Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1017/S174002282000039X
J. L. van Zanden, J. Bolt
Abstract As contribution to the debate about the interpretation of the process of economic growth before the Industrial Revolution, we discuss two concerns about the currently available estimates of historical national accounts and the way in which these estimates should be interpreted. Firstly, we argue that estimates of the long-term trends of economic growth should make use of all information contained in time series of Gross Domestic Product (GDP henceforth), and therefore use standard regression analysis to establish those trends. Secondly, we point to the problem that the time series of historical GDP are based on very different estimation procedures, which probably affect the outcome in terms of the level of GDP per capita in the period before 1850. Both concerns imply that we do not entirely agree with Jack Goldstone’s views of pre-industrial growth. In particular, his conclusion that growth was cyclical before 1800 is inconsistent with the available GDP estimates, which point to sustained growth, albeit at a very low rate.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s174002282100022x
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Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1017/S1740022820000388
S. Broadberry
Abstract By offering a particular interpretation of the new evidence on historical national accounting, Goldstone argues for a return to the Pomeranz (2000) version of the Great Divergence, beginning only after 1800. However, he fails to distinguish between two very different patterns of pre-industrial growth: (1) alternating episodes of growing and shrinking without any long-term trend in per capita income and (2) episodes of growing interspersed by per capita incomes remaining on a plateau, so that per capita GDP trends upwards over the long run. The latter dynamic pattern occurred in Britain and Holland from the mid-fourteenth century, so that Northwest Europe first edged ahead of the Yangzi delta region of China in the eighteenth century.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1017/S1740022820000418
P. Malanima
The article by Jack Goldstone, Dating the Great Divergence, has the merit of discussing both the wide panorama of recent global history and the conclusions stemming from specific northEuropean long-term series of GDP.1 The article’s main target is the deeply rooted idea that Modern Growth was the continuation of previous trends of GDP growth. Goldstone’s opinion is that the rise of the West, in the frame of global history, occurred only from the late-eighteenth century or the beginning of the Nineteenth, not earlier. At the time, a true divergence among World economies did not exist. Modern Growth is different from previous periods of expansion not merely in the degree but also in the nature. Pre-modern examples of growth were episodic and not sustained; they represented temporary ‘efflorescences’ rather than long upward rises.2 It is apparent that, in such an approach to growth, problems of definition are crucial. Since the modern rise is deemed to be different from past ‘efflorescences’ of sporadic growth, what is, according to Goldstone, the primary feature of “modern” in comparison with ‘pre-modern’? The definition of Modern Growth adopted by Goldstone is the classical one put forward in economics and historical research primarily by Simon Kuznets:3 it is characterised both by strong increases in population and production; growth in production is, however, higher than in population. The result is then a rise in per capita product or intensive4 growth. This rise is sustained for long periods of time and primarily derives from modern technological growth. This definition of Modern Growth, rapidly recalled by Goldstone in his present article, had been more widely discussed in his previous article on efflorescences and economic growth in World history.5 In the following, I will deal with the differences between modern and pre-modern growth and later with the concept of technological progress in relation to the rise of the West. I will focus primarily on Europe and the Mediterranean and will include extra-European macroareas at the end.
杰克·戈德斯通（Jack Goldstone）的《追溯大分歧》（Dating The Great Divergence）一文的优点在于，既讨论了近代全球历史的全景，也讨论了源自特定北欧长期GDP序列的结论。1这篇文章的主要目标是根深蒂固的观点，即现代增长是GDP增长先前趋势的延续。戈德斯通的观点是，在全球历史的框架内，西方的崛起只发生在18世纪末或19世纪初，而不是更早。当时，世界经济体之间并不存在真正的分歧。现代增长与以往的扩张时期不同，不仅在程度上，而且在性质上。前现代增长的例子是偶发的，而不是持续的；它们代表了暂时的“风化”，而不是长期的上升。2很明显，在这种增长方式中，定义问题至关重要。由于现代的崛起被认为与过去零星增长的“风化”不同，戈德斯通认为，与“前现代”相比，“现代”的主要特征是什么？戈德斯通对现代增长的定义是西蒙·库兹涅茨在经济学和历史研究中提出的经典定义：3现代增长的特点是人口和生产的强劲增长；然而，生产的增长高于人口的增长。其结果是人均生产总值的增长或密集增长。这种增长持续了很长一段时间，主要源于现代技术的增长。戈德斯通在他的这篇文章中迅速回忆起了对现代增长的定义，在他上一篇关于世界历史上的繁荣与经济增长的文章中，他对这一定义进行了更广泛的讨论。5在下文中，我将讨论现代增长与前现代增长之间的差异，以及后来与西方崛起相关的技术进步概念。我将主要关注欧洲和地中海，最后将包括欧洲以外的宏观地区。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1017/S174002282000042X
J. Goldstone
