Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction

Robert C. Allen

3.84 · Rating details · 803 ratings · 108 reviews

Why are some countries rich and others poor? In 1500, global income differences were small, but disparities have grown dramatically since Columbus reached America. In this Very Short Introduction, Robert C. Allen shows how the interplay of geography, globalization, technological change, and economic policy has determined the wealth and poverty of nations. Allen shows how t ...more

Get A Copy

Paperback, 196 pages

Published November 15th 2011 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published 2011)

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about Global Economic History, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about Global Economic History

Lists with This Book

The Oxford Very Short Introductions Series

428 books — 97 voters

Very Short Introductions: Economics

13 books — 2 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

Average rating 3.84 ·

Rating details

· 803 ratings · 108 reviews

More filters

Sort order

Start your review of Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction

Jul 07, 2013 Riku Sayuj rated it really liked it

Shelves: history-theory, vsis, economics, r-r-rs, history-imperial, history-europe, history-economic

I had been asked to read this in parallel with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Unfortunately, I have gotten around it more than a year late. But I kept the GGS open beside me as I traced the economic explanations for the trajectories of the various continents/regions - and it is true this book is a good companion volume for the enormously popular GGS. It can prove to be a useful aid to go beyond some of the simplistic assumptions and still arrive at some of ...more

flag 26 likes · Like · see review

Sep 18, 2018 Warwick rated it liked it

Shelves: history, economics

Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes…Everybody knows.
—Leonard Cohen

Economics is a frustrating subject, managing to be both essential and eye-wateringly dull. This primer does a decent job of distilling its subject into one basic question – why the world is so unequal – and of holding your attention long enough to sketch the outlines of an answer.

Normally with such things there is a lot of hemming and hawing, bet-hedging, and phrases lik Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes…Everybody knows.
—Leonard Cohen

Economics is a frustrating subject, managing to be both essential and eye-wateringly dull. This primer does a decent job of distilling its subject into one basic question – why the world is so unequal – and of holding your attention long enough to sketch the outlines of an answer.

Normally with such things there is a lot of hemming and hawing, bet-hedging, and phrases like ‘remains to be seen’; here, refreshingly, Allen is relatively clear and unambiguous about how things came about (though less so on how they should be fixed). There is much discussion of economic policy, but plainly geographical luck had a lot to do with it – and once some economic development gets underway, it becomes a self-fuelling engine as technology substitutes for, and drives, higher wages.

This is why the technologies developed by the industrialised West can't just be imported into developing countries – they only make economic sense when workers are paid so much that investing in machines instead becomes an appealing prospect.

Western technology in the 21st century uses vast amounts of capital per worker. It only pays to substitute that much capital for labour when wages are high relative to capital costs.

And the technology brings with it newer, more specialised jobs, which in turn bring higher wages, which in turn prompts further R&D into technology that will make them obsolete…. Hence the Industrial Revolution – and other ‘industrial revolutions’ since – were the result, not just the cause, of high salaries, and countries who don't get started are stuck in a poverty trap.

Especially interesting is the discussion in the last chapter about those few countries that did manage to catch up with the West – namely Japan, South Korea, and in part the Soviet Union. China will undoubtedly join this group any second now. The only way this could be done was to construct all the elements of an advanced industrialised economy all at once – steel mills, car factories, cities, all erected as an act of will on the grounds that they would eventually all need each other. This is ‘big push’ industrialisation, but it is hardly an option for many countries, especially those still suffering the deleterious hangovers of colonialism.

You finish something like this with a lot of questions, but they are at least more specific than the questions you had going in – or that's the hope, anyway. At the very least there's enough in here to arm you against the next Jared Diamond fanatic you find yourself stuck in an elevator with.
...more

flag 15 likes · Like · see review

Nov 23, 2012 Jonathan Peto rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

This "very short introduction" was fine. One point it hammered home was that there is a historical connection between high wages and growth. That came up repeatedly. Another interesting idea for me was that without the Industrial Revolution, without growth, without, I guess, consumerism, a lot of us would work hard just to subsist. The book gave me a good impression of how various factors interact and why some nations have been more successful than others. Folks, education is much more important ...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

Nov 07, 2017 Dorotea rated it really liked it

Shelves: economics, history, bsc-econ, read-in-english

Allen’s writing is clear and the material is fascinating. The central topic is the big divergence, the situation that it emerged from, its causes, the situation after (the ‘big push’) .

