You wait years for a magisterial overview of the entire global economy on a
thousand-year timescale, and then two come along within a week of each other.
Angus Maddison’s Contours
of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History was released
on November 5. Power
and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium,
by Ron Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, was released on November 12, and has already
prompted a gushing
blog entry by Dani Rodrik (as well as blurbs from the likes of Niall Ferguson
and Barry Eichengreen).
Between them, they weigh in at 1,072 pages. I don’t think either is likely
to unseat Jared Diamond’s Guns,
Germs, and Steel in the bestseller stakes, but it’s great in any event to
see more books of this nature being released.