#stephen broadberry

[adventuresinsocialpolicy]

Stephen Broadberry, CEPR

Aren’t economic historians great? They’ve gone back through centuries of accounts, government records, institutional records and so on to estimate GDP and population sizes right back to the middle ages.

This article argues that we can see the ‘great divergence’ between European and Asian countries from the late middle ages (although the continents aren’t homogeneous- there were ‘little divergences’ as well).

The Black Death of the 1300s and the opening of trade routes in the 1500s are the cause in this story. Countries with different economic structures/resources etc. responded to these shocks differently, and set off on the different paths we see today.