The Great Divergence

The Great Divergence
Author: Kenneth Pomeranz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691217181

A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the West The Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe? Historian Kenneth Pomeranz shows that as recently as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, and product and factor markets were comparable in Europe and East Asia. Moreover, key regions in China and Japan were no worse off ecologically than those in Western Europe, with each region facing corresponding shortages of land-intensive products. Pomeranz’s comparative lens reveals the two critical factors resulting in Europe's nineteenth-century divergence—the fortunate location of coal and access to trade with the New World. As East Asia’s economy stagnated, Europe narrowly escaped the same fate largely due to favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas. This Princeton Classics edition includes a preface from the author and makes a powerful historical work available to new readers.

The Inter-War Crisis

The Inter-War Crisis
Author: Richard Overy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317862511

The inter-war years were, at the time, perceived to be years of crisis across the world. The First World War, ‘the war to end all wars’, had solved nothing and its legacy was a world full of unresolved disputes and manifest ambiguities. Overy examines the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic crisis which struck at the very foundations of the capitalist world, and seeks to explain why dictatorships came to supplant democracy in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Baltic States and the Balkans, and why the world slid into war once more in 1939.

Between Empire and Globalization

Between Empire and Globalization
Author: Albert Carreras
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2021-02-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3030605043

This book provides a rigorously chronological journey through the economic history of modern Spain, always with an eye opened to what happens in the international economy and a focus on economic policy making and institutional change. It shows the central theme of the Spanish economy from the late 18th century to the early 21st century is the painful transformation from being a major imperial power to a small nation and later a member of the European Community and a player in a globalized economy. It looks in detail at two major issues - economic growth and convergence or divergence to the Western European pattern- and the permanent tension between the two when assessing historical experience since the industrial revolution. This book proposes new visions of the economic past of Spain and provides comparisons over time and space, which will be of interest to academics and students of economic history, European economic history and more specifically Spanish economic history.

Making Of An Economic Superpower, The: Unlocking China's Secret Of Rapid Industrialization

Making Of An Economic Superpower, The: Unlocking China's Secret Of Rapid Industrialization
Author: Yi Wen
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9814733741

The rise of China is no doubt one of the most important events in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. Mainstream economics, especially the institutional theory of economic development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions, is highly inadequate in explaining China's rise. This book argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable despite its current 'backward' financial system and political institutions. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the fundamental shortcomings of the institutional theory and mainstream 'blackboard' economic models, and provides more-accurate reevaluations of historical episodes such as Africa's enduring poverty trap despite radical political and economic reforms, Latin America's lost decades and frequent debt crises, 19th century Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial Revolution itself.

World Development Report 2017

World Development Report 2017
Author: World Bank Group
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 605
Release: 2017-01-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1464809518

Why are carefully designed, sensible policies too often not adopted or implemented? When they are, why do they often fail to generate development outcomes such as security, growth, and equity? And why do some bad policies endure? World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law addresses these fundamental questions, which are at the heart of development. Policy making and policy implementation do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they take place in complex political and social settings, in which individuals and groups with unequal power interact within changing rules as they pursue conflicting interests. The process of these interactions is what this Report calls governance, and the space in which these interactions take place, the policy arena. The capacity of actors to commit and their willingness to cooperate and coordinate to achieve socially desirable goals are what matter for effectiveness. However, who bargains, who is excluded, and what barriers block entry to the policy arena determine the selection and implementation of policies and, consequently, their impact on development outcomes. Exclusion, capture, and clientelism are manifestations of power asymmetries that lead to failures to achieve security, growth, and equity. The distribution of power in society is partly determined by history. Yet, there is room for positive change. This Report reveals that governance can mitigate, even overcome, power asymmetries to bring about more effective policy interventions that achieve sustainable improvements in security, growth, and equity. This happens by shifting the incentives of those with power, reshaping their preferences in favor of good outcomes, and taking into account the interests of previously excluded participants. These changes can come about through bargains among elites and greater citizen engagement, as well as by international actors supporting rules that strengthen coalitions for reform.

Colonial Legacies

Colonial Legacies
Author: Anne E. Booth
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2007-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824831616

It is well known that Taiwan and South Korea, both former Japanese colonies, achieved rapid growth and industrialization after 1960. The performance of former European and American colonies (Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines) has been less impressive. Some scholars have attributed the difference to better infrastructure and greater access to education in Japan’s colonies. Anne Booth examines and critiques such arguments in this ambitious comparative study of economic development in East and Southeast Asia from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960s. Booth takes an in-depth look at the nature and consequences of colonial policies for a wide range of factors, including the growth of export-oriented agriculture and the development of manufacturing industry. She evaluates the impact of colonial policies on the growth and diversification of the market economy and on the welfare of indigenous populations. Indicators such as educational enrollments, infant mortality rates, and crude death rates are used to compare living standards across East and Southeast Asia in the 1930s. Her analysis of the impact that Japan’s Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and later invasion and conquest had on the region and the living standards of its people leads to a discussion of the painful and protracted transition to independence following Japan’s defeat. Throughout Booth emphasizes the great variety of economic and social policies pursued by the various colonial governments and the diversity of outcomes. Lucidly and accessibly written, Colonial Legacies offers a balanced and elegantly nuanced exploration of a complex historical reality. It will be a lasting contribution to scholarship on the modern economic history of East and Southeast Asia and of special interest to those concerned with the dynamics of development and the history of colonial regimes.

