More: the 10,000 Year Rise of the World Economy. By Philip Coggan. The Economist Books £10.99.
This book contains a great deal of useful factual and statistical material on the development of human society, from hunter–gatherers to the present day, from the origins of agriculture via big increases in productivity to the 2007–08 financial crash. Chapters dealing with chronological periods alternate with those covering specific topics, such as energy and transport. Here we will focus on some of the themes and the main points made.
Coggan is quite open about the role of the state in defending and assisting capitalism. Some level of law and order is needed for businesses to operate, and also the government provides education and various kinds of infrastructure required by capitalism. Britain has never been completely laissez-faire, and more generally the Great Depression of the 1930s led to much greater state involvement in the economy. Many industries have been protected from competition from abroad, and long-term research without short-term payoffs is unlikely to be funded by private companies.
Another theme is the global interconnectedness of production. Cross-border trade involves over half of what the world produces; around ninety percent of this is carried by ship, as can be seen at massive container ports such as Felixstowe and Singapore. Everyday products such as toothpaste contain sizeable numbers of ingredients, which need to be combined in a factory, put in a tube and package and transported to a wholesale warehouse and then to a shop. ‘No man is an economic island.’
Coggan makes no bones about the impact of the slave trade, describing it as ‘the industrialisation of brutality’. He quotes another writer: ‘The African countries that are the poorest today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken.’ More generally, the European conquest of the Americas ‘had a catastrophic impact on the indigenous population’, with perhaps ninety percent of the inhabitants of Mexico being killed, whether by imported diseases or warfare.
In answer to why Karl Marx’s predictions of revolution did not come true by the late nineteenth century, Coggan refers to the benefits of industrialisation being ‘sufficiently apparent’ by then. Marx was indeed over-optimistic, but surveys of workers’ lives in London and York around that time, by Booth and Rowntree, showed that about forty percent could barely keep their heads above water.
The author sometimes puts the word capitalism in quotation marks, on the grounds that it tends to be used in a slippery way, though he does not exemplify this. Yet it does not stop him using communism (without quotation marks) to describe the former system in Russia, which is not slippery, just wrong. And when he writes that ‘If anyone needed a post-Soviet illustration of the failings of Socialist economics, Venezuela was it’, he just shows that he knows nothing about Socialism. He does, however, describe the current system in China as ‘authoritarian capitalism’.
Sadly, the William Morris listed in the index is the owner of a car factory and supporter of Oswald Mosley, not the revolutionary author and designer.
Paul Bennett
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