What is History 11: World Economic History

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Richard Baldwin The Great Convergence 2016

 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 4 May 2020

What is History 11: World Economic History to 1990

What is History: Richard Baldwin The Great Convergence 2016

Introduction

I was planning to write the next Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel articles following on from Guns, Germs and Steel: Overview and Polynesia A Natural Experiment of History and I will soon. I accidentally picked up a second hand copy of The Great Convergence by Richard Baldwin 2016 from Canty’s bookshop and decided that it had important information that couldn’t wait.

I usually don’t have much time for macroeconomists and rarely read economics books. But, at least Baldwin is interested in economic history and covers a period from 200,000 years ago to the present, which is extraordinary, certainly a much longer period than most economists ever think about. He has some quite important things to say about the early history of humankind and on the development of world economics up to the modern era.

I had been introduced to Kondratiev cycles (or waves) some time ago by Fred Emery (See Future Predicting and Q Research methods). Fred was interested in the modern modifications of the cycles (see Wikipedia below). He was also interested in the energy implications of the following:

• Industrial Revolution (1771)
• Age of Steam and Railways (1829)
• Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering (1875)
• Age of Oil, Electricity, the Automobile and Mass Production (1908)
• Age of Information and Telecommunications (1971)

(Wikipedia, Kondratiev Wave)

But, Fred thought the new forms of energy or ways of using new technologies were still intricately tied up in the Kondratiev idea of 40-60 year cycles of expansion, stagnation and recession, with their impacts on labour, production and prosperity.

Richard Baldwin is also interested in phases (cycles) in economic history but not wedded to equal time periods. Phase 1 Humanising the globe is from 200,000 years ago to around 12,000 years ago. Phase 2 Agriculture and the first bundling is from 12,000 years ago to around 200 years ago. Phase 3 is from around 1820 to 1990, the industrial revolution, the age of steam and globalisation’s first unbundling. Phase 4 is from 1990 and begins with the ICT revolution (information, communications technology) and is the second unbundling.

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What is history 8: EH Carr History as Progress

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   Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 July 2018

What is History 8 by EH Carr: The next two Lectures or Chapters 5 and 6

History as Progress & The Widening Horizon

Introduction

In What is History: Sleep Patterns we found that what we view as normal wasn’t necessarily the same in other periods. Sleep patterns were quite different before the coming of electric and gas lighting. Similarly the view of history has changed as well.

The two brilliant lectures in EH Carr’s What is History on the historian and his facts and causation were covered in the two previous articles: What is History 5: EH Carr Historians & their Facts and What is History 7: Causation in History covering EH Carr’s earlier lectures 1 to 4 in the book.

The current lecture 5 on History as Progress is perhaps Carr’s most brave and modern chapter in the book. While speculative, it raises issues that we still need to deal with, both in our understanding of history and our current understanding of what civilisation means. As such, the topic needs to be confronted and not marginalised.

The previous What is History? articles have been 1 Introduction, 2 Sleep Patterns 3, The Medieval Mind, 4 Love,  5  EH Carr Historians & their Facts, 6 Religion and 7: EH Carr Causation.

Progress in History

The changing view of History

The ancients were basically unhistorical in Asia, Greece and Rome, that is, basically uninterested in the future or the past. EH Carr says:

Poetic visions of a brighter future took the form of visions of a return to a golden age of the past — a cyclical view which assimilated the processes of history to the processes of nature.

What is history 7: EH Carr Causation in history

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   Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 May 2018

What is History? by EH Carr: The next three Lectures (Chapters 2 to 4)

Society & the individual; History, science & morality; Causation in history

Introduction

I covered Lecture 1 or Chapter 1 (pp 7-30) in What is History, quite comprehensively in What is History 5: Historians and their facts. This was a very satisfying process because it was easy to tease erudite and incisive answers from Carr’s wonderful sentences and quotations from other historians.

The remaining lectures on initial reading tend to be slightly less incisive and a little more difficult in interpretation. However, there is still a large amount of fascinating material and the content Carr is grappling with, that is, defining a new way of looking at historical method (historiography) is too important to ignore.

What is History 5: EH Carr Historians & their facts

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   Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 January 2017

What is History ? by EH Carr, Chapter 1: Historians & their facts

What is History? by EH Carr 1961 a compilation of the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures delivered at The University of Cambridge in 1961.

Introduction

I’ve been sneaking up on the meat of this topic slowly but EH Carr and later Jared Diamond represent the meat, though there is much more to come. The previous What is History? articles have been 1 An Introduction, 2 Sleep Patterns 3, The Medieval Mind, 4 Love. They were part of a softening up process to indicate that history is not just about kings and famous individuals, that one can view history from different directions to those normally chosen by historians and that writing about and understanding history is not at all an obvious process and is in fact very difficult.

With Carr one examines mainstream history and historians. He shows in a brilliantly witty and erudite series of lectures that the process of studying history is not at all straight forward. However, since Carr’s 1961 lectures the study of history has come a long way and I certainly am optimistic about its future. If one had to sum up Carr in one sentence, in his words, it would be:

The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.

This article will deal only with Carr’s first lecture.

What is History 3: The Medieval Mind

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The Medieval Mind, Bode Museum, Berlin 2014

   Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 February 2016

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What is History? Can we comprehend the medieval mind?

Introduction

Torture scene, Stained Glass, Old Church, Delft 2007

As in What is History 1 and What is History 2 about sleep patterns, we are looking at the difficulty in understanding history in a conventional sense.

Covering the medieval mind is a big ask and I mustn’t pursue my usual digressions.

The quotations are interpretations of an area of history that we don’t know much about especially the early period. There are three books. The first two William Manchester, and Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger cover the early Middle Ages.

What is history 2: Sleep Patterns

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Good, shop in Bangkok Mall, 2011

   Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 14 December 2015

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What is History? — Sleep patterns

Preamble

The next two articles are about how relatively ordinary people (like us?) lived in other times. It is a quirky question, but one I’ve often asked. And, I must admit I’ve rarely been satisfied with the answers. Although an easy question to ask, it is difficult if not impossible to answer, and why historians tend to gloss over it.

What is History 1: Introduction

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Ishtar Gate Relief, Pergamon Museum, Berlin

   Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony,  8 December 2015

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What is History? An Introduction

A confession

I am not a historian. I didn’t study it at school or university. But as with most things I am interested in history, particularly its process. I am also interested in the general rather than the specific.