Clark, Gregory: A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007. ISBN 978-0-691-12135-2; 432 pp.; $ 29.95.
Rezensiert für geschichte.transnational und H-Soz-u-Kult von:
Christof Dejung, Fachbereich Geschichte und Soziologie, Universität Konstanz
E-Mail: [mailto]christof.dejung@uni-konstanz.de[/mailto]
One of the biggest questions economic historians can try to answer is why the Industrial Revolution - and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it - did occur in 18th century England, and not in some other place. And why did industrialisation not make the whole world rich but, on the contrary, rendered large parts of the globe even poorer?
Some of the best economists, social scientists and historians have tried to solve this mystery - by providing entirely controversial answers. [1] Now Gregory Clark, professor for economic history at the University of California, Davis, has attended to the puzzle. He aims, he says, at writing a big history, in the tradition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or Karl Marx's Das Kapital, whose purpose is to lay out a universal interpretation of the course of economic development. Clark meets this challenge by claiming that, "fortunately ..., a simple set of ideas can carry us a long way in explaining the evolution of the world economy through the millennia." (p. X) What ideas are those and how convincing are they?
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