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Edward Said on Bernard Lewis
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...
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Counterfactuals of coal, sugar, cotton, and slaves
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...
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Jo Guldi’s Curiouser & Curiouser Footnotes
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...
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La longue purée
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...
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Economic History Books
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...
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“State Capacity”& the Sino-Japanese Divergence
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...
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Economic History Link Dump 15-01-2015
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...
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Greece from Postwar Orthodoxy to “Democratic Peronism”
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...
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Toponyms & Ethnonyms: a brief ramble
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...
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Economic Growth in Ancient Greece
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”....
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Ian Morris’s calculations about the ancient Greek economy
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...
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Errata dentata: The History Manifesto Revisited
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...
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Chile’s First Globalisation: Inequality, Frontier Expansion, and Immigration
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...
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McCloskey: Cotton wasn’t crucial to the British industrial revolution
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...
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Fascism was left-wing ???
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...
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Nazi political economy
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...
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The “Invisible Blockade” against Allende’s Chile
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...
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Anachronism & Relevance in History: a comment on Steve Pincus
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...
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Markets & Famine: Amartya Sen is not the last word !
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...
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Educational Romanticism & Economic Development
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...
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