Review and Reflection

Summary

An atlas does not have a conclusion. But after having browsed through it, one might briefly want to pause and reflect on what one has seen and what that might mean. A couple of things stand out.

• - Until industrialisation the economies of the countries depicted in this book - and according to the existing literature also the economies of all countries not depicted here - only had very limited growth potential. The information in the atlas certainly does not add up to a diehard defence of a strictly Malthusian perspective on pre-industrial economies. But it does show that the margins for pre-industrial societies were small and that their potential for growth was severely constrained by organic limits. All four countries depicted can be characterised as advanced organic economies, i.e. economies that still were organic but that, considering the constraints that this implied, had managed to reach quite high levels of development and growth without, however, actually ‘escaping’ from Malthus.

• - The changes we associate with ‘the industrial revolution’ meant the lifting or even elimination of the ‘Malthusian’ constraints. Whether that escape will prove to be definitive of course is another matter. That, however, need not concern us in this book as it stops at the beginning of the twentieth century.

• - The absence of modern economic growth did not mean the absence of any growth. There apparently were several instances of what one can call ‘pre-modern’ economic growth. It would appear that Great Britain and the Dutch Republic had already become wealthier than China and Japan before industrialisation in Great Britain took off. The figures presented for GDP, real wages and consumption would suggest so. It would be rash to draw very firm conclusions though: Problems of measurement and interpretation are huge and much has to depend on assumptions.

• - Pre-modern growth was not the outcome of so-called ‘macro-innovations’. Overall changes in the sources of energy that were used, in technology and in the raw materials that were processed, were marginal as compared to what became normal in industrial societies. Almost without exception they boiled down to (a little bit) more of the same.