The most important thing a book on the economic history of the world must emphasize, again and again, is the incredible, unbelievable, unrivaled improvement in the standard of living since preindustrial times. Economics terms like “growth,” “wealth,” or “division of labor” just never seem to do that shift justice.
Up until fairly recently, almost everyone in every society of every civilizational age in every part of the world toiled the earth for some meager, grain-dominated subsistence living. Little variety, poor hygiene, none of the technical and material comforts we take for granted — death and suffering always within terrifying proximity.
Today, most people live in urban areas, and make a living assisting their fellow humans — often humans very, very far away. They create “services” instead of growing crops, all without actually neglecting the land. Peruse some of the commodities at Our World in Data’s agricultural production page: almost without exception, they all move up and to the right. The story of the modern world is indeed “more.”
Very few innovations or revolutions in the history of mankind — perhaps the internet or the internal combustion engine, or the expanded franchise or the contraceptive pill in the social sphere — can even rival the extreme human revolution, over the relatively short arc of the last 175 years.
In One From the Many: The Global Economy Since 1850, Christopher Meissner, UC Davis economics professor and longtime scholar of international and financial economics, takes us on a journey through a century and a half of international trade. We’re treated to a slightly different flavor of that exact Great Enrichment point. A few stunning charts reproduced in the opening of the book tell precisely that story from a global trade point of view: nothing-nothing-nothing-hockey-stick-up.
It’s outlined like a textbook (lecture notes?) for a class in international economics: we get chapters on the North Atlantic trade, on the classical gold standard, on the great migrations of the nineteenth century, on the Great Depression, and on the Bretton Woods regime.
Trade was once restricted to a small number of high-value-to-weight products. But humans have progressively learned to trade even very low-value-to-weight products (e.g., wheat or water. Again, the nineteenth century was a watershed thanks to the new technologies.
Out of many, our global economy became one.
In a sense, it’s an investigation of globalization over the long haul. The author’s thesis is pretty clear: despite recent backlash and wobbles, globalization is inevitable and unstoppable. While it ebbs and flows over the centuries, the great enrichment in no small part owes its existence to the global division of labor, and the massive reduction in the cost of trading and shipping goods and services across the world.
With a full chapter on the gold standard, there’s plenty of room for focusing on money and monetary regimes. That’s not surprising coming from a scholar who made his reputation in assessing various gold standards — the classical, the interwar one, the Bretton Woods and European Exchange Rate Mechanism fixed-exchange rates. (It’s also welcome, since my bias, like many who study money, is to think monetary conditions rule the roost).
Given the importance of a gold-based monetary order for most of this timeline, if anything it’s something of a missed opportunity to not write further about the monetary qualities ruling gold, and to what extent that cherished monetary order contributed to the rise of standards of the world.
While I might quibble with the details here and there — explanations for the Great Depression, central banks as rescuing firefighters rather than arsonists, what makes a gold standard functional — Meissner is excellent on the many critical epochs of the last two centuries. If you knew nothing of these themes, this is as good and accessible an entry as any.
I much appreciate Meissner rudely discarding common mythical beliefs, e.g., in the Marshall Plan — which “did not rebuild enough infrastructure to matter for the European economy.” The war, he points out, ended in 1945, and by the time that (comparatively meager) Marshall Plan money showed up in 1947, most bridges and infrastructure had already been repaired. The European growth miracle had already started.
In this, as in so many other observations, he’s balanced: he competently invokes research or counterfactuals to assess popular claims in history and historiography alike. He contrasts the acclaimed Golden Age of growth between roughly World War II and the breakdown of Bretton Woods in the late 1960s with the unsatisfactory development of China, India, or most of Latin America — whose below-trend or average growth impressed nobody. It couldn’t therefore only have been technological transfer and catch-up. The candidate explanations we’re served are plausible but too vague to investigate: “conscientious policymakers,” political harmony, or growth as a way to defend against Soviet Union temptation.
What I can’t grasp, and what leaves a bad taste from what otherwise is a pretty enjoyable and enriching book, is what happens on the very last few pages: the left-wing, globalist, intellectual biases re-assert themselves.
The epilogue is altogether a reminder not to situate your long historical work in the fleeting political moment. Written in the fall of 2023, some six months before the book’s publication, it reads (from the point of view of early 2025) as straight-up comical. Meissner praises international institutions, celebrates the ousting of Donald Trump, and rebuilding the “long-standing alliances” and “global engagement” he torpedoed.
Oops. One takeaway is the bittersweet humility that the wailing, intellectual classes still haven’t embraced. Meissner, like so many academics and intellectuals, defaulted to treating Trump 1.0 as an outlier period to be purged from their memories. Returning him to the presidency wasn’t a remote possibility even in their wildest nightmares.
Worse, to spend a career studying, among other things, global trade monetary regimes and how the various gold standards operated… and yet end your first stand-alone book — with Oxford University Press! — by splurging platitudes about global cooperation and the threat of climate change, ends up sounding just like another member of the tone-deaf, ivory-tower, liberal intelligentsia.
Aside from all such political considerations, if climate change didn’t merit a role for 299 out of 301 pages of serious economic history, why must it show up on the penultimate page? Any editor worth his or her salt should have removed this.One from the Many is a nice addition to global economic history, but it’s a shame that it concludes by reinforcing exactly how reality-detached our otherwise excellent academics can be.