New Approaches to Economic and Social History: An Economic History of Europe by Persson Karl Gunnar & Sharp Paul & Persson Karl Gunnar & Sharp Paul

Author:Persson, Karl Gunnar & Sharp, Paul & Persson, Karl Gunnar & Sharp, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

Suggestions for further reading (see also suggestions under Chapter 10)

A very useful source of historical national accounts is available at Groningen University, search on www.ggdc.net/databases/hna.htm

Differences in American and European technology were explored by H. J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1962), and by N. Rosenberg: see the Introduction to The American System of Manufactures (Edinburgh University Press, 1969).

S. N. Broadberry has written extensively on productivity measurements and productivity comparisons. A good overview of his work is provided in The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International Perspective, 1850–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1997). His homepage is useful to visit for updates of long-run comparative GDP estimates.

Joel Mokyr provides an innovative and influential view of technology and economic development. His ideas were first developed in The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For a more recent elaboration consult The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton University Press, 2002).

An encyclopaedic survey of the technology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is provided by Vaclav Smil in Creating the Twentieth Century: Technological Innovations of 1867–1914 and Their Lasting Impact (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

The changes in consumer behaviour and market involvement preceding the Industrial Revolution are explored in Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy 1650 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

N. F. R. Crafts has changed our view of the Industrial Revolution: see his British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

R. C. Allen provides a new look at the same subject and suggests that one unique characteristic explaining the Industrial Revolution was the fact that Britain was a high-wage economy. See his The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Allen’s hypothesis has come under critical scrutiny by Morgan Kelly, Joel Mokyr and Cormac Ó Gráda in ‘Precocious Albion: a New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution’ in Annual Review of Economics 6 (2014), 363–389.

The forces that generated convergence and rapid economic growth in the so-called Golden Age (1950–73) have been intensively discussed. A recent article which provides a representative list of references as well as new insights is Tamás Vonyö, ‘Post-war reconstruction and the Golden Age of economic growth’, European Review of Economic History 12(1) (2008), 221–41.

A classic is A. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).

M. Abramovitz, ‘Catching up, forging ahead and falling behind’, Journal of Economic History 46(2) (1986), 385–406, helped us start thinking about the conditions and mechanisms of catching up.

N. F. R. Crafts and G. Toniolo edited a very useful collection of country-specific studies with a well-considered introduction in Economic Growth in Europe since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Additional insight on Spain is offered in L. Prados de la Escosura and J. Roses, ‘The sources of long-run growth in Spain, 1850–2000’, CEPR Discussion Paper 6189, 2007 and forthcoming in Journal of Economic History 69(4) (2009).

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