or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
More Buying Choices
18 used & new from £33.05
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History
 
 
Share your own customer images
Search inside this book

Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History (Hardcover)

by Angus Maddison (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £64.00
Price: £60.80 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £3.20 (5%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

12 new from £51.36 6 used from £33.05
Other Editions: RRP: Our Price: Other Offers:
Paperback £21.00 £17.49 23 used & new from £14.09
12 Days of Christmas Sale in Books
12 Days of Christmas Sale in Books
Get up to 65% off some of our top titles. Shop now

Special Offers and Product Promotions

Frequently Bought Together

Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History + Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton Economic History of the Western World) + A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
Price For All Three: £85.02

Some of these items are dispatched sooner than the others. Show details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Ronald Findlay
5.0 out of 5 stars (5)  £15.06
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Gregory Clark
4.2 out of 5 stars (5)  £9.16
One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth

One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth

by Dani Rodrik
5.0 out of 5 stars (1)  £9.00
The world economy: v. 1 & 2 combined (Development Centre studies)

The world economy: v. 1 & 2 combined (Development Centre studies)

by Angus Maddison
3.0 out of 5 stars (1)  £28.00
The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Barry Eichengreen
£11.55
› Explore similar items

Product details

  • Hardcover: 448 pages
  • Publisher: OUP Oxford (20 Sep 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0199227217
  • ISBN-13: 978-8171886135
  • Product Dimensions: 24.8 x 17 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,162,040 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

  • See Complete Table of Contents

Product Description

Product Description

This book seeks to identify the forces which explain how and why some parts of the world have grown rich and others have lagged behind. Encompassing 2000 years of history, part 1 begins with the Roman Empire and explores the key factors that have influenced economic development in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. Part 2 covers the development of macroeconomic tools of analysis from the 17th century to the present. Part 3 looks to the future and considers what the shape of the world economy might be in 2030. Combining both the close quantitative analysis for which Professor Maddison is famous with a more qualitative approach that takes into account the complexity of the forces at work, this book provides students and all interested readers with a totally fascinating overview of world economic history. Professor Maddison has the unique ability to synthesise vast amounts of information into a clear narrative flow that entertains as well as informs, making this text an invaluable resource for all students and scholars, and anyone interested in trying to understand why some parts of the World are so much richer than others.


About the Author

Angus Maddison is Emeritus Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Groningen. Known for his pioneering work in the field of the quantification of economic growth in the global and historic perspective, Professor Maddison has enjoyed a varied career. He has held a number of positions at St. Andrews University, Johns Hopkins University, MacGill University, the OECD, and Harvard University. He has also acted as a policy advisor for a number of institutions and advised the
governments of Ghana and Pakistan. Prof. Maddison was recently awarded the title of Commander in the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Netherlands.
Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
Search inside this book:

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
 
economic history

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags
 

Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
5 star:
 (1)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Flawed but still Excellent, 31 Oct 2008
By Steve Keen "therealus" (Herts, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History (Paperback)
This is a book that rewards patience.

It is crammed, cover-to-cover, with all manner of intriguing and amazing information. There's a surprise at almost every turn of the page, and there is a constant steam of facts and figures which have "useful" stamped all over them.

As the subtitle suggests, this book is a series of essays in macro-economic history. It covers, with little or no cross-referencing, a broad spectrum of historic eras and strings, covering periods from three hundred years to two millennia. Maddison explores in unique fashion the economies of classical Rome and of Asia since 1500, and tracks the influence of external forces on the Americas and Africa. There are also essays dealing with the more technical history of macroeconomics and some futurology at the end looking at the world economy in 2030.

Among the things we learn are the influence of the Spanish experience in the Reconquista on their pursuit of conquest in the Americas, that as influential as Perry's gunboat diplomacy on Japan was the Japanese discovery of Dutch medical science, and that it was not until the middle of the 20th Century that GDP became an accepted measure in government circles. Amazingly, we also find, in one of the tables, that Gregory King, an early demographer, assumed the world population in 3935 BCE to be 2 (Adam and Eve) and in 2279 BCE to be 8 (Noah's family)!

There are some welcome and valuable accounts, including the development of the Roman Empire, a history of Indonesia, the events surrounding the penetration of Islam into the heart of Africa, and a short review of the Crusades, though it's a shame the bibliography isn't more up to date on this.

