Dan Drezner, at his blog at the Foreign Policy blog site, lists his selections for the top ten books of international economic history. Let me raid his list plus commentary:
1. Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (2007). I've already tagged this book as an interesting read. If nothing else, the first chapter of this book - "The Sixteen-Page Economic History of the World" - actually matches the audacity of the title. As I said, I don't completely buy Clark's explanation of Malthus + genetics = Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. His attempt to explain away the irrelevance of institutions doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Still, I will say I better appreciated the heyday of mercantilism after reading Clark. (KA: I agree with the criticism, but think the book is better than the critique suggests. I think Dan thinks so too, but doesn't want to get into any extended arguments.)
2. Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich (1986). Perfect when paired with Clark, because Rosenberg and Birdzell present the classical argument for why Western Europe was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. (KA: read this first.)
3. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). The third leg in the triad of "why did Europe dominate the globe?" explanations. If Clark focuses on genetics/culture, and Rosenberg and Birdzell focus on institutions, Diamond proffers a geographical determinism. Simply put, he thinks the temperate climate of Eurasia was bound to produce the most sophisticated societies with the most advanced animals, germs, and technologies. Diamond's argument compliments rather substitutes for the institutions and culture arguments. If nothing else, it is impossible to read this book and ever buy the ending to War of the Worlds. (KA: you already know everything about this book.)
4. John Nye, War, Wine and Taxes (2007). David Ricardo's classic example of comparative advantage was English wool for Portuguese wine. Nye explodes the "natural" aspect of this trade, demonstrating how high tariffs against French wine proved a boon to both the Portuguese and English beer distillers. Nye stretches his argument too far at times, but the interrelationship between war, protectionism, and statebuilding is pretty damn fascinating. (KA: this one I have not read.)
5. Douglas Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (1996). Irwin's book is more a history of economic thought than economic history, but nevertheless tells a remarkable story: how did the idea of free trade knock off mercantilism, protectionism, strategic trade theory, and other doctrines? (KA: since I think one of the big problems with current economics teaching is its deliberately obscuring ahistoricism, I always appreciated this book.)
6. Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and History (1999). A lucid, detailed and fascinating study of how the nineteenth century of globalization went down. When anyone argues that the current (fast fading?) era of globalization is historically unique, take the hardcover version of this book and whack them on the head with it. (KA: I have not read this.)
7. Jeffry Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2006). This book is to the twentieth centiury as Williamson and O'Rourke's book is to the nineteenth - except it's written for a wider audience, so it's a more accessible read. Accessible doesn't mean simple, however - this book is chock full of interesting arguments, cases, and counterarguments. (KA: I haven't read this, but think now that I should.)
8. Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, second edition (2008). A more narrow work than Frieden's, Eichengreen's book is the starting point for understanding the classical gold standard, the Bretton Woods regime, and whatever the hell system we have now the Bretton Woods II regime. (KA: This is a great book. I also like Robert Solomon's The International Monetary System, 1945-1981, although it is too time limited and out of print; I read it in Costa Rica one summer, when I supposed to be filing documents for the Interamerican Court of Human Rights.)
9. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights (1997). Yergin and Stanislaw tell a cheerleader's tale of how the Washington Consensus displaced the old quasi-Keynesian, quasi-socialist economic order that had its apogee and downfall in the 1970s. What's particularly interesting is their argument that what mattered was the content and spread of the ideas themselves, and not some coercive power, that led to the re-embrace of markets. (KA: I once skimmed this at a London bookstore and alas none of it comes back to me.)
10. Paul Blustein, The Chastening (2001). Blustein, a reporter for the Washington Post, tells the you-are-there version of the Asian financial crisis and the reaction from the U.S. Treasury Department. If you want to know why Pacific Rim economies started hoarding foreign exchange reserves beginning in 1999, read this book. (KA: terrific book!)
He asks what readers would add to the list. I put the same question to you, gentlereaders. This list is a fine one - I've read most of them, and tend to agree. What would I add?
First, a book I have mentioned here before - the absolutely superb James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (2003 FSG). I think it's stronger than just about any other entry in the field interlinking finance, economics, and a strong, provocative, well supported thesis about politics in history.
I would also probably add something from the traditional of radical economic history - Perry Anderson, I guess - Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism or Lineages of the Absolutist State. Not precisely economic history, but Marxist historical materialism. (Perry Anderson is one of the most graceful writers to appear in the academy of the last fifty years; every paragraph, I find, is a pleasure to read, even when I don't agree with a word of it.)
