Global Economy

Andrea Colli is Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University, Italy. He has published several books and articles in fields such as the structure and evolution of SMEs, the role of family firms in modern economic growth, and foreign direct investment during the 20th century. Franco Amatori is Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University, Italy. He specialized in business history during his time at Harvard Business School, USA, and has written extensively on Italian and international business history.

Living up to its title, this volume puts the global economy front and center in a concise history that covers the Neolithic Revolution through the 2008 financial crisis in only a few hundred pages. Editors Colli and Amatori (both, Bocconi Univ., Italy) focus on how goods, services, and resources moved across national boundaries, using the experiences of individual countries in service to the larger theme. Chapters elucidate how these systems evolved in response to flows of goods and resources and in turn shaped them over time, primarily centering on the period since roughly AD 1700, what economic historians have come to call “the Great Divergence.” This is when western European (and later North American) incomes per person started growing much more rapidly than in the rest of the world. The book grapples with both the causes of this divergence and the consequences for the global economy. The text’s greatest strength is its up-to-date scholarship, bringing the latest findings to bear on classic issues such as late-19th-century globalization and the origins of the Great Depression, making this an excellent addition to any economic historian’s or library’s collection.--L. D. Johnston, College of St. Benedict/St. John's University

• 1. The structural characteristics of preindustrial economies 2. The "Great Divergence" 3. New players, new institutions 4. The Industrial Revolution: technology and society 5. Why Europe? Why Britain? 6. An unstoppable process 7. A new world balance 8. The Western model and its limits 9. The first phase of globalization 10. The Great War: the end of a world 11. The post-war years: the age of insecurity 12. The crisis of capitalism 13. State intervention 14. The Second World War: "Creative Destruction" 15. Prosperity at last 16. Decolonization: lights and (many) shadows 17. From Keynes to neoliberalism 18. Third World, "Third Worlds" 19. The end of a great dream 20. Unstable leadership 21. Europe in search of an identity 22. The globalized world 23. A different kind of crisis? 24. In praise of history