One distinctive element of the mercantilist era it’s that it witnessed an early modern globalisation because of the discovery of the New World and new sea routes to East Indies and Americas. This lead to the rise of north-western Europe (Britain, Netherlands, France) and the contemporary relative decline of the Me Allen’s writing is clear and the material is fascinating. The central topic is the big divergence, the situation that it emerged from, its causes, the situation after (the ‘big push’) .

One distinctive element of the mercantilist era it’s that it witnessed an early modern globalisation because of the discovery of the New World and new sea routes to East Indies and Americas. This lead to the rise of north-western Europe (Britain, Netherlands, France) and the contemporary relative decline of the Mediterranean region, as well as the accumulation of human capital (knowledge of managerial techniques mainly because of the birth of corporations or joint stock companies such as the East India Company) and the improvement of existing technologies (especially in shipbuilding, weaponry, metallurgy and agriculture).
Data on incomes in the distant past are not robust, but it looks as though the differences in prosperity between countries until 1500 are small, but since the mercantilist era (1500-1800 with the voyages of Columbus and da Gama which led to an integrated global economy thanks to the Atlantic trade) an income gap has resulted from the industrial revolution and then it has expanded creating a divergence between rich and poor countries all throughout 1800s till 1913, as in the former period economic development was to the primary objective – but rather was political power. This changed in the catch-up period of the 19th century when Western Europe and the USA set four policies to close the gap with Great Britain: unification of the domestic market (creation of a unified national market by eliminating internal tariffs and building transportation infrastructure), protectionism (the erection of an external tariff to protect their industries from competition), modernization of banking ( the chartering of banks to stabilize the currency and finance industrial investment), and the establishment of mass education to upgrade the labour force.
Ronald Allen measures this gap through not only GDP per capita but also real wages of unskilled labour, which further proves the poverty trap (when wages decrease people cut back on extras such as education, luxury goods and healthy diet + when labour is cheap, the incentive to increase productivity via capital equipment is minimum-to-non-existent)
In the 20th century, the same policies proved to be less effective in countries that had not yet developed, since technology was not cost effective. There are exceptions to income divergence – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and later on Soviet Union and China today – all thanks to a degree of planning and coordination of investment (developmental government).
Phenomena that explain this divergence are the shift in world manufacturing distribution and industrialization.
...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jan 28, 2020 Sina Mousavi rated it it was amazing

This is one of the most remarkable exercises in concision that I have ever encountered, and the style worked rather well for me. I won't try to provide a summary of a text which is itself of an impressively dense summary of the economic history of the last 500 years. I will thus only mention the tidbits that I found interesting.

In the beginning, the main theme is the cause(s) of the Great Divergence: Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain, and not somewhere else? The answer, shortly This is one of the most remarkable exercises in concision that I have ever encountered, and the style worked rather well for me. I won't try to provide a summary of a text which is itself of an impressively dense summary of the economic history of the last 500 years. I will thus only mention the tidbits that I found interesting.

In the beginning, the main theme is the cause(s) of the Great Divergence: Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain, and not somewhere else? The answer, shortly put, is that labour-saving inventions were incentivised in Britain, more so than anywhere else, due to a combination of high wages and cheap access to coal reserves. Globalisation and state economic policy also played important roles. Colonial exploration and settlement led to an integrated global economy and bigger markets, which made technical innovations even more appealing to European manufacturers.

I especially found the contrast that Allen drew between the British and the French state to be fascinating. Contrary to the imagination of laissez-faire fanatics (and Whig historians), he shows that the British state in the 17th and 18th centuries had, in fact, more authority and engaged in more economic interventions, not less, than its French counterpart. Taxation levels were twice the levels of France, and the doctrine of "Parliamentary Sovereignty" allowed for land appropriations, infrastructure projects and naval expansions (which facilitated British imperialism, thus resulting in economic gains) that simply were not possible in France, due to the influence of the French nobility:

Growth was also promoted by Parliament’s power to take people’s property against their wishes. This was not possible in France. Indeed, one could argue that France suffered because property was too secure: profitable irrigation projects were not undertaken in Provence because France had no counterpart to the private acts of the British Parliament that overrode property owners opposed to the enclosure of their land or the construction of canals or turnpikes across it. What the Glorious Revolution meant in practice was that the ‘despotic power’ of the state that ‘was only available intermittently before 1688 … was always available thereafter’.

