What unifies your choices?

My choices (except for Rawls) all deal with issues of quantifiable economic history. In other words, there are two pieces of information that I’m interested in and which I think are really necessary if you want to have some quantifiable view of history. One of them is to have mean incomes for countries, essentially like GDP per capita for countries in the past, and the second piece of information, which is, of course, much more difficult, is to have information on income distributions of countries in the past. These two pieces of information really give us a global picture of income distribution. So this is one unifying theme. The second one is to have books which show how inequality engenders certain political or economic developments – in other words, inequalities are not neutral. They do have an impact on, for example, imperialism. One book I’ve chosen shows how inequality in the Roman era actually prevented the adoption of new technology and stifled development.

Victoires et Déboires by Paul Bairoch.

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.

And did the colonies contribute to the metropole and did these places fail to develop 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.

That’s very interesting. Because in Britain lots of people think that the colonies did fine while we were there but now we’ve gone it’s a mess because these people don’t understand how to govern themselves. Obviously, it’s a mad imperialist view, but it’s very widely held.

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’.

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.

How exciting. Let’s move on to Angus Maddison, 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.

You say he dismisses the idea that everyone lived in poverty until the last century.

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.