First posted 18 January 2015; last updated: 8 February 2017

I keep getting asked for survey-type books/articles on the economic history of particular regions or countries. In the list below, as much as possible, I stick to works of economic history with a stress on country and regional knowledge, not topical or thematic specialisation. (So no books focused on international trade or income inequality, etc.) But they are all recognisably economic history. I also don’t list any “big history” books along the lines of Jared Diamond. Suggestions are welcome!

Also see the companion page: Economic History Papers.

For someone with absolutely no clue about the basics of world economic history of the last 500 years, but who wants something written by an economist, a good primer is Robert Allen’s Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction. It’s a little gem, a masterpiece of parsimony, so short yet so much. Every sentence packs a mound of research, going from the “rise of the West” and the “great divergence” to the “big push” late industrialisation of Japan, the Soviet Union, and China. Yet unlike other books of this kind, it has an idiosyncratic touch that’s uniquely Allen.

Also recommended: Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population

The Industrial Revolution in Britain

Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective and Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy are the key works. I say start with Allen first. But you definitely need both for a balanced perspective. Allen’s book is also a good entrée to the “great divergence” debate, contrasting European and Asian living standards just before the modern era. Clark’s A Farewell to Alms offers a very heterodox take, but it’s also the best elementary introduction to the neo-Malthusian model. Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity, which is basically a chapter-by-chapter criticism of nearly all theories of the Industrial Revolution, serves as an excellent if idiosyncratic survey of the literature on the IR.

With the exception of the above volume, I prefer McCloskey from the early days of cliometrics in the 1970s to the early 1990s. The two editions of The Economic History of Britain since 1700 that Donald McCloskey edited with Roderick Floud (2 volumes, 1981; and 3 volumes, 1994) are great. I treasure my unfortunately outdated, but dog-eared, copies of the 1981 volumes. The 2004 update by Floud & Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (3 volumes) continues in that tradition.

The 2014 successor, Floud, Humphries & Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (2 volumes) is important as introductory material and updated literature survey. An interesting change from previous editions is that the chapter on overseas trade originally written by Knick Harley has been replaced with one by Nuala Zahedieh which makes a nod to Immanuel Wallerstein.

Morgan’s Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660-1800 is an excellent review of the debate surrounding this question, but as of 2000.

For some Europe-wide perspectives on the “rise of the West”, see Broadberry & O’Rourke, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe (vol. 1). Unlike its predecessors in the same Cambridge series, this one is a very reader-friendly source. Another comparative look is Prados de la Escosura, ed., Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and its European Rivals, 1688–1815.

Books which review and summarise our current understanding of the “Great Divergence”, which used to be called the “Rise of the West”:

Findlay & O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium offers the most nuanced perspective on the contribution of the external to European economic development. Not only does it serve as economic history of the world since the fall of Rome, but you might also notice in it a more sophisticated version of Beckert’s “war capitalism”. (What exactly was wrong with the word mercantilism anyway???)

van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution reviews the latest evidence as assembled by economic historians on why the great divergence took place.

Vries, Escaping Poverty: The origins of modern economic growth, reviews all the theories and all the evidence for the “Great Divergence” as assembled by economists, California school historians, and global historians. Vries is critical of all them.

Persson, An Economic History of Europe: Knowledge, Institutions, and Growth 600 to Present, does not tell a conventional history or narrative; rather it is a lecturish or textbookish exposition of the main stylised facts of European economic history, explicated through modelling concepts.

Hatcher & Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages, an overview of the “super models” (Malthusian, Marxist, and Smithian) used to describe and explain economic change in the Middle Ages, with special emphasis on the late mediaeval “transition to capitalism” debate

Some books which focus on more specific aspects of European economic development in the long run:

The spread of the industrial revolution

After my recent post on the Hobson-Lenin thesis, someone asked if there’s a good book on the “first globalisation” of 1870-1914. My answer: Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy, by Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, the best summary-analysis of the econ hist literature on the epic movement of people, goods, and capital in the long 19th century. If you’re interested in the impact of the “first globalisation” on today’s developing countries, then Williamson’s Trade and Poverty: How the Third World Fell Behind.