The importance of the Industrial Revolution in shaping the course of human history cannot be understated. The pre-IR world, for the most part, is one in which long-term economic stagnation is the norm. Given this context, Britain's steady GDP growth by ~1.5% between 1760 and 1850 is an extraordinary achievement, one that is mainly made possible by innovations that expand the technological frontier.

Once Britain industrialised, it was only natural for the rest of the world to try and emulate its success. As the first US Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton developed an economic plan to catch up to the British, leading to the US overtaking Britain by the start of the 20th century. Hamilton's plan, which later influenced German and Japenese policymakers and became the "standard model" for economic growth, rested on four pillars:

1) Creating a unified internal market: Before the ratification of the American Constitution, levying tariffs on other American colonies (later states) was a common practice for American states to raise revenue. Hamilton, a Federalist and a believer in a strong and centralised state, managed to include the "Import-Export Clause" in the Constitution, preventing individual states to impose trade tariffs on each other. This, in conjunction with massive investments in transportation and local infrastructure, created an integrated domestic market in the US.
2) Protecting infant industries from foreign competition: For the majority of the 19th century, the US had some of the highest tariffs on imported manufactured goods in the world. Why? Hamilton was early to recognise the centrality of the establishment of modern manufacturing to economic development, which would not have been possible if British firms, more efficient than their American competitors at the time, were to dominate the American markets. Protectionism provided the American industry much-needed time to mature and import state-of-the-art British technology, without being outcompeted in the meantime. It was only after the end of the Second World War when the US was by far the most advanced economy on the planet, that American policymakers shifted from protectionism to free-trade, as they had very little to fear from global competition by that point.
3) Creating a central banking system to funnel investment and stablise the currency
4) Encouraging mass education: Highly literate and educated citizens are an essential part of any development strategy, as they are key to increasing worker productivity. Almost all innovators have to know reading, writing, and arithmetics, without any of which it would be possible to access the technical literature and/or discuss new discoveries with other innovators and scientists.

For countries that managed to implement all the four aspects of the "standard model" by the 20th century, the results were rather satisfying. But as the wage disparity widened between rich and poor countries, there were even fewer incentives for underdeveloped nations to adopt modern capital-intensive technology; Labour was simply too cheap to make such investments profitable, leading to a vicious cycle of poverty and backwardness. Under these conditions, extensive planning and "big push industralisation" efforts, as Allen puts it, form the winning formula for developing nations. Soviet Union between 1920-1970, post-war Japan, South Korea, and China adopt this approach to account for complementarities between different sectors, managing to close the gap with the industrialised West. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Sep 12, 2018 Kyle rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, other-nonfiction

Very interesting book. At least, if you like reading about how countries industrialized, and the theories on how to effectively do so. Allen does a good job of explaining a rather convincing theory that high wages drove investments in high-capital labor saving devices/methods, which forms a positive feedback cycle, as the high-capital devices allow wages to increase, and so higher-capital devices can be introduced economically.

He also gives good accounts of other theories of how economic histor ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 19, 2015 xhxhx rated it it was ok

It could have been so much better.

A non-Marxist center-left account. No, that's not quite right. A Listian, Leninist and Preobrazhenskyan history of the world. A history of primitive accumulation and extractive growth.

A critically incomplete account. Provides the outputs of growth, trade, and labor market models, but does not articulate their premises. Offers a dubious account of capital and technology transfer. Offers the conventional (deprecated) account of underdevelopment in the periphery. D ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jun 11, 2016 Vivek Agarwal rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The perspectives in this book are not unlike the other history books I have previously read

The main difference is that this is as the title says a lot more concise and to the point

The chapter on Africa is vey interesting and shows how and why Africa has lost out on the development which the other emerging countries were able to build upon

The author is very careful in linking many variables very well through the book

Which includes the education, ago based economy, how and why the Industrial Re ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jan 22, 2020 Ismoil Sadullozoda rated it really liked it

Shelves: short-introductions, economy-and-development

This very short introduction is a good start to economics for students of non-economic fields. It introduces many economic terms, concepts, and theories with lots of quantitative data. It also gives many economic measurements that can be applied individually to analyze the social and economic state of different societies.

