Howmuch.net created a Voronoi diagram on US economics a few months ago and then they did another great job in visualizing the historical world data, again with Voronoi diagrams. If you pause the diagram every second, you actually can follow what is going on. However, world economy hasn’t changed that much in the last 35 years and I found an evolving cell to be hard to follow. I tried a simpler approach, using a line chart with GDP per capita data. A British economist, Angus Maddison, apparently did extensive research on how to estimate the GDP of the Roman Empire. His work covers a timeframe of whopping 2000 years! You read that right; starting from year 1, his estimates compare how well countries did, based on 1990 international dollars.

Since we have basically no substantial economic data dating back to the Roman and Byzantium Empires, these results should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, most economic growth back then relied on agriculture and handcrafts, while buying power was a luxury of the aristocracy and planned production was almost non-existent.

At year 1, obviously, Rome had the strongest economic power (shown as Italy on the chart). After Rome’s fall, China rises around the year 1000. As Renaissance hits, we see a considerable rise in the European countries. Following that, with the age of expansion and colonization around the 18th century, the UK and Netherlands take the lead. Right before World War I; the UK, USA and Switzerland are among the most prosperous. USA and Switzerland swap places a few times after that around 50s and 70s. When you look at the chart the trough created by WWI is very clear. Thanks to rapidly growing technology and production, WWII apparently only created a stagnation and wasn’t much of a pushback.

As I mentioned earlier, especially the data before 1800s is not definitive in any way. However, I believe this one chart summarizes the history of the world and how economic power changed hands, fairly well.