What is divergence and why does it matter? The question motivating all of us is to understand what led up to modern economic growth. Malanima is correct that I follow Kuznets and describe this as rapid and sustained growth in both population and output per head, but I would now add a third qualifier, to levels beyond the pre-industrial peak. All three qualifiers are necessary because history has many examples of sustained growth in population and output per head: as van Zanden and Bolt show in their comment, both Britain and Holland had positive trend growth in real GDP/capita all the way from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. It seems clear that classical Greece and Rome each had at least three centuries of sustained growth in population and GDP/cap as well, and China likely did also before achieving the heights reached in the Northern Song.1 But all of these sustained growth episodes were very slow, as van Zanden and Bolt show in their regressions for Holland and England, where real income growth averaged not more than 0.2% per year. There were shorter periods of much more rapid growth, which I have labelled ‘efflorescences.’ In these cases, a combination of technical innovations in farming or transport or other production allows higher output that supports urbanisation and more extensive trade, which in turn leads to greater specialisation, greater monetary circulation and profits that feed further investment to boost productivity, in a virtuous cycle.2 In post-classical Europe, the High Middle Ages in the north, Renaissance Italy and Golden Age Holland are examples; outside Europe, the peaks of the Song and Qing dynasties in China, the early Baghdad Caliphate and perhaps the Mughal Empire under Akbar are likely others. But over time, population continues to grow, trade patterns change, climate shifts, administrative inefficiency, wars and diseases take their toll and after a century or less, rapid growth in GDP/cap comes to an end. Finally, past episodes of rapid and/or sustained growth, as beautifully shown by Broadberry’s Figure 5 above, showing GDP/cap in the leading regions of China and Europe, often approached but never reached beyond an apparent limit in GDP/cap of about $1800.3 Instead, from classical times up to 1750, as Malanima makes clear, GDP/cap fluctuated in a relatively narrow band under
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Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1017/s1740022821000218
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Pub Date : 2021-06-28DOI: 10.1017/S1740022821000231
S. Lu
Abstract This article explains how the US westward expansion influenced and stimulated Japanese migration to Brazil. Emerging in the nineteenth century as expanding powers in East Asia and Latin America, respectively, both Meiji Japan and post-independence Brazil looked to the US westward expansion as a central reference for their own processes of settler colonialism. The convergence of Japan and Brazil in their imitation of US settler colonialism eventually brought the two sides together at the turn of the twentieth century to negotiate for the start of Japanese migration to Brazil. This article challenges the current understanding of Japanese migration to Brazil, conventionally regarded as a topic of Latin American ethnic studies, by placing it in the context of settler colonialism in both Japanese and Brazilian histories. The study also explores the shared experiences of East Asia and Latin America as they felt the global impact of the American westward expansion.
{"title":"A great convergence: The American frontier and the origins of Japanese migration to Brazil","authors":"S. Lu","doi":"10.1017/S1740022821000231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022821000231","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explains how the US westward expansion influenced and stimulated Japanese migration to Brazil. Emerging in the nineteenth century as expanding powers in East Asia and Latin America, respectively, both Meiji Japan and post-independence Brazil looked to the US westward expansion as a central reference for their own processes of settler colonialism. The convergence of Japan and Brazil in their imitation of US settler colonialism eventually brought the two sides together at the turn of the twentieth century to negotiate for the start of Japanese migration to Brazil. This article challenges the current understanding of Japanese migration to Brazil, conventionally regarded as a topic of Latin American ethnic studies, by placing it in the context of settler colonialism in both Japanese and Brazilian histories. The study also explores the shared experiences of East Asia and Latin America as they felt the global impact of the American westward expansion.","PeriodicalId":46192,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S1740022821000231","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41258921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-23DOI: 10.1017/S1740022820000406
J. Goldstone
