Introduction by Angus Maddison

This book is intended as a quantitative reference work and guide to current and past research in macroeconomic history. It is a companion volume to The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, published by OECD in 2001. The major purpose of that study was to provide an analytic survey of developments in the world economy over two millennia, and to explore the reasons for the great divergence in the momentum of advance in different regions. The analysis was underpinned by a comprehensive quantification of levels and movement in population, output, and per capita income. The statistical appendices provided annual estimates for 1950–1998, and for 8 benchmark years back to the first century. Annual estimates for 1870–1950 appeared in my earlier book Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992.

The present work revises and updates the population estimates for 1950–2003, GDP and per capita GDP estimates for 1820–2001. It shows annual figures back to 1820 wherever possible and provides fuller source notes and explanations of proxy procedures for filling data gaps. For the period before 1820, there are fewer revisions, but detail is given for more countries and there is closer scrutiny of the contours of development in Latin America and Africa. Estimates of benchmark levels of output in 1990 international dollars are unchanged except for seven African countries. The possibilities for extended annual coverage of population, GDP and per capita GDP were greatest for Europe and Western Offshoots. There were about 4 200 annual entries for individual countries in the 2001 volume and 15 200 here. For Latin America, Asia and Africa combined, there were about 15 300 entries in the earlier volume and 22 600 here.

The prologue provides a brief survey of the development of historical national accounts and
demography from the 17th century to the present. It is based on some of the material I presented in the Kuznets lectures at Yale University in 1998. Sections HS–1 to HS–6 explain the sources and procedures used to derive the basic estimates for countries in the major regions. Section HS–7 summarises the procedures and problems involved in deriving the world totals for 1950–2003. HS–8 does the same for the estimates from the first century to 1950. Research on quantitative economic history has made great strides in the past quarter century, and the efforts of individual scholars have been reinforced by the creation of international networks as explained in HS–8. As a result we have a clearer notion of the range of growth experience, processes of catch–up, convergence and divergence, and underlying causal forces. Research has concentrated on the past two centuries of accelerated growth. Much less has been done on earlier centuries. As a consequence, there are conflicting views on relative levels of income in Europe and Asia around 1800. In my view, it is possible to resolve some of these differences by extending quantitative research further into the past. There were two reasons for indifference to or neglect of distant horizons. One is that quantitative evidence is scarcer the further back one goes in time, and earlier centuries were regarded as impenetrable to quantitative analysis. Another is that economic growth was much slower before the nineteenth century and therefore seemed irrelevant or uninteresting. There was a belief that the roots of modern growth lay in a sudden take–off (an industrial revolution) in the late eighteenth century, that agriculture originated eight thousand years ago and that there was a Malthusian torpor for most of the intervening interval. I disagree with this interpretation for reasons explained in HS–8.