Findlay & O'Rourke (2007) — Power and Plenty

Citation. Findlay, Ronald, and Kevin H. O’Rourke. Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium. Princeton University Press, 2007.

Summary

A comprehensive long-run global economic history emphasizing the role of trade, commercial-institutional innovation, and warfare in shaping civilizational trajectories over the second millennium. The book traces the rise of European trans-oceanic commerce from the 15th century through the 20th, documents the institutional innovations (joint-stock companies, marine insurance, naval finance) that enabled it, and argues that the commercial and military transformations are both downstream of state competition and upstream of modern economic growth.

Power and Plenty is the standard reference work for global long-run commercial history. It provides the quantitative underpinning for most arguments in the maritime-commercial-revolution tradition and serves as a general integrative framework for the Great Divergence literature from a trade-and-commerce angle.

Key claims

• Long-run economic and political power correlated with commercial capacity throughout the second millennium.
• European trans-oceanic commercial infrastructure (16th–19th century) represented a distinct institutional innovation with no non-European parallel in scale or institutional form.
• State competition within Europe was a necessary condition for the commercial-and-military innovations; unified empires did not produce equivalent institutional experimentation.
• Modern economic growth is substantially a product of the commercial-institutional transformation documented in the early modern period; the Industrial Revolution is a late act in a longer play.
• The 19th- and 20th-century history of globalization, de-globalization, and re-globalization is continuous with the early-modern commercial story.