New and old peripheries - Britain, the Baltic and the Americas in the Great Divergence

• In his seminal book The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that access to inputs from the vast acreages available in the Americas was crucial for the industrial revolution in Britain. But could no other regions of the world have provided the inputs in demand? Recent research claims that this could have been the case. This paper takes that research one step further by studying Britain’s trade with an old and important peripheral trading-partner, the Baltic, contrasting this to the British trade with America. This paper finds that production for export was not necessarily stagnating in the Baltic, as Pomeranz has claimed. Qualitative aspects of the factor endowment of land did however not enable the production of specific raw materials such as cotton, to meet the increasing demand. Thus, the decreasing role of the Baltic ought to a large extent be attributed to the patterns of British industrialization, and the demand it created for specific raw materials, rather than internal, institutional constraints in the Baltic region.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Ekonomisk historia (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economic History (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Great Divergence

Baltic

America

ghost acreage

grain

cotton

sugar

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)