What do you think are the key issues shaping the world economy?
It is a time of tremendous economic change and, as in previous times of economic change, there is a great deal of interest in the history of economics. I find it especially among young historians. there is a sense of both opportunity and insecurity, and for a historian it is a wonderful time to think about how economic history fits in with the history of economic thought and the history of economic life.
You are reading: Books on economic history
Let’s take a look at how his five books reflect that. His first choice is Sunil Amrith’s Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia, which explores how migration is at the heart of Asian history.
This book tells an extraordinary, little-studied story of what Sunil Amrith calls “Asia’s Age of Migration” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. century, when 27 million Indians and nearly 20 million Chinese migrated to Southeast Asia. these migration patterns were very different from the much more familiar Atlantic migrations. many of the migrants were undocumented and literally nameless. Amrith cites a comment by an earlier demographer: “Migration is the result of an idea, an idea of what is found elsewhere.”
in what way?
shows the scale of intra-asian migration over the past 150 years and the extent to which modern asia, including the great successes of asian economies, has been shaped by migration. a very different pattern of migration, of circular and short-lived migration, of what amrith calls permanence, which hasn’t really been studied until now, and it was also an eye-opener about the possibilities of finding archives of immigrants who didn’t have names and, They were often illiterate but nevertheless shaped the countries they moved to.
how do you think that kind of migration in asia has shaped the world economy?
I think it causes one to conceive of both China and India, as well as the countries of Southeast Asia, as transnational corporations in a way that hasn’t really been studied in great detail. and the diasporas of both. India and China are very important in the world economy.
your next choice is poor economics by abhijit banerjee and esther duflo.
The authors talk about understanding the economic lives of the poor and argue against grand universal solutions. they are very optimistic about finding empirical evidence, whether through experiments on policies that work or not. work and talking to people who are poor. One of the things that comes through so strongly in this book is the centrality of what Banerjee and Duflo call a sense of security, of how much poverty has to do with insecurity. And how tremendously important it is, for the people you’re talking to, to have a regular job and to have the kind of social security arrangements that are taken for granted in much of Europe.
And they’ve talked to people all over the world, from places like Chile to India, so it’s a far-reaching investigation.
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yes, they have and they actually go and talk to people who are really poor, about their lives, their economic life and their hopes. It also made me think about history, because it’s called poor economics, and I was wondering why we don’t have more poor history, that is, history that is really about the economic life of the poor, rather than how people have measured poverty. or how people have tried to alleviate poverty or anti-poverty policies. so it was a very inspiring book for me as a historian. As with my first option, it looks at people who are poor and shows that they, too, have ideas and shape the economy.
Why do you think our approach to tackling poverty has often not worked historically?
I think the policies have really worked in many of the countries that are now more developed. In Britain, the poverty that was so frightening to people in the late 19th century was largely eliminated. From the policies of the first welfare state, as well as economic growth, Europe is a great success story in reducing poverty.
With so many rich countries falling into recession, how do you think it will change the way the West treats poorer countries and how will that affect the world economy?
in countries that are still relatively poor, like china and india, one of the really exciting things that has happened in the last 20 years is that there are many millions of people who are moving. of poverty. I see that in India, and it’s a tremendously important change in the world economy. there are parts of Africa where people are moving out of poverty. things are changing in terms of which countries are “dealing with” poverty. In terms of financial influence, the role of India, China and Brazil has increased enormously. Somehow, European countries are not as confident as they should be about the successes of a hundred years of reforms and poverty reduction of their population.
Your next choice is the novel River of Smoke by amitav gosh, which, in addition to the colorful characters, tells the story of the great power that opium had in the world economy back in the 19th century.
I love this book. it was a book that, as I got closer to the end, I wanted to read it more and more slowly so as not to finish it. The weekly clothing market on the Singapore River, which is a fairly early scene in the novel, is a brilliant illustration of the kinds of trade within Asia that are so interesting to historians. market”, which is a wonderful phrase. the novel is about friendship, trade and empire, as well as the tragic story of opium. it is a great illustration of one of those novels that are wonderful in themselves. life stories cheap.
