Europe, America, and the Wider World: Volume 1, Europe and the World Economy: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitali

Description

Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a particular, yet comprehensive, view of the economic history of Western Europe since the Renaissance. The focus is wide and the level of treatment deep. Between 1550 and 1940, Professor Parker contends, the development of European capitalism was, in a sense, all of a piece. He separates the development into three periods and processes - 'Malthusian', 'Smithian', and 'Schumpeterian'. Each period was governed by a characteristic dynamic that produced productivity growth, in the presence of other favourable elements, and influenced also the evolution of the forms of industrial and economic life. A certain internal logic is claimed for this progression, which in the nineteenth century extended this system and technology efficiently over much of the globe. In the concluding essay, Professor Parker examines the break-up of the capitalist synthesis and speculates on its transmutation into other forms. Essays and reviews previously available in widely scattered sources are brought together here for the first time and arranged and amplified to develop the central theses.

'Bill Parker is one of the wisest and is certainly the wittiest of the post-war generation that created the new economic history. In this series of essays, some old some new, he sets forth an immensely erudite view of the evolution of Europe and the world economy over the past five centuries. Taken separately, the essays are beautifully crafted insights into particular parts of the story. Together they form an integrated interpretation of the development of the western world. They all add up to an extraordinary volume by an extraordinary economic historian.' Douglass C. North, Washington University 'William Parker's graceful and speculative essays presuppose that economic progress is rooted in political and intellectual life. To borrow one of his own titles, they are an 'opportunity sequence', inviting the historian to rethink economic development in a cultural context.' Charles S. Mailer, Harvard University