Emma Rothschild's Reading List
Emma Rothschild is the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University, and Honorary Professor of History and Economics at Cambridge University. She has written extensively on economic history and the history of economic thought. Her latest book is The Inner Life of Empires.
Open in WellRead Daily app →Economic History (2012)
Scraped from fivebooks.com (2012-01-02).
Source: fivebooks.com
Sunil S Amrith · Buy on Amazon
"This book tells an extraordinary story, which has been very little studied. It is about what Sunil Amrith calls “Asia’s age of migration” in the late 19th and early 20th century, when 27 million Indians and almost 20 million Chinese emigrated to Southeast Asia. These patterns of migration were very different from the much more familiar Atlantic migrations. Many of the migrants were undocumented and literally nameless. Amrith quotes a remark by an earlier demographer: “Migration is the result of an idea – an idea of what lies somewhere else.” This book really was a revelation to me. It shows the scale of migration within Asia over the past 150 years and the extent to which modern Asia, including the great successes of Asian economies, has been shaped by migration. It is a very different pattern of migration, of circular and short-term migration, of what Amrith calls sojourning, which hasn’t really been studied until now. And also it was a revelation about the possibilities of finding archives of migrants who were nameless and often illiterate but who nonetheless shaped the countries to which they moved. I think it makes one conceive of both China and India, as well as Southeast Asian countries, as transnational societies in a way that hasn’t really been studied in great detail. And the diasporas of both India and China are hugely important in the world economy."
Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo · Buy on Amazon
"The authors talk about understanding the economic lives of the poor and they argue against large, universal solutions. They are very optimistic about finding empirical evidence, both through experiments in policies that work or don’t work and through actually talking to people who are poor. One of the things that comes across so strongly in this book is the centrality of what Banerjee and Duflo call the sense of security – of how much poverty has to do with insecurity and how tremendously important it is, for the people they are talking to, to have a job that is regular and to have the sort of social security arrangements that are taken for granted across much of Europe. Yes, they have and they actually go and talk to people who are really poor, about their lives, their economic lives and their hopes. It did make me think about history as well, because it is called Poor Economics and I wondered why we don’t have more poor history – that is to say history that really is about the economic lives of the poor, rather than about how people have measured poverty or how people have tried to alleviate poverty or policies against poverty. So it was a very inspiring book for me as a historian. As with my first choice, it looks at people who are poor and shows that they also have ideas and shape the economy. I think policies have actually worked in many of the countries that are now most developed. In Britain the poverty that was so terrifying to people in the late 19th century was to a great extent got rid of by the policies of the early welfare state as well as by economic growth. Europe is a great success story in reducing poverty. In countries that are still relatively poor, namely China and India, one of the really exciting things that has happened in the last 20 years is that there are many millions of people who are moving out of poverty. I see that in India, and it is a tremendously important change in the world economy. There are parts of Africa where people are moving out of poverty. Things are changing in terms of which countries it is that are “dealing with” poverty. In terms of financial influence, India, China and Brazil’s role has increased enormously. In some ways European countries aren’t as confident as they should be about the successes of a hundred years of reforms and of reduction in the poverty of their population."
Amitav Ghosh · Buy on Amazon
"I love this book. It was a book that, as I was getting towards the end, I wanted to read slower and slower and slower so I wouldn’t finish it. The weekly clothes market on the Singapore River, which is a scene fairly early in the novel, is a brilliant illustration of the kinds of exchanges within Asia that are so interesting to historians. He calls it the ‘Wordy-Market,’ which is a wonderful phrase. The novel is about friendship, commerce and empire as well as being about the tragic story of opium. It’s a great illustration of one of those novels which are themselves marvellous histories of economic life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Tobacco is not steering the world economy in the way that opium did, but there have been many comparisons made between opium and tobacco and I think they are very compelling indeed. The expansion of cigarette use across large parts of Southeast Asia is really terrifying. Energy commodities are obviously going to be central to the 21st-century world economy, and everything that has to do with processing fossil fuels. The largest issue for the world economy is global climate change and recent studies of permafrost in the Arctic are extraordinarily perturbing. I think that the conflict over energy, which is a conflict with many different dimensions, is bound to be central."