Globalization and History

Kevin O''Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson present a coherent picture of trade migration and international capital flows in the Atlantic economy in the century prior to 1914the first great globalization boom which anticipated the experience of the last fifty years.Globalization is not a new phenomenon nor is it irreversible. In Gobalization and History Kevin O''Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson present a coherent picture of trade migration and international capital flows in the Atlantic economy in the century prior to 1914the first great globalization boom which anticipated the experience of the last fifty years. The authors estimate the extent of globalization and its impact on the participating countries and discuss the political reactions that it provoked. The book''s originality lies in its application of the tools of open-economy economics to this critical historical perioddifferentiating it from most previous work which has been based on closed-economy or single-sector models. The authors also keep a close eye on globalization debates of the 1990s using history to inform the present and vice versa. The book brings together research conducted by the authors over the past decadework that has profoundly influenced how economic history is now written and that has found audiences in economics and history as well as in the popular press.