Abstract New data on Dutch and British GDP/capita show that at no time prior to 1750, perhaps not before 1800, did the leading countries of northwestern Europe enjoy sustained strong growth in GDP/capita. Such growth in income per head as did occur was highly episodic, concentrated in a few decades and then followed by long periods of stagnation of income per head. Moreover, at no time before 1800 did the leading economies of northwestern Europe reach levels of income per capita much different from peak levels achieved hundreds of years earlier in the most developed regions of Italy and China. When the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, it was not preceded by patterns of pre-modern income growth that were in any way remarkable, neither by sustained prior growth in real incomes nor exceptional levels of income per head. The Great Divergence, seen as the onset of sustained increases in income per head despite strong population growth, and achievement of incomes beyond pre-modern peaks, was a late occurrence, arising only from 1800.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-10DOI: 10.1017/S1740022820000443
Ruth Mostern
[...]they offer a research agenda about the incorporation of land, labour and resources into the capitalist world economy. According to Raymond Williams’ classic work of Marxist literary theory, the ideological work that the concept of the countryside performs is simply to be a discursive counterpoint to the city. [...]I emphasise the urgency of centring the brutal history of conquest and the resistance of colonised peoples. [...]I explain how an approach focused on frontiers as locales on the geospatial earth would bring to life the digital research methods that the authors propound in their conclusion.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-10DOI: 10.1017/S1740022820000431
S. Beckert, U. Bosma, Mindi Schneider, E. Vanhaute
Given the alarming pace of climate change, global environmental destruction, and associated social dislocations and inequalities, a global history that also speaks to the present is more important now than ever. We started our article with a pointed argument that ‘[t]he history of the making of the modern world is a history of the expansion of commodity frontiers, a historical conundrum so spatially, socially, and structurally all-encompassing that it still awaits its persuasive analysis’. This deep historical perspective, we argued, is crucial to understanding how we arrived at our current socioecological predicament. What is more, we proposed that transdisciplinary research among historians and social, ecological, and computational scientists is essential to engage such questions. To that end, we have developed our research agenda around an analytical framework that lets us trace the long history and present of capitalism. We look at the countryside through the lens of the history of commodity frontiers, using commodity regimes as an analytical framework to make sense of the vast amount of data we hope to uncover. The commodity frontier – the empirical core of our investigations – is not simply a place. It is a relational concept that grasps the flows of materials and energy between nature and society, between different societies and within them. These flows connect regions of extraction with the sites of production that organize capitalist modernity on a world scale. The commodity frontier stands for an inductive historical approach that starts from the far edges of global expansion. It includes agents other than the global hegemonic powers, spaces other than the metropole and relations that encompass more than the economic. Indeed, as we emphasized in our paper, ‘[m]uch of the writing on the history of capitalism privileges the perspective from the city and industry to the detriment of processes in the household, agriculture, and the countryside where the vast majority of humanity has lived until very recently and where many of the revolutions of capitalism have taken place’. Urban merchants, state bureaucrats, soldiers and lawmakers, of course, helped produce these commodity frontiers as much as commodity frontiers co-created them – yet the distinguishing feature of our work is that it thinks of these processes from the fringes. We welcome Maxine Berg’s observation that ‘histories of natural resources and of the countryside and its peoples have not been sufficiently addressed by global historians’. This lacuna stands in contrast to a growing number of scholars from other disciplines who have come to see ‘commodity frontiers’ as a promising approach to historical processes. As Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke conclude, such an approach is both exciting and necessary to avoid mono-causal explanations of historical change. The research agenda we propose, as Ruth Mostern observes, attempts to bridge the gulf between the conceptual focus of soci
考虑到气候变化、全球环境破坏以及相关的社会混乱和不平等的惊人速度，一部反映当下的全球历史比以往任何时候都更加重要。我们在文章的开头提出了一个尖锐的论点:“现代世界的形成史是一部商品边界扩张的历史，这是一个在空间、社会和结构上无所不有的历史难题，它仍在等待有说服力的分析。”我们认为，这种深刻的历史视角对于理解我们是如何陷入当前的社会生态困境至关重要。更重要的是，我们建议历史学家和社会、生态和计算科学家之间的跨学科研究对于解决这些问题至关重要。为此，我们围绕一个分析框架制定了我们的研究议程，使我们能够追溯资本主义的悠久历史和现状。我们通过商品边界的历史镜头来观察农村，使用商品制度作为分析框架来理解我们希望揭示的大量数据。商品前沿——我们研究的经验核心——不仅仅是一个地方。它是一个关系概念，掌握了自然与社会之间、不同社会之间以及社会内部的物质和能量流动。这些流动将抽取地区与在世界范围内组织资本主义现代性的生产地点联系起来。商品前沿代表了一种从全球扩张的边缘出发的归纳历史方法。它包括全球霸权国家以外的代理人，大都市以外的空间，以及超越经济范围的关系。事实上，正如我们在论文中强调的那样，“许多关于资本主义历史的著作都从城市和工业的角度出发，而忽略了家庭、农业和农村的过程，而直到最近，绝大多数人类都生活在农村，也发生了许多资本主义革命。”当然，城市商人、国家官僚、士兵和立法者帮助创造了这些商品边界，就像商品边界共同创造了它们一样——然而，我们工作的显著特点是，它从边缘思考这些过程。我们欢迎玛克辛·伯格(Maxine Berg)的观察，即“全球历史学家对自然资源、农村及其人民的历史没有进行充分的研究”。这一空白与越来越多其他学科的学者形成鲜明对比，他们将“商品边界”视为研究历史进程的一种有前途的方法。正如Ronald Findlay和Kevin O 'Rourke总结的那样，这种方法既令人兴奋，又必要，以避免对历史变化的单一因果解释。正如露丝·莫斯顿(Ruth Mostern)所观察到的，我们提出的研究议程试图弥合社会科学概念焦点之间的鸿沟
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