• RRP: £21.95
  • You Save: £4.03 (18%)
FREE Delivery in the UK.
Only 3 left in stock (more on the way).
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon. Gift-wrap available.
A Farewell to Alms: A Bri... has been added to your Basket

Dispatch to:
To see addresses, please
Or
Please enter a valid UK postcode.
Or
+ £2.80 UK delivery
Used: Like New | Details
Condition: Used: Like New
Comment: Unbeatable customer service, and we usually ship the same or next day. Over one million satisfied customers!

Have one to sell?
Flip to back Flip to front
Listen Playing... Paused   You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more
See all 3 images

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) Paperback – 18 Jan 2009

3.9 out of 5 stars 12 customer reviews

See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions
Amazon Price
New from Used from
Kindle Edition
"Please retry"
Paperback
"Please retry"
£17.92
£11.34 £11.19
Want it delivered by Tuesday, 18 Oct.? Order within 20 hrs 39 mins and choose Priority Delivery at checkout. Details
Note: This item is eligible for click and collect. Details
Pick up your parcel at a time and place that suits you.
  • Choose from over 13,000 locations across the UK
  • Prime members get unlimited deliveries at no additional cost
How to order to an Amazon Pickup Location?
  1. Find your preferred location and add it to your address book
  2. Dispatch to this address when you check out
Learn more
£17.92 FREE Delivery in the UK. Only 3 left in stock (more on the way). Dispatched from and sold by Amazon. Gift-wrap available.
click to open popover

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested In These Sponsored Links

  (What is this?)

Frequently Bought Together

  • A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
  • +
  • The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New Approaches to Economic and Social History)
Total price: £37.91
Buy the selected items together

Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

  • Apple
  • Android
  • Windows Phone

To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number.



Product details

  • Paperback: 432 pages
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press (18 Jan. 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0691141282
  • ISBN-13: 978-0691141282
  • Product Dimensions: 14.5 x 3.3 x 22.1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 52,223 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • See Complete Table of Contents

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested In These Sponsored Links

  (What is this?)

Product Description

Review

""A Farewell to Alms" asks the right questions, and it is full of fascinating details, like the speed at which information traveled over two millennia (prior to the 19th century, about one mile per hour). Clark's combination of passion and erudition makes his account engaging. When a light bulb goes off in my head, the first thing I ask myself is 'Would this be interest if it were true?' Clark's thesis definitely meets that test."--Samuel Bowles, "Science"

"Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms" is fully as absorbing, as memorable and as well written as [Jared] Diamond's remarkable bestseller. It deserves to be as widely read.... [A]ny book that is as bold, as fascinating, as conscientiously argued and as politically incorrect as this one demands to be read."--Clive Crook, "Financial Times"

"Gregory Clark's new book "A Farewell to Alms" is an investigation of both our nasty, brutish, and short past and our more prosperous present. Mr. Clark first makes the case that we owe our current prosperity to the gifts of the Industrial Revolution. He then attempts to explain why that revolution happened in 18th-century England."--Edward Glaeser, "New York Sun"

""A Farewell to Alms" is a brave new work, rich in both detailed facts and big ideas. Clark clears away much of the tangled brush of theories of long-term economic growth that have grown up in recent decades. This is the most ambitious and far-reaching book on long-term economic history to appear in many years, perhaps since Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel.""--Jack A. Goldstone, "World Economics"

"Clark's book "A Farewell to Alms" is . . . Ambitious, staking out an entire vision of world history. . . . Clark's Malthusian model is forcefully argued."--Roger Gathman, "Austin American-Statesman"

"["A Farewell to Alms"] is one of the most fascinating, and the most disturbing, historical works I have read. It seems to suggest that the gross inequality of our world has less to do with the inherent unfairness of global capitalism and more with scarcely ineradicable cultural difference. . . . [T]his is economic history as you never read it before."--A.N. Wilson, "The Daily Telegraph"

""A Farewell to Alms" is . . . worth scrutinizing. The book offers a distinct line of thought on evolutionary affairs. It is also valuable in historiographical terms as it recalls historical explanation forsaken due to shifting scholarly fashions."--Ian Morley, "The History Teacher"

Winner of the 2008 Gold Book Medal in Finance/Investment/Economics, Independent Publisher Book Awards

Winner of the 2008 Gold Book Medal in Finance/Investment/Economics, Independent Publisher Book Awards

"Right or wrong, or perhaps somewhere in between, Clark's is about as stimulating an account of world economic history as one is likely to find. Let's hope that the human traits to which he attributes economic progress are acquired, not genetic, and that the countries that grow in population over the next 50 years turn out to be good at imparting them. Alternatively, we can simply hope he's wrong."--Benjamin M. Friedman, New York Times Book Review