Scylla & Toniolo, ed., Patterns of European Industrialization: The Nineteenth Century is a collection of surveys with chapters on France, Russia, Italy, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. Trebilcock, The Industrialization of the Continental Powers 1780-1914, also covers Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Spain.

Broadberry, The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International Perspective, 1850–1990 covers three important themes: the so-called “decline of Britain”, the rise of Germany and the USA, and the “Second Industrial Revolution”.

covers three important themes: the so-called “decline of Britain”, the rise of Germany and the USA, and the “Second Industrial Revolution”. For a short article on how industrialisation spread from Britain to Europe, s ee Harley, “British and European Industrialisation“.

ee Harley, “British and European Industrialisation“. Allen’s article “The Spread of Manufacturing” is more global but I don’t see a copy online. Both articles are contained in the 2nd volume of The Cambridge History of Capitalism.

There are surprisingly not that many general economic histories of France or Germany in English with a quantitative orientation and updated findings.

France:

Germany:

United States

The most general survey is Atack & Passell, A New Economic View of American History (1994) or Hughes & Cain, American Economic History (a fairly simple undergraduate textbook).

For the economic history of slavery, don’t read Fogel’s Time on the Cross. Instead, read his Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. It’s updated and corrected compared with the first, taking into consideration the extensive debates Fogel had with economists and historians after Time on the Cross was published. But you should also read the sceptical assessment of F & E’s claims by Gavin Wright (2006), Slavery and American Economic Development.

The “Fogel of Emancipation” is Ransom & Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. Olmstead & Rhode, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development is an agricultural history of the United States which touches on many themes from slavery to innovation.

Lindert & Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700, despite the title, is really a complete economic history of the United States. It’s the most updated of its kind.

Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the US Standard of Living since the Civil War, conveys better than any other book how life was transformed by technological changes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and how the welfare gains from that are underestimated in GDP measurements).

Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth

Russia & the Soviet Union

Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917 is now rather old, but Gregory, Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year covers roughly the period from the abolition of serfdom in 1861 to the end of the New Economic Policy in 1928. Mironov is mostly about biological living standards in the prerevolutionary period, but has a chapter or two on wages and prices.

Gregory & Stuart, Russian & Soviet Economic Performance is a textbook covering the entire period of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history from 1917 to the present.

Other current-OECD:

Comparative historical development

Nathan Nunn “Historical Development” (a chapter in The Handbook of Economic Growth) and “The Importance of History for Economic Development” are indispensable readings. For the “deep roots” literature, Spolaore & Wacziarg’s “How deep are the roots of economic development” is the best entry way.

VoxEU has also just issued a 3-volume series of free e-booklets called The Long Economic and Political Shadow of History (~150 pages in each volume). It brings together very readable summaries of the “deep history” literature by some of the key researchers themselves. Parts one (global), two (Asia & Africa), and three (Europe & the Americas).

Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500 is probably the most general mediaval econ history. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe — the greatest fucking debate in economic history ! A synthesis of the Malthusian and the Brennerian-Marxist approaches is contained in Turchin & Nefedov, Secular Cycles, which models “structural-demographic cycles” in ancient Rome, medieval England and France, and Russia.

Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History (Boldizzoni & Hudson, ed.) is rather uneven, but this is a sui generis volume: there is no other place where you can read about the history of the economic historiography for the major regions and countries of the world.

The Cambridge History of Capitalism (2 volumes) has all kinds of short synoptic essays about many countries and regions, such as by Bresson (ancient Greece), Jongman (Roman empire), Pamuk (the Middle East), Roy (India), Jerven (Africa), and Atack (USA). I think Gareth Austin’s chapter in the 2nd volume, “Capitalism and the Colonies”, is the single best short treatment of the economic relationship between the imperial metropolis and the colonies. Harley’s chapter on British industrialisation stresses the crucial role of “agrarian capitalism” (big capitalist farms, as opposed to the peasant agriculture of France).

