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Edward Said on Bernard Lewis

November 9, 2014, 7:07 am
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Just quoting my favourite unintentionally hilarious passage from Said’s Orientalism. On pages 314-5 of his famous book Orientalism, Edward Said quoted a passage from the Middle East historian Bernard Lewis and then “analysed” it thereafter : [Said quoting Lewis from the essay “Islamic Concepts … Continue reading →
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Counterfactuals of coal, sugar, cotton, and slaves

November 10, 2014, 12:00 am
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Did western industrialisation require American slave cotton ? What coal and sugar might tell us. In a rather hyperbolical claim, Edward Baptist argued in his book The Half Has Never Been Told that American slave-picked cotton was a prerequisite to the Western world’s escape … Continue reading →
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Jo Guldi’s Curiouser & Curiouser Footnotes

November 10, 2014, 5:36 am
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In The History Manifesto, historians Jo Guldi, the Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History at Brown, and David Armitage, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at Harvard, repeatedly misunderstand or misrepresent the research they disparagingly cite in … Continue reading →
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La longue purée

November 10, 2014, 10:57 am
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In The History Manifesto, two historians, Jo Guldi of Brown and David Armitage of Harvard, urge their peers to turn away from microhistory and go back to doing Big History in the longue durée tradition of Fernand Braudel. The book also doubles as a rant against the … Continue reading →
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Economic History Books

December 7, 2014, 7:13 pm
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I’ve compiled a list of books on economic history (and closely related subjects) at Goodreads. I welcome any suggestions. I also recommend Anton Howes’s Amazon wish list. Both lists were highlighted by Dietz Vollrath at his Growth Economics blog. By the way, I … Continue reading →
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“State Capacity”& the Sino-Japanese Divergence

December 8, 2014, 6:56 am
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Why China did not industrialise before Western Europe may be a tantalising and irresistible subject, but frankly it’s a parlour game. What remains underexplored, however, is the more tractable issue of why Japan managed, but China failed, to initiate an early transition to modern growth … Continue reading →
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Economic History Link Dump 15-01-2015

January 15, 2015, 4:47 am
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A haphazard mass, a chaotic carnival, a Bikini Atoll, of links relating to economic history, political economy, and allied matters. I also have brief comments on some of the links. I just decided to start doing this, so I am … Continue reading →
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Greece from Postwar Orthodoxy to “Democratic Peronism”

February 22, 2015, 10:01 pm
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The roots of the present Greek crisis lie in the political transformation of the country during the 1980s. (Disclaimer: Although this post is about Greek fiscal behaviour, I am not taking Germany’s side. Lenders to the profligate are just as culpable as the borrowers.) … Continue reading →
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Toponyms & Ethnonyms: a brief ramble

February 27, 2015, 6:36 am
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Rambling about toponyms and ethnonyms in various languages. Branko Milanovic has revived interest in an older post of mine about the Polish language. From Twitter it appears that the tidbit from that post which has been most remarked about is the fact that the Polish … Continue reading →
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Economic Growth in Ancient Greece

April 2, 2015, 12:33 am
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Was there “intensive growth” in Classical Greece and was there something special about its causes ? Was it due to “inclusive institutions” ? This post assesses some claims of the “New Ancient History”. [Retitled from the previous silly title “just what … Continue reading →
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Ian Morris’s calculations about the ancient Greek economy

April 4, 2015, 6:48 am
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Addenda to the previous blogpost “Economic growth in ancient Greece“. I argue that certain estimates made by Ian Morris under-compute the implied growth rates in the “per capita income” of the ancient Greeks. With a proper computation Morris’s estimates simply become … Continue reading →
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Errata dentata: The History Manifesto Revisited

April 13, 2015, 5:41 am
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This post, a follow-up to my earlier posts “La longue purée” and “Jo Guldi’s Curiouser & Curiouser Footnotes“, examines the recent revisions made to The History Manifesto. Warning: the post may be tedious. For die-hards only. Recapitulation In October 2014, The … Continue reading →
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Chile’s First Globalisation: Inequality, Frontier Expansion, and Immigration

April 24, 2015, 4:03 am
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This is a translation-reblog of the post by historian Javier Rodríguez Weber, “Globalisation and Inequality, for a ‘sophisticated’ version of the neoclassical intepretation” (original: “Globalización y Desigualdad. Por una versión ‘sofisticada’ de la interpretación neoclásica”). It shows how Chile’s income … Continue reading →
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McCloskey: Cotton wasn’t crucial to the British industrial revolution

April 25, 2015, 10:05 pm
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I (mostly) copy-and-paste Deirdre McCloskey’s classic argument that cotton was not crucial to the Industrial Revolution in Britain. I also have a very brief rant about historians’ erasure of Robert Fogel from historiographic memory. In an earlier post I argued that … Continue reading →
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Fascism was left-wing ???

May 3, 2015, 10:53 am
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John Holbo at Crooked Timber revives an online debate which raged 7 years ago when a book called Liberal Fascism was published. His take focuses on Germany but mine puts more weight on Italy. I think the issue is kind of … Continue reading →
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Nazi political economy

May 5, 2015, 6:00 pm
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My previous post about the political orientation of fascists got a response from Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism. This is my brief response to his. Goldberg assumes that I was criticising his book, which I was not. That’s my fault. I should … Continue reading →
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The “Invisible Blockade” against Allende’s Chile

May 21, 2015, 4:07 am
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Did an ‘invisible blockade’ by the United States fatally undermine the Chilean economy under the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73) ? Did it actually work ? Short answer: No. Note: this post is not about the wider US involvement in the September 1973 coup … Continue reading →
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Anachronism & Relevance in History: a comment on Steve Pincus

May 24, 2015, 11:45 pm
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Anachronism and relevance are in tension. Historians (often) rail against the former and (often) pine for the latter. They can easily manage a bit of relevance by intervening in today’s political and economic debates and offering ‘lessons’ from the past — but at high risk of … Continue reading →
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Markets & Famine: Amartya Sen is not the last word !

June 8, 2015, 5:33 am
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Whether markets help cause or exacerbate famines is one of the great questions of political economy. Cormac Ó Gráda’s recent book Eating People is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, its Past, and its Future, along with his earlier volume, Famine: A Short … Continue reading →
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Educational Romanticism & Economic Development

June 14, 2015, 6:16 pm
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An elaboration on Ricardo Hausmann’s article “The Education Myth“. This post also comments on a post at the Spanish group blog Politikon which criticises Hausmann’s views. The Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann recently published a column in Project Syndicate called “The Education Myth“, … Continue reading →
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