What would you add to this list? Leaving aside my Perry Anderson suggestions, please stick with international economic history. What's missing? Good alternatives welcomed, too, especially as some of this stuff is a bit hard to locate.
Although it's not about economics in scholarly way, it's about how short-sighted humans can be about the allocation of their resources, which is certainly as aspect of economics.
In his book Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade points out some of the fatal flaws in Diamond's argument. As I recall Diamond gets the sequence of settlement and agriculture wrong, but I need to review what he wrote before making a definitive statement. The 10,000 Year Explosion, and Understanding Human History, provide a much more coherent theory.
Diamond is a very smart man and should get an "A" for effort. Too bad the facts get in the way.
Except for Braudel, none of these historians was trying to prove some overarching principal about trade, they were just describing systems as they found them.
Oliver is must reading because he found things that Adam Smith never dreamed existed.
We must be in a veritable golden age of international economic history! Not one of the best books on the whole economic history of the entire world was written before 1986!
If only our fathers knew they were forgotten fools!
What? Learning real-world facts makes science fiction seem less plausible? That's a trade-off I'm not sure I'm willing to make, sir!
That's a quote from the book, and Bairoch provided a lot of evidence to back it up.
His Cities and Economic Development is worth a read, too.
Diamond's book gets many things dead wrong which severly undermines his credibility (others have catalogued them). My most recent example was watching the Zebras perform tricks at the Circus two weeks ago, even though he says they couldn't be domesticated over dozens of generations.
On a vastly more serious plane:
Amyarta Sen, Poverty and Famines.
Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity. Not economic history, but a theory of political economy. Olson was simply a genius; his Logic of Collective Action and Stationary Bandit are two of the most powerful ideas in 20th century economics.
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
Because it wasn't all that great? It was okay, but awfully breezy.
The real answer lies more in genetics and evolution
Do tell! Pray, explain further about the superior genes of the Europeans. I have enough of those myself to perhaps follow your argument.
Diamond's book gets many things dead wrong which severly undermines his credibility (others have catalogued them). My most recent example was watching the Zebras perform tricks at the Circus two weeks ago, even though he says they couldn't be domesticated over dozens of generations.
Training an animal to do tricks isn't the same thing as domestication. Circus zebras, tigers and bears aren't domestic animals.
"Do tell! Pray, explain further about the superior genes of the Europeans."
Not only Europeans, Asians as well.
Diamond is wrong about some things. But in the grand scheme of things, saying "facts get in the way" of his hypothesis requires actually pointing to the specific genes that Europeans possess that allowed them to build a technologically advanced civilization and that these genes are not present in sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines.
Such a theory would also have to account for how the natives of South America were able to achieve the single greatest feat of genetic engineering prior to the modern era: the domestication of maize. Diamond rightly points out it requires a special scientific mindset and a lot of patience to carry out trial-and-error breeding of wild plants. Up until now, nobody has a clear idea of how the natives actually achieved this.
Same goes for Greg Clark's thesis. Until we can actually point to a gene that controls our psychological rate of discount, it's an untested hypothesis, not a set of facts that "get in the way" of Diamond.
I'm impressed with the kind of cognitive dissonance that allows one to be both a climate skeptic -- asserting there is not enough evidence to believe in AGW -- while embracing theories of genetically-caused cognitive differences despite a continued poor understanding of which genes contribute to cognition and how they do so. And that is leaving aside the implicit fallacy of composition: that a society can be reduced to the sum of its constituent parts with no additional analysis needed.
It is a very unique book that can best be described as the intersection of economic history, nutritional science and public health. There is less here about the well-covered history of the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, changes in political institutions and innovations in financial markets. In that sense, you need to read the other books on the list to have a complete perspective.
This book is instead about how all these other things freed Europeans from the Malthusian trap and how improvements in diet and public health measures like sanitation and clean drinking water cut led to people being taller and stronger and living longer. This also led to both an increase in the size of the labor force as well as an increase in productivity as people become physically capable of putting in longer hours of physical labor.
As I said, it is an unusual book coming from an economist but it is still an interesting read -- especially as it directly applies to modern debates about what to do about developing countries as they face the same issues developed countries faced 100-150 years ago.
This development led to 10,000 years of malnutrition, stunted growth, nasty parasitic infections and early death for most of the human race (except for those who remained hunter-gatherers -- they lived longer, much healthier lives) that has only very recently been alleviated by economic growth and the escape from the Malthusian trap.