I recommend reading this book with "Why Nations Fail" by J. Robinson and D. Acemoglu. Many concepts and processes that are introduced in this short introduction can be found in ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 17, 2018 Ekul rated it really liked it

Shelves: economics, temp-modern-late, history, geo-global

Beginning chapters were decent, middle chapters on the Americas and Africa were excellent, last chapters were lacking. The chapter on the Americas was especially illuminating. Allen seems to take a "one size fits all" approach, which I don't think is a good way of seeing the history of economic "development," but this book does function as an excellent introduction to the subject. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Dec 15, 2015 Jack rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, history

Fantastic brief book on why some countries have a lot of shit, and why other countries have much less.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Aug 05, 2020 Ankyaa rated it it was amazing

Supremely succinct overview of modern economic history. Allen divides the last 500 years into three periods; the mercantilist era, the catch-up and the big push.

Leads with the Great Divergence; the period of mercantilism and industrialization, and the discovery of the New World. Large regions of the world are washed into brief overviews, and slavery + colonialism are mostly glossed over. Although, I suppose that is to be expected of a remarkably short and Anglocentric book.

The Industrial Revolut Supremely succinct overview of modern economic history. Allen divides the last 500 years into three periods; the mercantilist era, the catch-up and the big push.

Leads with the Great Divergence; the period of mercantilism and industrialization, and the discovery of the New World. Large regions of the world are washed into brief overviews, and slavery + colonialism are mostly glossed over. Although, I suppose that is to be expected of a remarkably short and Anglocentric book.

The Industrial Revolution became a turning point in history as it set off the era of sustained economic growth. Why Britain? Britain's high-wage and cheap-energy (due to coal deposits) economy at that time, created profitable conditions for businesses to use technology and capital intensive methods. High wages induced more capital-intensive production that led to even higher wages. Allen provides concise and highly contingent features of industrialisation in Western Europe and its global impact. Colonialism + Globalisation + Western Technological Superiority led to the de-industrialisation of eastern empires. Western states enjoyed a self-reinforcing and ascending spiral of progress, while today's poor countries missed the elevator.

Allen describes a "Standard model" for economic development in the 19th century; a national market, universal or mass education, protectionist tariffs, advanced banking + financial system. He thinks these four policies were the necessary conditions to industrialise. Nations used these policies to varying degrees of success (especially Latin American failures). The differences are attributed to geography, demographics and the global landscape at the time.

He briefly examines 'Africa' as a monolith and its failure to industrialise. Finally, he dives into Big Push industrialisation (primarily Russia+ East Asia): mass education, immense production and capital endeavours led by state-owned / controlled pushes. These policies guided several nations in the late 20th & 21st centuries onto a pathway to prosperity.

Although several periods aren't given their due, there's limited discussions of different regions, and humdrum repetitions abound (labour costs and shifts in production methods occupy half the work in the same monotonous manner), the book is an exceptionally concise and informative introduction to a gigantic discipline. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jul 04, 2018 Adam rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, history, ebook, economics

This book is not so much a history of the global economy as it is a comparative study of economic development after the Industrial Revolution. Its premise is that at around 1800, most nations had more or less the same size economy relative to their population – i.e., they were all poor despite the existence of some small elite. But from that point, the richest nations experienced a spiral of growing population, GDP, education, and industrial output, while the poorest nations continued to grow sl This book is not so much a history of the global economy as it is a comparative study of economic development after the Industrial Revolution. Its premise is that at around 1800, most nations had more or less the same size economy relative to their population – i.e., they were all poor despite the existence of some small elite. But from that point, the richest nations experienced a spiral of growing population, GDP, education, and industrial output, while the poorest nations continued to grow slowly despite access to increasingly productive technology and global markets. Later, some countries in the middle became rich through another path. The general question of the book is what is that spiral of growth and what allowed it to happen in some places and not others?

