EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
A History of the World since 1300
Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University
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C O U R S E L E C T U R E The Benefits of Comparative Advantage Notes taken on February 22, 2016 by Edward Tanguay |
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transition from self-sufficient villages to interdependent societies
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Marx observed this as fundamental to the system
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the demise of mercantilist empires
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the end of the slave trade
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the rise of free labor
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these were intensifying
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painting: Pieter Bruegel's Peasants
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taking a break from their work
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they take a lot of breaks because they produce for their own needs
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there are no clocks
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there are no assembly lines
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you're producing for village needs
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you're self-sufficient
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how trade changes the world
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creation of interdependent societies
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the village used to be largely self-sufficient
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trade alters this system
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societies become interdependent
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urban
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e.g. England
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produces manufactured goods
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rural
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e.g. Argentina
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export wheat
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there is interdependence
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you no longer produce for your own subsistence needs
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promote free trade with little regulation
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as they become more specialized, they become more productive, and as they become more productive, they become wealthier
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to own property and to trade became basic rights
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these became principles that would govern laws and institutions
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David Ricardo
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one of the first economists to observe these trends
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promoted the idea of extreme industry specialization by nations, to the point of dismantling internationally competitive and otherwise profitable industries
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there are benefits that come from comparative advantage
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it was applied to parts of globe that did not necessarily want to be part of the system, i.e. did not want to be the weak exporters
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free trade sometimes has to be imposed by force
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resistance of societies at the arrival of the market place
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merchants seen as the instruments that corroded older economies
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Indian Rebellion of 1857
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a response to the dispossession of land
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anger over taxes being levied by the East India Company
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capitalism becomes institutionalized
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after Napoleonic wars, it would be free trade, and not old empires, that would pull the parts of the global system together
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Marx
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this resistence against capitialism were spasms of a dying empire-based world
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saw capitalism as destiny
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Marx not the only one who saw these trends
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but Marx was unique in piecing the parts together
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Alexis de Tocqueville
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in the 1830s was sent to the United States to report back on innovations in the penitentary system
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during the Jacksonian era
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the ways in which capitalism was unfolding in the frontier societies in the United States
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found an egalitarian society with grassroots democracy
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strength rested on power of civil society
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wrote one of the great tracts called Democracy in America
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it was obvious to de Tocqueville that America's thriving economic system depended on its frontier
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between the opportunities between the frontier for economic expansion
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the United States could have capitalism without the upheavals which appeared to come inevitably in the other capitalist transformations in Europe, India, China and elsewhere
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combination of a civil society and a frontier
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1841 and 1846 traveled to north Africa
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"Travail sur l'Algérie"
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saw here a possibility for France to open up a frontier zone analogous to the opening of the frontier that the United States had
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it's own safety valve
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it's own opportunity to resolve the tension of capitalism by opening up the opportunity for others to settle land
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describes an Algeria populated by Arabs on the coast
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Berber tribes in the interior
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all living within a decaying Turkish regime
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these coastal plains were lying in wait for European settlers, for agrarian colonization
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analogous to the United States
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the conquest of Algeria could do for France what westward expansion could do for the United States
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he expressed these thoughts as a member of France's Chamber of Deputes
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from a 1840 speech: "What is now taking place in Egypt and in Syria is only at the edge of a vast panorama, only the prelude to a dramatic action on a large scale. Do you know what is happening in the East? An entire world is changing. From the banks of the Indus to the shoes of the Black Sea, in that vast space, every society is being shaken, every religion is growing weaker, the nations are dying, every light is being extinguished, the ancient Asiatic world is disappearing. And we are seeing the European world gradually take its place. In our time, Europe is not merely nibbling away at one corner of Asia as Europe did in the days of the Crusades. It is attacking it to the north, the south, the east, the west, everywhere. It is puncturing the ancient world, enveloping it, subduing it."
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arguing as Marx did that there was a global destiny to the system that Europe had created
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the growth of European expansion will see its climax in the First World War
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ends with the guns of August 1914
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our first narratives of globalization
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Marx
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Darwin
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De Tocqueville
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we can say that these people were both trying to envision a future utopia but also looking at the world as it already was and trying to make sense of it