One weakness in Diamond's argument is failure to address the evidence that men in hunter-gatherer societies face a much higher rate of violent death at the hands of another man than in settled societies, though.
The final work of the great sociologist, economist, and political scientist Max Weber (1864-1920), General Economic History features the innovative interpretations of economic life and change for which its author is famed. Starting with descriptions and analyses of the agrarian systems, Weber explores the manorial system, guilds, and early capitalism as developed on plantations and other estates. Subsequent economic trends include the organization of industry and mining, the development of commerce, technical requisites for transporting goods, and banking systems. The final section surveys the evolution of capitalism and the capitalistic spirit, concluding with Weber's celebrated discussion of the relationship of religion to the cultural history of capitalism. Unabridged republication of the classic 1927 edition.
Over the past couple generations we have been sold this story about the leisured life of the wandering band, singing, telling stories and getting laid all day. It's a phony story.
Washington Irving's 'A Tour on the Prairie, or, a Narrative of a Tour of the Southwest in the Year 1832' is one of many eyewitness accounts that debunk the idea.
We also have eyewitness accounts of the slums of Paris 200 years ago: they make the modern-day slums of Dhaka or Bombay sound like the Hamptons.
Harry: "we have been sold this story about the leisured life of the wandering band, singing, telling stories and getting laid all day."
Yeah, those savages couldn't possibly have done anything good.
Additionally, people lived longer earlier in the Bible. Methusala (sp?) lived hundreds of years, supposedly.
Incidentally, if you are such a fan of "eyewitness accounts," what do you make of the many accounts of Europeans upon encountering hunter-gatherers that they were lazy and given to idleness (and therefore required European masters to order them about in order to instill the Protestant virtue of hard work in them)? We know from modern studies of hunter-gatherers that they do not, in fact, spend every waking hour in desperate search of just enough food to sustain them. There is frequently complex division of labor and sharing of food to ensure the most efficient use of time and also to help diversify the diets of the hunter-gatherers. Diverse diets -- not eating a diet consisting mostly of wheat (for Europeans) or rice (for Asians) -- are identified as crucial in modern medicine to avoid malnutrition, stunted growth, illness and early death.
Adult heights and lifespans show that malnourishment is much less of a problem in hunter-gatherer societies than in historical agrarian societies.
"Power and Profit: The Merchant in Mediaeval Europe" by Peter Spufford.
Very good, and particularly demonstrated just how many links there were in the international economy from the high middle ages onward.
On a similar theme "The Merchant of Prato" is an examination in part of the merchant Francesco di Marco di Prato, and his trading activities. Approaches the international nature of mediaeval trade from the perspective of a merchant, rather than the whole.
Is an economic analysis of empire collapse
SFH: If you can train an animal, then a dozen generations of you can domesticate it. This is covered in the book.
Seriously, don't bother with Diamond. Do you still read about legal opinions from journalists? Economic news from NBC News? Disintermediate and read the experts directly.
15,000 or so years ago, Europe was primarily open country and tundra and the people traveled along with migrating large fauna like wooly rhinoceros, mammoths, and other animals you can see at the LaBrea Tar Pits. They did have adequate food, but when the glaciers retreated, trees migrated into the old feeding grounds and large fauna died off (forests support only 25% of the weight of fauna as open country). Human population was decimated and less than 25% survived the invasion of the trees; those taht surviced, learned to store food and to gather and grow food.
I don’t know how you apply a moral narrative to that (trees are killers?). Maybe that its better to be able to bend the environment to your will than to suffer its vagaries?
The original bio is three volumes, with the economic content about 50%; there is now a condensed one volume version, but I do not know if it is primarily economic or whether it follows Keynes through Bloomsbury to the exclusion of the economics.
The original bio is three volumes, with the economic content about 50%; there is now a condensed one volume version, but I do not know if it is primarily economic or whether it follows Keynes through Bloomsbury to the exclusion of the economics.
The original bio is three volumes, with the economic content about 50%; there is now a condensed one volume version, but I do not know if it is primarily economic or whether it follows Keynes through Bloomsbury to the exclusion of the economics.
Yeah, and pellagra was endemic in the lower South until Rockefeller missionaries taught us to eat our greens in the '20s, and now it isn't.
I haven't read Cunliffe, but guy in the veal calf office has it about right.
Hunter-gatherers ate a better balanced diet (in some places) than (some) settled people, when they ate at all. Their relative inability to store food ensured that they didn't have to worry much about expanding demand -- duh?
