Maddison (2007) — Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD

Citation. Maddison, Angus. Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary

Angus Maddison’s late-career synthesis of his decades-long reconstruction of world GDP and GDP-per-capita across two millennia. The book is organized as a sequence of essays covering the ancient world, the “proto-modern” period (500–1500), early-modern growth (1500–1820), the modern growth era (1820–present), and a forward-looking essay on the next decades. Each essay draws on the vast historical-national-accounting work Maddison had pursued (in successive books through 1995, 2001, and 2003) with progressively refined country-level estimates.

The book is the most accessible single-author treatment of the long-run comparative economic-history project that became the Maddison Project Database. Where the Database provides the numbers, Contours provides the interpretive narrative — Maddison’s own reading of what the numbers show about divergence, convergence, and the turning points in long-run economic growth.

Key claims

• World GDP per capita was roughly constant at subsistence levels from 1 CE through 1500 CE. Apparent regional differences reflect differences in population density, not differences in per-capita income.
• A slow divergence begins around 1500, with Western Europe and later its offshoots pulling ahead of the rest of the world.
• The Industrial Revolution in Britain (post-1760) is the turning point at which per-capita growth becomes sustained in the world economy.
• The 20th century sees a rough convergence among Western economies but a widening of the gap between the West and much of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.
• Post-1980 Chinese and Indian growth represents the largest catch-up episode in modern history, with implications extending to 2030 and beyond.

What to be skeptical of

• Maddison’s own data were progressively superseded in his lifetime. His country-level estimates, particularly for pre-1820 Asia, were revised substantially by the Broadberry-Guan-Li (2018) Chinese reconstruction, the Broadberry-Gupta Indian reconstructions, and subsequent Maddison Project updates. The specific numbers in Contours should be cross-referenced with the current Maddison Project Database rather than treated as authoritative on their own.
• The “constant subsistence before 1500” claim is a working assumption in many places, not a measurement. Pre-1500 per-capita figures are inferred from urbanization rates, stature data, and general historical plausibility — not from anything resembling modern national accounts.
• Maddison’s framework is contested at the interpretive level by the California School and by world-systems theorists (Frank, Wallerstein) who read the same numbers as showing Asian centrality until very late. Maddison’s own narrative is not neutral between these readings.
• The 2030 projections are now 20+ years old and should be judged against actual subsequent developments rather than relied on.

Note on access

The book is Oxford University Press; it is not an open-access publication. The Maddison Project Database 2023 provides the current version of the underlying numerical estimates as open data.