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The “Anthropology” of Financial Crises
Germany experienced little increase in unemployment during the Great Recession, and has found “internal devaluation” relatively easy and pain-free, unlike most other countries. Why ? Some observations...
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“The Great War and Modern Memory”
An excerpt from Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. The start of this month coincides with the centenary of a momentous calamity. There will be commemorated every possible consequence of...
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Plant breeding, not working slaves harder, drove cotton productivity gains in...
Summary : New cultivars of cotton led to an unprecedented rise in the productivity of US southern cotton in the 60 years before the American Civil War. The Economist magazine may have said some stupid...
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Baptism by Blood Cotton
The underlying claim in Edward Baptist’s “oral economic history” of slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, is that slave owners, through the scientific...
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Global Income Distribution in 20 Charts
The global distribution of income in 1970-2006 in 20 charts. Not much text. Posting the charts because I thought they were neat… In the late 1990s I used to follow inequality issues closely, but I’ve...
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The emptiness of life will save us from mass unemployment
In general, people are too cheery when the economy is booming, and too gloomy about the future during recessions. Right now, pessimism about the consequences of “skill-biased technological change” is...
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Ye Olde Inæqualitee Shoppe
A quick note : Income inequality in pre-industrial societies was, in general, lower than in modern industrial societies, but traditional agrarian economies tended to be closer to their “maximum...
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Piketty & Slave Wealth
A quick note on Piketty, slave-wealth, and US capitalism. Matthew Yglesias had a Vox article thundering “American prosperity was built on slavery and torture” as part of his reaction to Edward...
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Conscientiousness & Technology
From the plastics industry, a very concrete, real-life example of how conscientiousness matters in the use of a medium-level technology and how high(er)-technology might help. In the past I have argued...
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A horse ! A horse ! My serfdom for a horse !
Part 2, England, of my critique of Nick Szabo’s view of industrialisation. This is continued from Part 1, “Chinese workers were cheaper than English horses“. What do coal, American slave cotton, and...
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Chinese workers were cheaper than English horses
My critique of Nick Szabo’s “horse theory” of the Great Divergence between Western Europe and East Asia. This part is about China in the 18th century. See Part 2 for the general issue of...
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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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Was slavery necessary to western industrialisation ?
Did western industrialisation require American slave cotton ? What coal and sugar might tell us. (Short answer: It’s reasonable and plausible to argue slavery accelerated the industrial revolution, but...
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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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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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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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Did inequality cause the First World War? Contra Hobson-Lenin-Milanovic
The “Hobson-Lenin Thesis”: inequality, ‘underconsumption’, capital exports, imperialism, and the Great War In a small section in his new book, Branko Milanovic argues that the First World War was...
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Inequality & the First Globalisation
A follow-up to my previous post, “Did inequality cause WW1? Contra Hobson-Lenin-Milanovic“, elaborating on the inequality=>capital exports link in Branko Milanovic’s overall inequality=>ww1...
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Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Reductionist Summary
Historian Sven Beckert’s widely acclaimed book, Empire of Cotton, is a good agrarian, business, and labour history of a single commodity. But as economic history it’s not so good. I think many readers...
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