Unfortunately that's the way the book too often goes. It's riddled with a whole plethora of errors, inconsistencies and oversights, which is the reason it requires patience.

Some examples.

On page 20 we are told Hannibal divided his army between "90,000 infantry and 12,000", 12,000 what we are not told; on page 27 a stray apostrophe in a possessive "it's" (there are also plenty of sentences that end with no full stops); on page 34 "agued" for "argued"; on page 78 "due gains" instead of "due to gains". There are many more such.

There is throughout an idiosyncratic chronology. This starts in the section on Rome, where people die only to be resurrected in subsequent paragraphs. Later, Maddison talks about Japan's takeover of Okinawa in 1882, then of Bonin in 1878, as if the second followed the first.

On page 168 a sidebar on China's emergence from isolation checks Nixon's visit but bizarrely omits Mao's death.

In a table on page 233 (slave exports from Black Africa) the numbers don't add up.

He usefully informs us that the Crusaders were known as Franks in the Middle East, repeats the same information a few pages later, uses "Franks" as their name for a while, then reverts to "Crusaders".

He criticises newspapers and British politicians for abusing GDP and ignoring PPP, but makes no mention of the Economist's Big Mac Index, a popular and semi-lighthearted PPP calculation.

Furthermore, there is a stunning lack of conclusions drawn, and strands of the tale are rarely pulled together, even within essays. At times it reminded me of reading the Grundrisse, Marx's notes for Das Kapital.

And just on a personal note, why in a secular book do we hang on to BC and AD instead of BCE and CE?

But let's bring ourselves back to the ground. Although all this matters, it doesn't matter enough to make this a bad book. On the contrary, despite the flaws, this is an almost essential read for economic history junkies, and scholars of history and economics will find a wealth of information.

However, if given a choice between this and Findlay and O'Rourke's Power and Plenty, I'd go for the latter for being more integrated, and logical in its structure.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
4.0 out of 5 stars Very insightful studies in economic history, 8 Sep 2009
By William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History (Paperback)
This is a fascinating and brilliant collection of studies in economic history. In Part 1, he looks at various periods of history. Chapter 1 studies the Roman Empire, then the richest part of the world, and "peninsular Italy and its ruling oligarchy were the main gainers." Chapter 2 looks at the years 1500-1820, at Western Europe's unparalleled progress and the transformation of the Americas.

Chapter 3 examines the West's impact on Asia since 1500, particularly the effects that Portugal, the Netherlands and Britain had on China, India, Indonesia and Japan. Chapter 4 looks at the impact of Islam and Europe on Africa since 1 AD. He notes that North Africa was, from the 1st century until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century, a wealthy part of the Roman Empire.

In Part 2, Maddison looks at the advances in macro-measurement made by William Petty (1623-87), `one of the finest examples of the English Enlightenment', John Graunt (1620-74), the first demographer, and Gregory King (1648-1712) who produced estimates of the population of England and Wales, and of income and expenditure. Maddison shows how the evidence has refuted Kondratiev's notion of long waves and Malthus's dismal scaremongering.

In Part 3, Maddison critiques the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's `Special Report on Emissions Scenarios'. This assumes growth that in the OECD countries (the world's richest countries), income per head 1990 to 2100 would rise between from $19K to $109K, in the former socialist countries from $2.4K to $101K, in Asia from $536 to $72K, and in Africa from $1.6K to $61K. Thus the total GDP of Africa, Latin America and some Middle Eastern oil-producing countries would become far bigger than the OECD countries' total GDP. Maddison comments mildly that this "seems implausible and differs sharply from historical experience."

Yet, as he points out, "This assumption is a major driving force in projected energy use and carbon emissions." On this basis, the IPCC forecast a temperature rise of between 0.5 to 1.30C by 2030. He judges, "In view of my scepticism about the higher IPCC projections of GDP, energy consumption and emissions, the lower end of their temperature projections seems the more plausible."

He also observes that the earth's temperature fell between 1945 and 1976, when we had record GDP growth of more than 4% a year. As he notes, "It is odd that the cooling happened when the pace of world economic growth was a good deal faster than in 1910-45 and 1976-2000."

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 

   

Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category

Look for similar items by subject

















i.e., each product must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Feedback

Ad

Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.