"Clark's idea-rich book may just prove to be the next blockbuster in economics. He offers us a daring story of the economic foundations of good institutions and the climb out of recurring poverty. We may not have cracked the mystery of human progress, but A Farewell to Alms brings us closer than before."--Tyler Cowen, New York Times

"[C]lark is very good at piecing together figures from here and there, including those from isolated groups of hunter-gatherers alive today. He makes a plausible case for the basic pattern: for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, there was essentially no sustained improvement in mankind's general material standard of living, nor was there much variation from place to place around the world. The Industrial Revolution made all the difference."--Robert Solow, New York Review of Books

"A Farewell to Alms asks the right questions, and it is full of fascinating details, like the speed at which information traveled over two millennia (prior to the 19th century, about one mile per hour). Clark's combination of passion and erudition makes his account engaging. When a light bulb goes off in my head, the first thing I ask myself is 'Would this be interest if it were true?' Clark's thesis definitely meets that test."--Samuel Bowles, Science

"Mr. Clark...has produced a well written and thought-provoking thesis, refreshingly light on jargon and equations. It could well be the subject of debate for years to come."--The Economist

"Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms is fully as absorbing, as memorable and as well written as [Jared] Diamond's remarkable bestseller. It deserves to be as widely read.... [A]ny book that is as bold, as fascinating, as conscientiously argued and as politically incorrect as this one demands to be read."--Clive Crook, Financial Times

"Obviously, we ve got a controversial argument here. But Clark makes a compelling case for the idea that the fruits of industrialization were open to all societies, but only a handful seized the moment."--William R. Wineke, The Wisconsin State Journal"

"Gregory Clark's new book A Farewell to Alms is an investigation of both our nasty, brutish, and short past and our more prosperous present. Mr. Clark first makes the case that we owe our current prosperity to the gifts of the Industrial Revolution. He then attempts to explain why that revolution happened in 18th-century England."--Edward Glaeser, New York Sun

"Economic history often conjures images of musty tomes, bygone eras that no one knows about and in general, scholarship that is dry and difficult to relate to. Gregory Clark's new book A Farewell to Alms conveys a different image. Offering a sweep of history from the border between antiquity and the medieval age, the book is an attempt at tackling grand themes."--Siddharth Singh, LiveMint

"For a novel and somewhat dispiriting theory of economic divergence, read A Farewell to Alms, published this year, by Gregory Clark of the University of California at Davis. He doesn't accept the view, common among the utopians, that natural endowments like soil and water explain why rich nations are 50 times as prosperous as poor ones. How can differences in natural resources possibly explain Zimbabwe's misery or Singapore's wealth? Clark amasses an extraordinary collection of historical data to explain why the Industrial Revolution was born in western Europe, not Africa or India."--William Baldwin, Forbes

"Clark's ferociously systematic expounding of an alternative to the institutional explanation does...provide many delightful insights, large and small, along the way. Some of the observations in this very well-written book do make for nice dinner party anecdotes."--Harold James, The American Interest

"Comes now Gregory Clark, an economist who interestingly takes the side of culture. In an important new book, A Farewell to Alms Clark suggests that much of the world's remaining poverty is semi-permanent. Modern technology and management are widely available, but many societies can't take advantage because their values and social organization are antagonistic. Prescribing economically sensible policies (open markets, secure property rights, sound money) can't overcome this bedrock resistance."--Robert Samuelson, The Washington Post

"A Farewell to Alms is a brave new work, rich in both detailed facts and big ideas. Clark clears away much of the tangled brush of theories of long-term economic growth that have grown up in recent decades. This is the most ambitious and far-reaching book on long-term economic history to appear in many years, perhaps since Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel."--Jack A. Goldstone, World Economics

"Clark's book A Farewell to Alms is . . . Ambitious, staking out an entire vision of world history. . . . Clark's Malthusian model is forcefully argued."--Roger Gathman, Austin American-Statesman

"[T]he author's engaging style and (relatively) jargon-free descriptions of the economic principles in play before, during, and after the Industrial Revolution in England turn this rich and detailed account into more of a sprint than a slog. . . . Whatever your reaction to this decidedly un-PC take on economic aid, [A Farewell to Alms] serves as a useful explanation of how we got where we are today and a reminder that new approaches are needed to close the yawning gap between the world's richest and poorest societies."--Roberta Fusaro, Harvard Business Review

"Clark argues the English evolved biologically in ways that created prosperity. Before you dismiss the notion, read this brilliant tour of economic history."--MoneySense Magazine

"Clark adds substantively to an understanding of perhaps the important questions of this--or any--era: what makes economies grow, and why have some not experienced any success at all?....Alms is provocative, authoritative, insightful, readable, well documented, and an inescapable detour for anyone wanting to tackle economic growth and development topics and enter into these conversations."--A. R. Sanderson, Choice