Which 21st century products do you think are having a similar impact to opium in the 19th century?
Tobacco is not driving the world economy the way opium did, but there have been a lot of comparisons made between opium and tobacco and I think they are really compelling. Southeast Asia is really scary.
And what commodities do you think are particularly powerful in the world economy right now?
Obviously, energy products are going to be fundamental to the world economy of the 21st century and everything that has to do with the processing of fossil fuels. The biggest problem for the world economy is global climate change and recent studies. permafrost in the Arctic are extraordinarily disturbing. I think the conflict over energy, which is a conflict with many different dimensions, is bound to be central.
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Next is The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, which is the second in Eric Hobsbawm’s trilogy, and looks at the events and trends that led to the triumph of private enterprise in the 19th century.
says that in the book he wants to make sense of the third quarter of the 19th century and he does, it’s an example of history on a grand scale that is also a history of individual lives it’s very much a book about the mobility of workers across mid-nineteenth century. it is also very much a book about resources, including minerals and coal, and about the triumph of capitalism in what became its twentieth-century form.
For me, it’s a fascinating book to come back to. I read it when it came out and have taught with it for years. it’s inspiring because it’s history on so many different levels and scales, and I also think it provides an extraordinary insight into the origins of the world economy, which is now possibly coming to an end.
what were some of the key moments of the 19th century that are the origin of today’s global economy?
It was the industrial revolution; it was the expansion of communications and information worldwide; it was the transformation of ideas and the development of new means of exporting capital – and it became the expansion of European empires throughout the world.
Finally, you have chosen a book about the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life by Nicholas Phillipson.
Nicholas Phillipson’s book gives a wonderful insight into the life of Adam Smith and a life lived in the midst of ideas. speaks of smith in relation to exchange in two different ways: first, the exchange of conversations in smith’s own environment in eighteenth century scotland, where people talked passionately about ideas of human nature and about ways in which economic and philosophical ideas fit together, but there is also exchange in the sense of long distance exchanges and I think the book brilliantly conveys the extent to which adam smith himself was thinking about very long distance communications, information and exchange, both in glasgow, where he lived for many years, as well as in connection with his own friends and acquaintances who were involved in the east india company.
These are two things that interest him a lot. He has also written on eighteenth-century Scotland and migration, as well as Adam Smith. So how do you think he shaped the history of our world economy? ?
i think smith is the greatest economist who ever wrote. there is a fascinating story to be told about the ways in which his ideas have been used, transformed and abused and exchanged. His feeling system is also of extraordinary importance. In my own book, The Inner Life of Empires, I was very interested in Smith’s circle of friends and the extraordinary adventures some of them had, literally traveling around the world, discussing ideas by Smith and trying to put them together with the scenes they saw and with their own choices about their lives, that world of 18th century Scotland and its connection to a much larger outside world is presented extraordinarily well in Phillipson’s book. /p>
and your own, because you trace a family and all their travels around the world.
yes, but they were a family that lived in a world of ideas wherever they went. The center of the story really is the two slaves that the family brought with them to Scotland, one of whom came from India and could not read or write, but is nonetheless an important figure in the history of slavery and the history of the empire, so this gets back to the big questions of people on the move. in the case of the slaves it was a forced movement, but for the next 200 years there were hundreds of millions of people on the move, many of them following their ideas of going elsewhere.
a final thought. many of us in america and europe seem to be very pessimistic about the financial situation, while things in the east seem much more optimistic. you are married to the eminent economist amartya sen and they are very connected to the east and india. so do you think that eastern countries are likely to make the same mistakes as americans and europe, or do you think countries like india and china are going in a very different direction?
I’m basically optimistic. i think one of the exciting things that’s happening in india is that there’s both extraordinary economic growth and really serious public debate going on right now about how to make even more extraordinary progress. in reducing poverty so i think there is reason for economic optimism about india and also reason to be really interested in the conversations that are going on now about education and health and opportunity and even about the global environment, which is something that will eventually have to unite many different countries.
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