free trade’. “Political competition, intellectual curiosity and a temperate climate breed economic and technological development.” Bairoch discusses slavery , its huge human toll and how it affected institutions of the countries where the slaves were moved. He shows how agricultural revolution could not spread southward because new agricultural techniques were designed for moderate climates, so they could spread West to East or East to West, but not North to South. The initial catch-up of the Third World countries after decolonisation was rather successful (with the exception of Africa), but then ‘les années charnières’ (turning point years) of the second oil crisis, increased interest rates, and inability to service the debt plunged most of the Third and Second world into two decades of stagnation. (China and India, due to their relative isolation, did much better, and, of course, China’s institutions changed dramatically for the better at just the same time.) Most of our pre-global crisis world was shaped in the period 1979-80. By extension one can see the years 2008-2010 as another ‘années charnières’. A new world, with a new distribution of economic power will emerge."