| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy. By Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson. (Cambridge: mit Press, 1999. xii, 343 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-262-15049-2.)

This is a book about simple but powerful theories in economics and the light that they can cast on the evolution of the world economy over the last 150 years. The economy has moved through two long phases of greater openness and globalization, during which living standards across economies have converged; between those periods came one of greater autarky and a stop to convergence. Globalization and History addresses important questions, not just about the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy but also about the current wave of globalization and greater openness; it discusses what the two more open periods have in common and whether a sequence of go-stop-go in the movement toward greater globalization is likely to be repeated, and if so why. In sum, this is an important book that combines simple theory with empirical rigor—the latter bringing together a large body of evidence and argument developed by Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson in their work over at least the last ten years. It should be read widely, not least by those who take to the streets under the misguided impression that free trade is not welfare enhancing. . . .

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