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Recent & Popular Posts
- Critiques of Edward Baptist
- Critiques of The History Manifesto
- Did inequality cause the First World War?
- Did the "Invisible Blockade" against Allende work?
- Economic growth in ancient Greece
- Fascism was not left-wing!!!
- Greece from Post-war orthodoxy to "Democratic Peronism"
- Ideology & Human Development (on Cuba's social development)
- Labour repression & the Indo-Japanese divergence
- Markets & famines: Amartya Sen is not the last word!
- Nazi political economy
- Random Thoughts on Robert Allen's theory of the Industrial Revolution
- State Capacity & the Sino-Japanese Divergence
- Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Reductionist Summary
- The Bairoch conjecture & the "tariff-growth paradox" of the late 19th century
- The Calico Acts: Was British cotton made possible by infant industry protection from Indian competition?
- The Napoleonic Blockade & the Infant Industry Argument
- Various posts on slavery
- Was slavery necessary for the Industrial Revolution?
- Where do pro-social institutions come from?
Language Posts
Author Archives: pseudoerasmus
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 Greeks. With a proper computation Morris’s estimates simply become … Continue reading
Posted in ancient economic history
Tagged Ancient Greek economy, Ian Morris, Josiah Ober
18 Comments
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 examines some claims of the “New Ancient History”.
Toponyms & Ethnonyms: a brief ramble
Rambling about toponyms and ethnonyms in various languages.
Posted in Languages
10 Comments
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 side. Lenders to the profligate are just as culpable as the borrowers.)
Posted in Financial Crises, Greece, Political Economy
29 Comments
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 why Japan managed, but China failed, to initiate an early transition to modern growth … Continue reading
Posted in China, East Asia, Japan
Tagged China, divergence, industrialisation, Japan, state capacity
19 Comments
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 Department at Harvard, repeatedly misunderstand or misrepresent the research they disparagingly cite in … Continue reading
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 of Fernand Braudel. The book also doubles as a rant against the … Continue reading
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 “calibration” of torture, intensified the work of slaves in order to increase labour productivity by … Continue reading
Plant breeding, not working slaves harder, drove cotton productivity gains in the US South
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 things about the subject in its review of Edward Baptist’s book … Continue reading
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 on the role of social capital in financial crises.
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