The British Industrial Revolution

The British Industrial Revolution
Author: Joel Mokyr
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429974191

The Industrial Revolution remains a defining moment in the economic history of the modern world. But what kind and how much of a revolution was it? And what kind of ?moment? could it have been? These are just some of the larger questions among the many that economic historians continue to debate. Addressing the various interpretations and assumptions that have been attached to the concept of the Industrial Revolution, Joel Mokyr and his four distinguished contributors present and defend their views on essential aspects of the Industrial Revolution. In this revised edition, all chapters?including Mokyr's extensive introductory survey and evaluation of research in this field?are updated to consider arguments and findings advanced since the volume's initial 1993 publication. Like its predecessor, the revised edition of The British Industrial Revolution is an essential book for economic historians and, indeed, for any historian of Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Ubu Saved from Drowning

Ubu Saved from Drowning
Author: Loren Goldner
Publisher:
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN:

Little remembered today, the worker insurgencies in Portugal and Spain at the end of the Salazar and Franco dictatorships were, for a brief moment in the mid-1970s, at the center of world politics. They occurred in the midst of the 1973-75 crisis of world accumulation, in which capitalism was "changing gears" from the era of the big factory and the assembly line to the era of "globalization," deindustrialization, outsourtcing, downsizing and "just in time," the era in which we live today. They took place in a conjuncture that included the deepest economic downturn (to date) since the end of World War II, the oil crisis, the advance of "Euro-communism," the US defeat in Indochina, the triumph of "national liberation fronts" in the ex-Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Ginea-Bissau, and the crisis in the Horn of Africa. World capitalism, centered in the United States, seemed to be everywhere involved in putting out fires, but the Iberian insurgencies were unique among these simultaneous crises in being centered on the working class and, particularly in the case of Portugal, directly posing the question of the state and unmasking the pretensions of different factions of "progressive" state bureaucrats. They were the most genuinely radical moments of the (mainly statist) "red mirage" that, briefly, seemed to have placed world capitalism on the defensive. By the late 1970s, capitalism had returned to the offensive, and the era of Thatcher and Reagan inaugurated a rollback that swept away leftist statism, up to and including the Soviet Union itself.What was ending was the century of the "progressive" state bureaucrat, who had entered the international workers' movement in the German SPD and its 1875 Gotha Program, and who for 100 years seemed, in "socialist" and "communist" guise, to represent something "beyond capitalism." Events since 1975 have shown that the "progressive state bureaucrat," everywhere, from England to China, represented, rather, something before capitalism, throwing the old statist "left" into terminal crisis. This book analyzes the last two Western worker revolts just before this turn, and shows how they already pointed toward a new era, though hardly the immediately revolutionary era they seemed to portend.Now that the statist illusion of the revolutionary workers' movement has been laid to rest once and for all, the Portuguese and Spanish worker revolts of the min-1970s offer one benchmark from which to judge present and future struggles.

Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions
Author: Gabriel Paquette
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2013-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107328594

As the British, French and Spanish Atlantic empires were torn apart in the Age of Revolutions, Portugal steadily pursued reforms to tie its American, African and European territories more closely together. Eventually, after a period of revival and prosperity, the Luso-Brazilian world also succumbed to revolution, which ultimately resulted in Brazil's independence from Portugal. The first of its kind in the English language to examine the Portuguese Atlantic World in the period from 1750 to 1850, this book reveals that despite formal separation, the links and relationships that survived the demise of empire entwined the historical trajectories of Portugal and Brazil even more tightly than before. From constitutionalism to economic policy to the problem of slavery, Portuguese and Brazilian statesmen and political writers laboured under the long shadow of empire as they sought to begin anew and forge stable post-imperial orders on both sides of the Atlantic.

'Los Invisibles'

'Los Invisibles'
Author: Richard Cleminson
Publisher: University of Wales
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 0708320120

Examining the social, medical and cultural history of male homosexuality in Spain, this book looks at it from the time homosexuality came to be an issue of medical, legal and cultural concern. Research into homosexuality in Spain is in its infancy. The last ten or fifteen years have seen a proliferation of studies on gender in Spain but much of this work has concentrated on women's history, literature and femininity. In contrast to existing research which concentrates on literature and literary figures, "Los Invisibles" focuses on the change in cultural representation of same-sex activity of through medicalisation, social and political anxieties about race and the late emergence of homosexual sub-cultures in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As such, this book constitutes an analysis of discourses and ideas from a social history and medical history position. Much of the research for the book was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust to research the medicalisation of homosexuality in Spain.