Asian economic history

China

The recent The Economic History of China (2016) by von Glahn has no equivalent. There is no other book at the moment which simultaneously contains a readable narrative of the full sweep of Chinese economic history; and reflects recent scholarship both Chinese and international (although the most important scholarship on Chinese economic history is actually Japanese, which is what von Glahn relies on); and covers the major themes and controversies of the historiography. Von Glahn’s book might have dealt a little bit more with the controversies surrounding the revisionism of Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, which really changed the terms of the debate and is an absolute must-read.

A bit dated but for the “big issues” approach, Elvin’s The Patterns of the Chinese Past is still worth reading). Also recommended is Lee & Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000, a demographic and family history of China.

For China after 1949 —

Perkins, The Economic Transformation of China, covers both Mao and post-Mao, and qualifies as a short history of both periods.

Naughton, The Chinese Economy, is a very good descriptive work on the post-Mao period.

Qian, How Reform Worked in China is probably the best analysis.

India

In my opinion, the absolutely necessary first stop: Chaudhary et al., A New Economic History of Colonial India. As the title suggests, it embodies the most modern research by economic historians.

Tirthankar Roy’s The Economic History of India 1857-1947, which is used in both India and the UK as the South Asian intro, is more detailed. It can be seen as an updated, reader-friendly version of the even more detailed The Cambridge Economic History of Modern India, volume 2. Also check out Roy’s recent book, How British Rule Changed India’s Economy.

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of these two books by Roy and Chaudhary et al. In 1963, Morris D. Morris, an American economic historian of India, wrote:

It is dismaying to realize that even within very broad ranges of error we do not know whether during the past century-and-a-half the economy’s performance improved, stagnated, or actually declined. The fact that we have no satisfactory basis for any judgments has not prevented the emergence of a widely-held interpretation of the career of the Indian economy in the nineteenth century. This conventional doctrine starts with a notion of “traditional India,” a subsistence economy which was self contained and static. Into this traditional socio-economic order came the shattering influence of market forces represented by Western commercial and industrial competition, reinforced by the power of the modern imperial state… Indian writers typically stress the exploitative features of British rule as the cause of nineteenth-century decay.

That’s no longer (as) true. Many things about the 19th century remain quite patchy, but the picture we now have is much more nuanced than “Britain impoverished India” — even though that crude and antiquated view still predominates in Western history departments or amongst nationalists and neo-Marxists in India.

For pre-colonial Indian economic history, see Moosvi, The Economy of the Mughal Empire c. 1595: A Statistical Study.

Parthasarathi, How Europe Got Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (2011) tries to do for India what Kenneth Pomeranz had done for China. But Parthasarathi doesn’t quite make the cut, and I can’t recommend the book for reasons I touch on here.

But the historians Pomeranz and Parthasarathi (as well as Joseph Inikori) are so much better at writing economic history than others trained in history departments! In fact, if the “historians of capitalism” all reasoned and wrote like Pomeranz, Parthasarathi, and Inikori, I would probably still disagree with them but I would bitch less about them !

Japan

Given Japan’s status as the premier non-Western late industrialiser, there should be more books on Japan’s economic development with updated research. An ideal volume would start from the late Tokugawa period with Japan’s own version of the “industrious revolution” and the Meiji Restoration. It should also cover not only Japan’s pre-war industrialisation but also assessments of Japan’s post-war industrial policy and state planning (as described by Chalmers Johnson). Nothing really fits that bill in English:

Other Asia:

Overall, the best economic history of Asia is still mostly found in papers. (See this list.) Personally I think the relative dearth of East Asian economic history must be related to the near-absence of East Asia in development economics — despite the ‘historical turn’ taken by development studies in general. Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail is very sketchy about Japan or South Korea! And many political economy of development syllabi are all about Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia or Latin America and very little about East Asia.