The first question is arguably a variant of the Jared Diamond "cargo" question: why did economic growth take off in Europe before anywhere else, and within Europe, why in England before any other nation? Allen begins his explanation with globalization. The richest nations in Europe were those engaged in the most trade around the world (Britain and the Netherlands). That meant that, for the first time in an agrarian society, high wages were not necessarily linked to a small market for goods. Allen doesn't reference secular cycles explicitly, but the logic is the same and I think it is more clear to think of it in those terms. What would normally happen is that the price of labor and thus manufactured goods (whose costs derives mainly from labor) would be high when population is low and vice versa. There would be no incentive to invest in capital to enhance the productivity of scarce labor because the price of labor would fall faster than the market would grow. With globalization, high wages and growing international markets combined to give capitalists the incentive to invest in research and development of laborsaving technologies.

Allen takes it for granted that the IR was caused by intentional R&D spending on a social scale if not by each company. He gives a fairly in-depth treatment of the technological iterations involved in cotton production, emphatically making the point that this was a process of technological evolution driven by sustained price competition and high wages.

The British industrial sector was initially protected from competition with (primarily) Indian cotton by transport costs. The low price of labor in India and many parts of Europe prevented the immediate adoption of laborsaving technologies elsewhere, preserving the technological advantage of the British businesses long enough for them to refine the machines. In the meantime, the price of British cotton and of transportation became low enough that British companies could outcompete native manufacturing in India. I was not aware of the fact that the handicraft cotton spinning industries in India and China were largely the same proportion of the economy as they were in Britain immediately before the Industrial Revolution, but shrank to almost nothing shortly thereafter. As soon as British cotton was cheaper to produce and ship to India than local laborers could spin it by hand, those laborers were better off in the short term working in agriculture, growing food to trade for British manufactured goods.

That leads to one of the points that I found most surprising. Britain was obviously not the only country to benefit from the Industrial Revolution. So the next question is why did some countries get on the same escalating spiral while others did not? The example of India hints at one explanation: competition. As long as imports are cheaper than native products could be, it is not worthwhile to invest in capital intensive technologies to try to compete. Some countries, like the United States and Germany, had high wages and were more or less able to join the Industrial Revolution as it began. Others, like India, experienced deindustrialization. Once they had missed the beginning, it was hard to step on that later points, because the population was not being educated and wages were not growing to justify the investment.

Which raises the question that is in some ways the most relevant today: how have some nations jumped onto that spiral while others remained at the bottom? Early on, the answer seems to lie in a "standard package" of development policies including eliminating internal tariffs, imposing external tariffs, and subsidizing education and transport networks. The US and Germany, among many others, took this approach and found it very successful. What I found surprising was the emphasis answer places on external tariffs, which I assumed economists found unwelcome in practically every circumstance. The implication that developing economies imposing external tariffs is in the long-term interest of their citizens, and that countries like the US now seek to destroy because our industries are now dominant and need markets more than protection, feels more like something you would hear in a NAFTA protest than an economics book.

Conversely, this "standard package" no longer seems to be effective as of the 20th century. Because rich countries have climbed so high on the development ladder,
enormous investments are required to jump to that level. Economies of scale mean that a steel plant or an automobile factory must be extremely large to compete on an international level, and many national economies are not large enough markets to support them. The answer once again seems to contradict contemporary economic conventional wisdom: Government planning. In China, Russia, and Japan, industrial development was kick started by targeted investment from government banks, which apparently demanded large scale production on the assumption that demand would rise to meet it. While part of this process was jumping up to the current level of efficient scale, the other part involved scaling down some machinery to be efficient at current wages.

It's interesting to note the balance in explanatory mechanisms Allen offers. In general, he has little faith in a cultural or institutional explanations and tends to prefer materialist ones. He does not totally dismiss the importance of bad policy, but he emphasizes that underlying economic conditions can work around or overcome it. He gives several interesting examples of cases where cultures and governments with policies or predilections many feel should discourage economic development in fact experienced rapid growth (the most obvious being China). On the other hand, the "standard model" and Big Push models of industrialization both feel more or less entirely up to the government.

