Authors: Stephen D. King
1.
See, for example, J.
Campbell Gibson and Emily Lennon,
Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-born Population of the United States: 1850–1990
, Population Division, US Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC, 20233-8800, February 1999, Population Division Working Paper No.
29.
The number of immigrants coming into the US today is higher than it was in the nineteenth century but that is a function of the much bigger global population.
In relation to the size of the indigenous population, the proportion of foreign-born citizens is now a lot lower: in the second half of the nineteenth century the proportion stood at between 13 and 14 per cent whereas, over the last fifty years, it has oscillated between 4 and 8 per cent.
The proportionate economic impact of immigration has, thus, faded over the last half-century.
2.
Source: US Census Bureau.
3.
The range of arguments is vast.
Supporters of globalization include Martin Wolf with his
Why Globalization Works
(Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004) and Thomas Friedman’s
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century
(Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, New York, 2005).
Its detractors – using varying arguments – include Joseph Stiglitz (
Globalization and its Discontents
[Penguin, London, 2003]), Naomi Klein (
No Logo
[Fourth Estate, New York, 1999]) and Noreena Hertz (
The Silent Takeover
[The Free Press, New York, 2002]).
My sense, however, is that many of these books are written as if the West is still pulling the strings – either governments or corporations.
This book suggests otherwise.
1.
Source:
Washington Post
, 23 January 2007.
2.
Given on 6 December 2006, the full speech is available at
http://www.hm-treasury gov.uk/prebud_pbr06_speech.htm
.
In Mr Brown’s reference to the ‘major
economies’, he conveniently forgot to mention China, India, Brazil and other emerging nations.
3.
Source: International Olympic Committee at
http://www.olympic.org
4.
Owens won four gold medals.
5.
A case of ‘No we can’t’ rather than ‘Yes we can’.
6.
Source: International Olympic Committee.
The US achieved a haul of eighty-three medals in Los Angeles in 1984 but the Soviet Union chose not to turn up for those Games after the US had boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
To put China’s gold medal haul into context, the Middle Kingdom managed to win only five gold medals in the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
7.
For an informed discussion of the client state problem, see Tony Judt’s
Post War: A History of Europe since 1945
(William Heinemann, London, 2005).
8.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
, first published in 1776.
As it turned out, this was a remarkably auspicious year for political and economic developments.
9.
See, for example, ‘The market for lemons: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism’, the groundbreaking paper by George A.
Akerlof,
Quarterly Journal of Economics
, 84.3 (1970), pp.
488–500.
10.
For an interesting modern discussion of the role of ‘good government’, see Timothy Besley’s ‘ ‘Principled Agents?’
The Political Economy of Good Government’, The Lindahl Lectures (Oxford, 2006).
The case for government in general is famously well expressed in Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan,
where the ‘state of nature’ gives rise to continuous wars leaving human lives ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.
Even the best of governments, however, have difficulties coming up with policies that work in the international arena.
11.
Thomas Malthus (ed.
G.
Gilbert),
An Essay on the Principle of Population
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993), p.
18.
12.
For an attempt to rehabilitate Thomas Malthus, read Gregory Clark’s
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
(Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007).
13.
From
The Communist Manifesto
, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
For an update on Marx and globalization, see Meghnad Desai’s
Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism
(Verso, London, 2002).
14.
Smith is justly famous for his
Wealth of Nations,
but his earlier
Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759) provides the moral and legal foundations for all that followed.
15.
Booms and busts were also a common feature of late nineteenth-century economic progress.
16.
Although, with polonium poisonings in London, the presence of Russian spooks cannot be ruled out.
See, for example, Edward Lucas’s
The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West
(Bloomsbury, London, 2008).
17.
Source: Vodafone.
18.
The Oxford University website states the following: ‘Oxford’s university community is truly international.
Students currently come from 138 countries around the world and study a wide range of subjects.
They make up one third of our student body, including 14 percent of our full-time undergraduate students and 63 percent of our full-time postgraduates.’
19.
Purchasing power parity basis.
20.
In 1980, only 15 per cent of urban Chinese families owned a colour television and a refrigerator.
In 2004, 70 per cent of families owned a home, mobile phone and a DVD player.
Source: Qu Hongbin,
The Great Migration
, HSBC Research, October 2005.
1.
The arguments were outlined in
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
(1817).
2.
The first ‘modern’ stock market was established in Amsterdam to trade shares in the Dutch East India Company in 1602.
3.
For those who believe the Enlightenment really was a triumph of free markets and liberal thought, it’s worth reflecting on the views of David Hume (1711–76), one of Britain’s greatest philosophers, on racial differences: ‘the Jews in Europe, and the Armenians in the east, have a peculiar character; and the former are as much noted for fraud, as the latter for probity’ or ‘You may obtain any thing of the negroes by offering them strong drink; and may easily prevail with them to sell, not only their children, but their wives and mistresses, for a cask of brandy.’
