Generating the Wealth of Nations

Ifyou had been alive at the start of the eighteenth century, your materialwell-being would have been much the same whichever region of the world youlived in, and it would almost certainly have been a precarious existence.  Go back 300 years before the eighteenthcentury, and not much was different.  Butcome forward 300 years to the present, and we see a startling transformation.

Incomesin some parts of the world have increased more than ten-fold; and now it mostcertainly does matter where you live – with income differentials of 50 timesbetween the world’s richest and poorest countries.  What has changed in the past 300 years is thedevelopment and application of new technologies at a pace unprecedented inhuman history – the steam engine, electricity and the computer, to name just afew.  With these developments, for thosewho have access to them, have come huge gains in living standards.

Inthis course we’ll explore the spectacular (but uneven) story of economicdevelopment – beginning with the Malthusian era, moving on to the take-off ofgrowth in the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence in livingstandards that followed, and finishing in the present with the Global FinancialCrisis.  We’ll cover the main episodesand events in the development of the world economy in the past 300 years, andhave something to say about most regions of the world.  As well as dealing with ‘what happened’, thecourse will emphasise what is known about ‘why’ – and what lessons historicalexperience can provide for understanding how some countries today are so richyet others remain so poor.

Course image: Copyright JL Brown. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)