There has to be some limit to how far a "Very Short Introduction" can follow the causal chain, so it would be reasonable for Allen not to spend much time going into the political economy of why some governments made those efforts and others did not. And for the most part he does, but there are some good insights in that vein. He suggests that many of the Latin American ex-colonies (and the Southern US) persisted in extremely divided and unequal societies, in which white elites did not want to grow the economy in ways that would benefit society in general (whereas New England had a more equal economy of small farmers and merchants and a democratic spirit friendly to investing in education). Colonial governments have more or less the same relationship, though exogenous instead of endogenous. India, for instance, seems to perhaps have suffered in comparison to China for this reason. Those ambitious development policies are universally beneficial in the long run, but a major lesson I think this book emphasizes is that for the most part things progress in small steps that are all beneficial in the short term or they don't progress at all. In that light, a Big Push investment is a feat of ultracooperation that requires more social capital than many countries possess, especially among often corrupt ruling classes.

Overall it's a remarkable dense but very accessible, and very even handed intro to the topic. More discussion of the debate on certain issues might be useful. ...more

flag Like · see review

Mar 01, 2014 John-Paul rated it really liked it

I felt quite ignorant about this topic and now that I've read this little book I feel slightly less ignorant. Allen writes quite well -- not beautifully, but efficiently -- so the reader not only gets a lot of facts but also a way of thinking about the central question of the book: Why are some countries rich and other countries poor?

His answers are reasonable and persuasive if not definitive, and squarely in the California School of history: it's mostly about access to resources and getting the ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Aug 21, 2015 Pavlo Illiashenko rated it it was amazing

Good overview, but may be a bit biased towards authors own work: sometimes you can ran into an unjustified (not very convincing) underestimation of the role of institutions. This book is useful because of generalizations and the big picture view of a very long period of economic development. If you a novice in this topic it will certainty destroy some of yours misconceptions. So, if you are ideologically biased reader, be careful, you can hurt your filings.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Nov 20, 2017 DonkeyPopsicle rated it really liked it

Industrial policy works, except for all those times when it didn't.

Good for the basics of economic history (the great divergence, the industrial revolution, etc.). Topical rather than thematic, making it better than the average VSI. Like lots of economic history, too often caught up in GDP rather than the spectrum of standard of living at a current time period (even quartiles would be nice). Still, a very good starting point. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Nov 07, 2012 Daniel Wright rated it liked it

Shelves: history, other-history, vsi, economics, world-history

A fairly solid introduction. It certainly taught me a lot, especially about Japan, among other things. If you want to gain a really proper understanding of why the world is like it is (economically), you will need to dig into something much thicker, but this little volume is a reasonable overview with which to start.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Nov 26, 2018 Gevorg Yeghikyan rated it it was amazing

An excellent clear introduction to the principles and logic behind the economic policies nations have been carrying out throughout centuries, and which underlie the one question every person has asked themselves: why and how are some countries rich and others poor? Much recommended!

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Aug 02, 2020 Aaron rated it really liked it

Shelves: social-science, general, history

"Why are some countries rich, and some poor?" That's the question on the inside of the jacket, and it's the reason I read this book. Just going by the book's title I thought, what a snoozer. What is this, a book full of line graphs and historical price indexes? And yes, it definitely has those. But you can easily skip past all the math and the figures to follow Robert C. Allen's analysis as he tries to answer that basic question: why are some countries rich, and some poor. I'm not an economist a "Why are some countries rich, and some poor?" That's the question on the inside of the jacket, and it's the reason I read this book. Just going by the book's title I thought, what a snoozer. What is this, a book full of line graphs and historical price indexes? And yes, it definitely has those. But you can easily skip past all the math and the figures to follow Robert C. Allen's analysis as he tries to answer that basic question: why are some countries rich, and some poor. I'm not an economist and even some of the basic ideas were new to me, but I found his examples clear and his arguments compelling.

To really, really oversimplify it, Allen says that in the year 1500 the standard of living for the average person was approximately the same all around the world. People had basically a substance diet (meaning better than skin and bones but not by much), and maybe they had a little left over for a new hammer or a new cooking pot, but not much more. And let's be clear here, we're talking about the average person, not fabled stories of kings with luxurious wealth. Everything started to change with European colonialism. It didn't happen overnight, but it was a steady stream of siphoning wealth off the oversees lands and a feedback loop of technical and commercial innovations. Basically the more money was being made, the more incentive people had to try to get piece of it. Things went into high gear with the industrial revolution (and its demand for skilled labor, supply chains, and networks of industry) where the wealthiest countries of today leaped ahead of the rest. This left the rest in the world in vicious cycle where more labor is unskilled and therefore cheap, but industry powers don't want to invest in development of skilled labor since it's in their interest to keep wages low.