See Hume’s essay ‘
Of National Characters
’ in his
Political Essays
, ed.
Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp 78–92.
4.
Protectionist tariffs were unusually high in the US in the late nineteenth century, prompting development economists such as Ha-Joon Chang to argue that ‘tariff protection was critical in the development of certain key industries, such as the textile industry in the early nineteenth century and the iron and steel industries in the second half of the nineteenth century’ (from
Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective
[Anthem, London, 2002]).
British wool-makers became increasingly concerned at the end of the seventeenth century about the competition coming from cottons produced in India and elsewhere in Asia.
Their agitation led to a ban on cotton imports from the East, which simply prompted the establishment of the Lancashire cotton industry.
The Indian cotton industry lost out, unable to compete with the remarkable innovations in spinning, weaving and dyeing that followed and which became key stages in the Industrial Revolution.
Ironically, the British wool industry also lost out.
Economic advance in particular parts of the world, or in particular industries, has not always been synonymous with rewards for everyone.
5.
As Bernard Lewis points out in
What Went Wrong?
Western Impact and Middle East Response
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2002), the Ottomans were largely uninterested in events taking place on the periphery of the Islamic world.
6.
Maddison’s
Contours of the World Economy 1–2030 AD: Essays in Macro-economic History
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007) is essential reading.
7.
A Malthusian view of the world suggests that the initial gains in per-capita incomes in Europe were related to the outbreaks of plague, which left workers in short supply and therefore pushed up their wages.
8.
Keynes wrote the
Consequences
in 1919.
He offered a brilliant analysis of the implications of the Treaty of Versailles.
9.
Source: D.
R.
Headrick,
Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981).
10.
British sea power was immortalized in ‘Rule Britannia’, first heard in 1740, and now sung at the Last Night of the Proms every year in a fit of Union Jack-waving nostalgia for times past.
One verse sums it all up: ‘The nations, not so blest as thee, must, in their turns, to tyrants fall; while thou shalt flourish great and free, the dread and envy of them all.’
The Chinese, for good reason, certainly dreaded the British: the
Nemesis
, a British warship, could operate in just five feet of water, and could therefore be used to impose Britain’s will on a technologically backward China during the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century.
11.
See
Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis and Growth
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004).
12.
The UK ran a trade deficit, but surpluses in services and in net income from abroad more than offset the shortfall of merchandise exports.
The US current account of the balance of payments offers the same mix, but the deficit on trade completely swamps the surpluses elsewhere.
13.
Source: OECD
Economic Outlook
, June 2009.
14.
The G20 includes the G8 members – the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Canada and Russia – alongside Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey and the European Union as a whole.
At the time of writing, pressure was mounting for the creation of a G4 including the US, the Eurozone, China and Japan, thereby leaving out in the cold the UK, Russia, Canada, Brazil and India, amongst others.
15.
T.
Fleming,
The Louisiana Purchase
(John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey, 2003).
1.
Audi’s UK strapline, ‘
Vorsprung durch Technik
’, literally means ‘Advancement through technology’.
2.
In the words of the Volkswagen Corporate History Department, ‘As far as we can say, there was no official possibility to sell or buy an Audi Quattro in the former GDR before the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
But as a GDR citizen could receive such a car as a present from someone in West Germany it is possible that such a car was used in former GDR, although we think this might have happened – if at all – only in very rare cases.’
3.
As I wrote this, plans were announced to launch a new eco-friendly Trabant for the twenty-first century.
4.
The irony was that British-built cars were, in many cases, as uncompetitive as those manufactured in Soviet Eastern Europe.
5.
In 1542, the Portuguese navigator Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo set sail from Mexico on behalf of the Spanish and came across what he thought was an island.
He named it California after a sixteenth-century Spanish novel (
The Exploits of Explanadían
) in which there was a reference to a mythical island of that name ruled by Calafía, a pagan queen.
California properly fell into Spanish hands in 1769 following the establishment of a number of missions up and down the land.
Mexico gained its independence from the Spanish in 1821.
6.
See, for example, Paul Samuelson’s article ‘Where Ricardo and Mill rebut and confirm arguments of mainstream economists supporting globalization’,
Journal of Economic Perspectives
, 18.3 (2004), pp.
135–46.
7.
See, for example, Alan G.
Ahearne; Joseph E.
Gagnon; Jane Haltmaier; Steven B.
Kamin,
Preventing Deflation: Lessons From Japan’s Experience in the 1990s
.
published by the Federal Reserve in 2002 and available at
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/ 2002/729/ifdp729.pdf
.