Subsistence farmers left alone to eat what they raise do as well as any hunter-gatherers in the nutrition department. It's taxes from the cities that depress their food intake. Or, as William H. McNeill put it, the city can be regarded as a disease of the countryside.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, perhaps? Does no one have any historical perspective anymore? I mean it only:
1) Provides the consensus economic judgement on the causes of WWII
2) Led to the development of the Bretton Woods system after WWII.
Diamond is a professor of physiology and geography at UCLA and is a recipient of the National Medal of Science Award. A search for his name in Google Scholar turns up 11,300 citations.
Of course, nobody can be an expert in everything nor can anybody be correct about everything. Modern academia -- of which Diamond is unquestionably a member -- encourages extreme specialization within sub-fields. Someone wanting to delve into any area touched upon by Diamond can read the in-depth scholarly works on that subject. But people with limited time should read Diamond along with all the other books mentioned above on the thread: he is part of any diversified intellectual portfolio.
Harry, I'm impressed that you can form such a strong opinion on a subject when you seemingly admit you haven't actually read anything on the subject.
Without cites, I will just assume you made that up because you like it.
" It's taxes from the cities that depress their food intake. Or, as William H. McNeill put it, the city can be regarded as a disease of the countryside."
This you clearly made up. LIfe expectancies in western europe didn't start rising until the beginning of the 19th century. and really took off in the 20th. This is because people migrated to cities, and the cities were able to import a greater variety and volume of food than was ever available on the farm. Seeing as how taxes were virtually non existent pre-1800 (at least as compared with today), and yet humans were much shorter and suffered from many more diseases, and in general had a poorer diet, one could actually make the opposite case -- higher taxes correlate with better nutrition.
Now, I have no idea if Diamond is a liberal or conservative. I assume he's a scientist just interested in the facts. However, here's the tip off from Harry: "Over the past couple generations we have been sold this story about the leisured life of the wandering band, singing, telling stories and getting laid all day."
To my knowledge, no one actually has told this story. However, there is a liberal conceit out there if you live off the land, you can have everything you want. Damn hippies! So if hippies believe it, it MUST be wrong.
I will certianly admit to my own derangement - I truly believe that George Bush and Dick Cheney are such liars that if they said the sky is blue, I will call them liars and say that the sky must therefore be any color BUT blue. But at least I limit my derangement to these two guys, and, if presented with actual evidence, will break down and admit that the sky is blue.
Unfortunately, few conservatives have that maturity.
David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus.
Ne plus ultra.
There were other fieldworkers and observers who saw something different, including Malaurie (Polar Eskimos); Chagnon (Yanomamo) and Brody (Doig).
The McNeill comparison of cities to a disease of the countryside was either in 'Plagues and Peoples' or 'The Shape of European History.' It's been decades since I read them, so I cannot give you a page number.
You obviously know nothing about either subsistence farmers or taxation. The idea that taxes hardly existed before 1800 would surprise a French peasant of the ancien regime.
In fact, subsistence farmers of the past and of today generally were and are taxed at about the same rate as Swedes in 2009. The difference is, Swedes get something back in services.
Ricardo, you need to learn how to read. I said I had not read Cunliffe, I did not say I hadn't read anything.
In 2000, eh.net, a mailing list for economic historians, solicited nominations for the "Great Books in Economic History". This is the list; eh.net published review essays as noted.
[NB: Unlike substantially all the books suggested in this post and the comments, these are serious works. All of them have profoundly affected how we understand our world.]
Braudel, Fernand Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century Time. Reviewed by Alan Heston (University of Pennsylvania).
Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Reviewed by David S. Landes (Department of Economics and History, Harvard University).
Chaudhuri, K. N. The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760. Reviewed by Santhi Hejeebu.
Davis, Lance E. and North, Douglass C. (with the assistance of Calla Smorodin) Institutional Change and American Economic Growth. Reviewed by Cynthia Taft Morris (Department of Economics, Smith College and American University).
Fogel, Robert W. Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History. Reviewed by Lance Davis (California Institute of Technology).
Friedman, Milton and Schwartz, Anna Jacobson A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Reviewed by Hugh Rockoff (Rutgers University).
Heckscher, Eli F. Mercantilism. Reviewed by John J. McCusker (Departments of History and Economics, Trinity University).
Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Reviewed by Paul M. Hohenberg (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
Pinchbeck, Ivy Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. Reviewed by Joyce Burnette (Wabash College).
Polyani, Karl The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Reviewed by Anne Mayhew (University of Tennessee).
Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Reviewed by Thomas K. McCraw (Harvard Business School).
Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Reviewed by Stanley Engerman.
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