While Allen covers several factors in play, here a some of the key factors for what he calls the standard model. Improvements in transportation (better ships, better roads, railways, etc.) bring down the total cost; this means you can produce something cheaply at one place (farm, plantation, factory) and ship it a greater distance while maintaining a profit, increasing the pressure on competitors. Next is education, especially literacy, since knowledge and skills are essential for more complex, specialized work. I found one of his points especially interesting in that I recently read The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction, which made the claim that literacy is generally higher in Protestant countries, especially northern Europe. At the time I thought this was a strange claim, mostly since I don't think I'd ever heard it before. Allen takes the opposing position, pointing out that the literacy rates follow industrial development borders more accurately than religious borders, and specifically notes the Catholic areas of northern France and Belgium that have literacy rates in line with their Protestant neighbors. Allen takes the position that better economic opportunities drive the motivation for education. I guess decide for yourself. A few other items to round out the standard model are removing internal tariffs (to encourage internal trade), raising external tariffs (again, to encourage local trade), embracing technical innovations, and having a strong financial system (from banks or the government) for loans. Again, these describe the standard model, and countries need to use a "Big Push" to escape the vicious cycle of low wages described above. Allen describes how Japan did this with much success, Russian and Argentina with mixed success, and how China working to do it today.

Who should read this book? I'd like to say everyone, but I know most people won't pick up a book on economic history, no matter how you pitch it. I'm still going to recommend it. It's more the topic than anything: this is someone I can hear anyone at all having an opinion about without the slightest bit of knowledge. Someone standing in line or sitting on a barstool or leaning over the neighbors fence. "See, you know what they need to do is..." Yeah, they need to solve a complex problem involving industry, politics, economics, infrastructure, investing, local job opportunities, education... and doing all this while being economically viable so the business doesn't move somewhere else for cheaper. And you got all that figured out without opening a book. Honestly, I just wish people would challenge themselves more to learn about things like this, things that don't have easy answers. By all means, have an opinion about it, but do read up first!

Anyway, if you've ever wondered why some countries are rich and some are poor, this is a good place to start. ...more

flag Like · see review

Mar 03, 2018 AnnaG rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, non-fiction, oup-vsi

A good overview of economic history. The narrative elements explaining statistically what happened when are thorough and interesting, some of the analysis seems a little superficial e.g. the authors implies in the Africa chapter that with tariffs, banks and schools any part of the world could develop and Africa was held back by colonial policies that prevented it from enacting these measures; however a chapter later he shows that Latin America did enact those policies and it still didn't work; b ...more

flag Like · see review

Apr 07, 2020 Abhishek Kona rated it really liked it

I am glad to have stumbled on the "A Very Short introduction" series. This book was dense information packed, but still got the job done of giving me an introduction to the topic, along with good recommendations on books to followup on.

. The California school of economists believe that China and parts of India had higher wages and quality of life before the 18th century and something caused a great divergence. This was the industrial revolution, and why did it start in Britain?

Primarily because ...more

flag Like · see review

May 26, 2019 Angie Boyter rated it it was ok

Shelves: didn-t-finish

Some topics are probably better candidates for a Very Short Introduction format than others. Whether it was the topic or the author I an not sure, but this one did not work for me.
The book is a big data dump full of lists of historical events and tables of data punctuated by facile general statements that are not adequately explained or supported.
I only lasted 2 chapters and threw in the towel when I encountered this discrepancy between the text and the accompanying table. The author says lite ...more

flag Like · see review

Jul 06, 2018 Pete rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, economics, history

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (2011) by Robert C Allen is an excellent overview of the world's economy. Allen is a professor of economic history and clearly knows his subject in depth. The book is well written and provides an excellent overview of global economics.

