Product Description: First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The second volume of The Cambridge History of Capitalism provides an authoritative reference on the spread and impact of capitalism across the world, and the varieties of responses to it. Employing a wide geographical coverage and strong comparative outlook, a team of leading scholars explore the global consequences that capitalism has had for industry, agriculture, and trade, along with the reactions by governments, firms, and markets. The authors consider how World War I halted the initial spread of capitalism, but global capitalism arose again by the close of the twentieth century. They explore how the responses of labor movements, compounded by the reactions by political regimes, whether defensive or proactive, led to diverse military and welfare consequences. Beneficial results eventually emerged, but the rise and spread of capitalism has not been easy or smooth. This definitive volume will have widespread appeal amongst historians, economists, and political scientists.

Product Description: Today's wide economic gap between the postindustrial countries of the West and the poorer countries of the third world is not new. Fifty years ago, the world economic order -- two hundred years in the making -- was already characterized by a vast difference in per capita income between rich and poor countries and by the fact that poor countries exported commodities (agricultural or mineral products) while rich countries exported manufactured products...read more

In Globalization and the Poor Periphery before 1950 Jeffrey Williamson examines globalization through the lens of both the economist and the historian, analyzing its economic impact on industrially lagging poor countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Williamson argues that industrialization in the core countries of northwest Europe and their overseas settlements, combined with a worldwide revolution in transportation, created an antiglobal backlash in the periphery, the poorer countries of eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. During the "first global century," from about 1820 to 1913, and the antiglobal autarkic interwar period from 1914 to 1940, new methods of transportation integrated world commodity markets and caused a boom in trade between the core and the periphery. Rapid productivity growth, which lowered the price of manufactured goods, led to a soaring demand in the core countries for raw materials supplied by the periphery. When the boom turned into bust, after almost a century and a half, the gap in living standards between the core and the periphery was even wider than it had been at the beginning of the cycle. The periphery, argues Williamson, obeyed the laws of motion of the international economy. Synthesizing and summarizing fifteen years of Williamson's pioneering work on globalization, the book documents these laws of motion in the periphery, assesses their distribution and growth consequences, and examines the response of trade policy in these regions.

Product Description: Late Nineteenth-Century American Development is an economist's attempt to interpret a critical period of US history, from Civil War to World War I. The questions raised have always been at the heart of American historiography. What accounts for the retardation up to the turn of the century? How did capital markets operate and what was their influence on the pace and pattern of our growth? What determined farm performance and what impact did that performance have on the economy as a whole? Yet while the questions raised in this book are familiar, the methods are not...read more

Product Description: Dos prestigiosos especialistas ofrecen un análisis coherente del comercio, las migraciones y los flujos internacionales de capital en la economía atlántica entre 1814 y 1914. La obra, cuya principal originalidad reside en haber aplicado las herramientas de los modelos de economía abierta a dicho período, ha influido profun...read more

As awareness of the process of globalization grows and the study of its effects becomes increasingly important to governments and businesses (as well as to a sizable opposition), the need for historical understanding also increases. Despite the importance of the topic, few attempts have been made to present a long-term economic analysis of the phenomenon, one that frames the issue by examining its place in the long history of international integration.This volume collects eleven papers doing exactly that and more. The first group of essays explores how the process of globalization can be measured in terms of the long-term integration of different markets-from the markets for goods and commodities to those for labor and capital, and from the sixteenth century to the present. The second set of contributions places this knowledge in a wider context, examining some of the trends and questions that have emerged as markets converge and diverge: the roles of technology and geography are both considered, along with the controversial issues of globalization's effects on inequality and social justice and the roles of political institutions in responding to them. The final group of essays addresses the international financial systems that play such a large part in guiding the process of globalization, considering the influence of exchange rate regimes, financial development, financial crises, and the architecture of the international financial system itself.This volume reveals a much larger picture of the process of globalization, one that stretches from the establishment of a global economic system during the nineteenth century through the disruptions of two world wars and the Great Depression into the present day. The keen analysis, insight, and wisdom in this volume will have something to offer a wide range of readers interested in this important issue.

Product Description: In this study, Jeffrey G. Williamson examines the political economy of immigration backlash and immigration policy in two global centuries. The first, between 1820 and World War I, was a proglobal environment, characterized by booming trade, labor, and capital markets...read more

Product Description: Coping With City Growth assesses British performance with city growth during the First Industrial Revolution by combining the tools used by Third World analysts with the archival attention and eclectic style of the economic historian...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Globalization is not a new phenomenon, nor is it irreversible. In Gobalization and History, Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson present a coherent picture of trade, migration, and international capital flows in the Atlantic economy in the century prior to 1914--the first great globalization boom, which anticipated the experience of the last fifty years.The authors estimate the extent of globalization and its impact on the participating countries, and discuss the political reactions that it provoked. The book's originality lies in its application of the tools of open-economy economics to this critical historical period--differentiating it from most previous work, which has been based on closed-economy or single-sector models. The authors also keep a close eye on globalization debates of the 1990s, using history to inform the present and vice versa.The book brings together research conducted by the authors over the past decade--work that has profoundly influenced how economic history is now written and that has found audiences in economics and history, as well as in the popular press.

Product Description: Two of the world's leading economists, Philippe Aghion (a theorist) and Jeffrey Williamson (an economic historian), jointly question the conventional wisdom on inequality and growth, and address its inability to explain recent economic experience...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This text reflects the developments in the economic understanding of the third world. Williamson argues that third world analysts ignore economic history at their peril, and uses it to speak to the issues of the 1990s. Economic knowlege of third world development has undergone a transformation since the 1970s...read more

Product Description: Migration and the International Labor Market 1850-1939 focuses on the economic aspects of international migration during the era of mass migrations. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The development achieved by the resource-limited Asian countries in the last thirty years is unprecedented. This work examines what the authors believe to be the key to this growth--human resources. Using the most current methodology and data, the authors address many issues, including demographic foundations for human resource development, the role of women, whether the expansion of the educational system can occur too quickly, and the implications of evolution toward an aging society...read more

Product Description: This book examines the relationships between industrialization and poverty, and equity and productivity. It argues that the arguments for the Kuznets curve is strong, but that inequality has never been essential to non-human capital accumulation...read more