Africa:

Latin America:

The Middle East :

Developing countries in general, the Global South

The Spread of Modern Industry to the Periphery since 1871, edited by Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, is now the standard reference for the spread of industrialisation from the western core to the periphery, both European and non-European, with chapters on most major regions by specialists. Also see their VoxEU column.

Other books which had previously covered this period:

But there isn’t a specifically post-war economic history of the “Global South” taken as a whole, that’s really up to date. Radelet’s The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World doesn’t quite fit the bill. Ideally you want a book which covers the colonial period, the postwar boom, the fad for import-substitution industrialisation and other kinds of state-led development, the external shocks of the 1970s and 1980s, and structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s. But I’m not aware of a book which fills this woeful lacuna.

Little et al.’s Boom, Adjustment, and Crisis: The Macroeconomic Experience of Developing Countries (1993) is excellent but has a narrower focus than I’m talking about.

I must say, the finest fusion of economics and psychology is not some book on nudges or biases, but The Hive Mind by Garett Jones. It’s also the first time that differential psychology has been substantively applied by an economist to the questions of economic development and political economy. The book is also a masterpiece of cunning ambiguity, causing different readers to have diametrically opposed interpretations of it!

Ancient Economies:

Culture and cultural evolution

After my post on the origins of “pro-social institutions“, I have been asked about books on culture & economics, and the new(ish) interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution.

For the economistic perspective on culture, the key summary articles are Nathan Nunn, “Culture and the Historical Process“; and Alesina & Giuliano, “Culture and institutions“. Also see Sriya Iyer’s survey, “The New Economics of Religion“.

The best book on cultural evolution is by far Joe Henrich’s recent The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. (You can also see Henrich’s 15-minute presentation of his book.) It offers many delights, but my favourite bit is this. Henrich has a very interesting way of looking at (premodern) technology as a designerless-yet-designed, culturally evolved product for which no single person has any idea why it works but users have confidence in ancestrally transmitted methods. The best example is manioc processing — manioc is toxic yet the detoxification process is completely non-intuitive and users have no idea why any of the steps in the incredibly labourious system work. They just blindly imitate ancestral customs, but somehow this blind cultural evolution has an ‘intelligence’ and is highly efficient. If you skip one step in the process the whole thing fails. The manioc processing example is all the more evocative for its causal opacity — the damage from failure to follow all the steps in the traditional process (such as merely removing the bitter taste) is only apparent in the very long run, so there is no way individuals could have put 2 and 2 together and said it prevents toxin poisoning. I haven’t read a book with as many eureka! type insights in a long time.

Henrich’s book is compelling as narrative. But if you want more nuts-and-bolts description of what cultural evolution is about, especially in relationship with biological evolution, then Mesoudi’s Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences; and Boyd & Richerson’s Not By Genes Alone: How culture transformed human evolution. The mathematical theory is translated into ordinary language; it’s argued that cultures evolve in a way analogous with Darwinian biological evolution; and evidence (mostly) from the social sciences such as anthropology and sociology is put forward. Rest assured: this movement upholds culture as the driver of human social evolution, not genes or biology, but they reject the dichotomy between cultural and biological evolution, considering it a single process.

However, most of the cultural-evolution guys (Henrich, Mesoudi, Boyd, Richerson) are quantitatively orientated anthropologists who are more comfortable trucking in evolutionary game theory or talking about foraging bands like the Aché of Paraguay. You won’t get too much about the role of culture in history or economic life. For cultural evolution and recorded human history, the best (and almost the only) book-length exemplar is Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War: the Rise and Fall of Empires. This is the popularisation of theoretical modelling and empirical work he has done elsewhere. Not only does it apply the principles of cultural evolution to the dynamics of state formation and decay, but it also has the best single chapter describing the science of human sociality. Also worth a look is Turchin’s Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth with arguments drawn from anthropology, archaeology, religion, ancient history, as well as contemporary life. It’s also got a chapter with the best explanation-illustration of cultural group selection.