The chapters are The Great Divergence, The Rise of the West, The Industrial Revolution, The Ascent of the Rich, The Great Empires, The Americas, Africa, The Standard Model and Late Industrialisation and big Push I ...more

flag Like · see review

Sep 12, 2017 Wing rated it really liked it

This is a very concise and informative booklet. So-called prosperity stems from R&D, which is encouraged by a high wage to capital ratio, and a "standard development model" (i.e. integrated internal market, protective tariffs, universal education, and reliable domestic investment banking). An early start, relative to other competing nations, helps because, amongst other factors, minimum efficient scales enlarge with time. Geography and history matter because these dictate the initial configurati ...more

flag Like · see review

Sep 22, 2019 Tianhang Hu rated it liked it

Finished in a day since it's not that long. Would give it a 3.5/5. The economic history is coherent and tried to be comprehensive in analyzing certain important economic history issues. The author sought root causes and explanations for current economic situations of different countries and areas and he introuced and proposed a few theories and arguments. Very easy to read and has good academic value. It does take a certain level of economics knowledge to know everything he's talking about in th ...more

flag Like · see review

Dec 19, 2019 Matthew Hastings rated it liked it

Taking leave from the depths of Guy Arnold’s Africa: A Modern History, having reached the start of the 1980s, the light touch of Robert Allen’s introduction to global economic history was refreshing and accessible.

As with many other of Oxford’s Very Short Introductions, this is a great starting point to learning why things are how are, from an broad economic point of view.

At points, the generality of the arguments is infuriating, but it is a VERY short introduction, so I’ll have to search for ot ...more

flag Like · see review

Oct 14, 2020 Tom added it

for those interested in economic history, this provides a brief and accessible overview of why each region of the world has experienced the level of economic growth that it has.
the book particularly likes looking at the ratio of [wages : cost of capital and energy] as a driver for the adoption labor-saving technology. no doubt this is informed by Allen's own academic research (cf. "The Industrial Revolution in Minature" (2009))
...more

flag Like · see review

Dec 21, 2017 vikram chandran rated it really liked it

It's well written, very concise, and pulls its central theory together well. It illustrates how much the invisible hand of economics drives decision making as well as the growth trajectory for different countries. With respect to India - the book illustrates the size of the missed opportunity for the world's largest country to grow and prosper. A thought-provoking read... ...more

flag Like · see review

Oct 17, 2020 Mustafa rated it really liked it

The book is about one of the main topics of Economic History, "Why some nations are rich and the others are poor?", from a historical perspective. It has some compelling arguments, although it also has some flaws. It was good to read anyway since it had some different arguments from the other scholars. ...more

flag Like · see review

Jan 19, 2017 Michael Bee rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Great starter book on economic theory

I start a book listing / looking at the bibliography. The more foreign, cryptic/puzzling the better. This passed the test! I don't think you will come out the other side of this read quite the same as you were before reading!! ...more

flag Like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend It | Stats | Recent Status Updates

Readers also enjoyed

See similar books…

Goodreads is hiring!

If you like books and love to build cool products, we may be looking for you.
Learn more »

Genres

Economics

121 users

History

84 users

Nonfiction

36 users

Politics

15 users

History > World History

6 users

Business

5 users

Social Science

4 users

Literature > 21st Century

3 users

Science

3 users

Economics > Finance

3 users

See top shelves…

About Robert C. Allen

Robert C. Allen

21 followers

Books by Robert C. Allen

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture

Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism

More…

News & Interviews

6 Great Books Hitting Shelves This Week

Need another excuse to treat yourself to a new book this week? We've got you covered with the buzziest new releases of the day. To create our...

Trivia About Global Economic H...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

Quotes from Global Economic H...

“The Western countries have experienced a development trajectory in which higher wages led to the invention of labour-saving technology, whose use drove up labour productivity and wages with it.” — 0 likes

“These developments were not due to a conspiracy among the rich nor simply to colonialism (although it played a role). They were the result of one of the fundamental principles of economics – comparative advantage.” — 0 likes

More quotes…

See a Problem?

Preview — Global Economic History by Robert C. Allen

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Goodreads is hiring!

Genres

About Robert C. Allen

Books by Robert C. Allen

News & Interviews

Trivia About Global Economic H...

Quotes from Global Economic H...

See a Problem?

Preview — Global Economic History by Robert C. Allen

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

Goodreads is hiring!

Genres

About Robert C. Allen

Books by Robert C. Allen

News & Interviews

Trivia About Global Economic H...

Quotes from Global Economic H...

new topic
Discuss This Book