Tag Archives: Paul Bairoch

To continue from my post here, Paul Bairoch’s book Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (New York and London, 1993) further analyses Western colonialism, the industrial revolution, and non-Western versus Western imperialism.Did British imperialism from the 15th to the early 19th century play a major – or indeed necessary – role in triggering the British industrial revolution?The fact is that, economically speaking, the British empire was not very big in the early modern period and...

The economic historian Paul Bairoch (1930–1999) subjected some Marxist myths about Western capitalism and imperialism to critical scrutiny in his now classic book Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (New York and London, 1993).First, was the Western industrial revolution dependent on energy from the Third World?Bairoch (1993: 59) notes that right up until the post-WWII era the West was almost completely self-sufficient in energy, and as late as the 1930s much of the developed...