"Gregory Clark has written a fascinating book which is chock-full of insight and ideas. Clark paints on a big canvas and his deft handling of the puzzles and counterintuitive outcomes is delicious. 'No one, ' he says, 'can claim to be truly intellectually alive without having understood and wrestled, at least a little, with these mysteries'. We are indebted to him for revealing more of them in such an electrifying fashion."--Ian R. Harper, The Melbourne Review

"[A Farewell to Alms] is one of the most fascinating, and the most disturbing, historical works I have read. It seems to suggest that the gross inequality of our world has less to do with the inherent unfairness of global capitalism and more with scarcely ineradicable cultural difference. . . . [T]his is economic history as you never read it before."--A.N. Wilson, The Daily Telegraph

"Why do some nations get rich while others stay poor? What are the conditions that allow an economy to take off and grow? These questions have puzzled economists for many years. But no explanation is more startling than the one proposed by Gregory Clark in his book A Farewell to Alms."--Ross Gittins, Sydney Morning Herald

"This is a fine book, bristling with interesting data and opinions, more extensive than this review can possibly convey. Readily accessible to non-fiction readers, this book should fire more debate about a historical episode of unfailing fascination."--Michael G. Sargent, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

"This is . . . a remarkable book, with an unerring focus on the fundamentals of the Malthusian economy and the large-scale economic trends. It is a unique source of factual information, beautifully presented in almost 200 tables and figures, and will make an excellent textbook for college-level courses of history and economics."--Gerhard Meisenberg, Journal of Biosocial Science

"[P]erhaps there is no higher praise for an author than to say that I disagreed with the arguments but liked the book. It made me think in new ways about the course of economic history. I recommend the book to anyone with an interest in the economic history of the world."--Rick Szostak, New Global Studies

"I derived enormous stimulation from this book. At a superficial level, Clark offers a richly documented picture of England's economic history, put into perspective by comparisons with other parts of Europe and with the Far East, and sometimes even by references to amazing facts about ancient forager societies. . . . More fundamentally, the layman gets a good understanding here of what made for the Industrial Revolution and how its preconditions evolved in England over a period of centuries. Clark accuses economists of being undereducated about history. This will be somewhat remedied if they read his provocative book."--Wolfgang Kasper, Policy

"As a self-proclaimed exercise in 'big history' this work succeeds extraordinarily well: it is engaging and readable, and it renders abstruse economic models and empirical results accessible to nonspecialists."--Zorina Khan, Technology and Culture

"A Farewell to Alms is . . . worth scrutinizing. The book offers a distinct line of thought on evolutionary affairs. It is also valuable in historiographical terms as it recalls historical explanation forsaken due to shifting scholarly fashions."--Ian Morley, The History Teacher

"Gregory Clark has written a stimulating, provocative, witty, and ambitious book. It is accessible to the uninitiated and a pleasure to read. Clark's valuable insights are presented with an admirable forcefulness, as are his grievous errors. In short, this is a book very much worth reading for the sake of argument and debate."--Jan De Vries, Journal of Economic History

"Clark has provided a sensible and readable account of important frontier research in economic history."--Peter Howitt, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Gregory Clark has given us a very provocative work. It is economic history, but with strong implications for contemporary problems. His quantitative techniques for demonstrating such phenomena as the innumeracy of pre-industrial humanity and the evolution of the speed of information flows are clever."--Arnold Kling, Journal of Bioeconomics

From the Back Cover

"What caused the Industrial Revolution? Gregory Clark has a brilliant and fascinating explanation for this event which permanently changed the life of humankind after 100,000 years of stagnation."--George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics and Koshland Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

"This is a very important book. Gregory Clark argues that the Industrial Revolution was the gradual but inevitable result of a kind of natural selection during the harsh struggle for existence in the pre-industrial era, in which economically successful families were also more reproductively successful. They transmitted to their descendants, culturally and perhaps genetically, such productive attitudes as foresight, thrift, and devotion to hard work. This audacious thesis, which dismisses rival explanations in terms of prior ideological, technological, or institutional revolutions, will be debated by historians for many years to come."--Paul Seabright, author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life

"Challenging the prevailing wisdom that institutions explain why some societies become rich, Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms" will appeal to a broad audience. I can think of nothing else like it."--Philip T. Hoffman, author of Growth in a Traditional Society

"You may not always agree with Gregory Clark, but he will capture your attention, make you think, and make you reconsider. He is a provocative and imaginative scholar and a true original. As an economic historian, he engages with economists in general; as an economist, he is parsimonious with high-tech algebra and unnecessarily complex models. Occam would approve."--Cormac O Grada, author of Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce

"This should rapidly become a standard work on the history of economic development. It should start whole industries trying to test, refine, and refute its explanations. And Gregory Clark's views on the economic merits of imperialism and the fact that labor gained the most from industrialization will infuriate all the right people."--Eric L. Jones, author of Cultures Merging and The European Miracle

"While many books on the Industrial Revolution tend to focus narrowly either on the event itself, or on one explanation for it, Gregory Clark does neither. He takes an extremely long-run view, covering significant periods before and after the Industrial Revolution, without getting bogged down in long or detailed exposition. This is an extremely important contribution to the subject."--Clifford Bekar, Lewis and Clark College

"

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
Share your thoughts with other customers

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark asks good questions: why did we wait so long for the industrial revolution? why did it occur when and where it did? why has it still not taken universal effect? He attacks the conventional story which sees the crucial pre-condition as the inalienability of property rights, first occurring in England. In other words, he argues that institutional arrangements don't matter that much.

A Farewell to Alms has three broad strands. First, from the agricultural to the industrial revolution, accumulated capital and improved technology served largely to increase population. This section of the book presents some wonderful data, but Clark's argument is close to circular and less novel than he suggests. In any event, by his own account his analysis allows for a substantial variation in living standards between one and another society.

Second, the industrial revolution was triggered by a slow accumulation of habits and values in English society, making for successful economic practices, which did not occur in (for example) China and Japan. If true, this would be very interesting, so let's explore it a little. Clark's argument draws attention to literacy, violence and interest rates. Let's focus on interest rates, which have the most objective data and are most relevant to economic life. Clark points out that rates in Western Europe fell from 10% or so in the middle ages to 4-5% on the eve of the industrial revolution. He goes on to note that rates include a "risk premium" and a "time-preference", capturing the universal inclination to consume today rather than tomorrow. The customary account of this fall emphasises the decline in the risk premium due to the improvement of property rights.
Read more ›
9 Comments 28 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Dear Professor Clark

I began your book with excitement. At last, an explanation of the industrial revolution, a timely reminder that Malthus was right, even though we were always taught that as soon as he founded economic science conditions changed and made Malthus wrong. From the perspective of quantitative economic history (your speciality) we can now see that the Malthusian trap is the default condition of humanity; indeed your analysis is even more pessimistic than the good reverend's.

Making lists of people this book will annoy is quite fun. I counted marxists, doctors, teachers, development economists, mothers at bath-time, farmers, UN apparatchiks, republicans, feminists, industrialists... before giving up and beginning a list of those whose preconceptions WON'T be challenged by this book.

After Malthus, you go on to discuss that old chestnut "causes of the industrial revolution". The usual suspects - agricultural efficiency, birth control, the patent office, peace, law and order, minimal taxation, democracy, etc. - are magisterially dismissed.

This leaves your pet theory, that social mobility - specifically downward mobility - and the consequent acquisitiveness is the key to advance. Here (though I've none of your command of the stats) I start to have doubts. The condition you posit is that the upper classes in England were disproportionately fertile, hence spread their genes to all sectors of society. So they were, according to your data (very good charts and tables throughout, by the way). But you would have to prove that the rich were actually different to the poor (the Fitzgerald / Hemingway exchange) to begin with as bourgeois virtue spread through the population.
Read more ›
2 Comments 12 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Why did the industrial revolution happen in Britain? Why not in more populous advanced agrarian societies like India or China? Some economics - the institutionalists - have argued that Britain developed institutions (rule of law, property rights, representative democracy etc) that rewarded private enterprise. British entrepreneurs and inventors then took advantage of the benign social regime and, presto, they produced an industrial revolution. Other thinkers like Max Weber attributed British and North European economic success to the Protestant work ethic, which glorifies labour and the enjoyment of worldly goods (presumably, unlike the vapid, other-worldly post-Tridentine Catholicism that held sway in southern Europe). Yet, other thinkers like David Landes have credited factors like genes, culture, climate and race/ethnicity for Britain's economic development. None of these explanations is likely to be the smoking gun; there is, perhaps, some truth in most of the explanations. Mono-causal explanations of complex social phenomena can be naïve, at best, and irresponsible at worst. I was therefore surprised that in A Farewell to Alms, Professor Gregory Clark, a distinguished professor of economics history at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), hung his intellectual coattails on the genetic and culture arguments.

RECORDS IN ENGLANDS REALLY IMPRESSIVE
The book is not without merit. I was impressed by the research that Professor Clark presented on economic conditions in pre-industrial Britain, an age he calls the Malthusian age. In this age, population was the main determinant of income per head. Economic productivity in this age was low; any rise in living standards led to a rise in population, which, in turn, led to starvation, disease and subsequent decline in population.
Read more ›
Comment 7 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Report abuse

Most Recent Customer Reviews



Feedback