Four great Asian trade collapses

Abstract

This paper is written in honour of Jeffrey Williamson, whose work on globalization and deglobalization (to take just one, early contribution, Williamson, 1996) and the economic history of the non-Western world (again to take just two examples, Williamson, 2006 and 2011) has been an inspiration to all of us. We are extremely grateful to Steve Broadberry, Bishnu Gupta and Debin Ma for their very helpful advice, and to Loren Brandt, Pierre van der Eng, Kyoji Fukao, and Tom Rawski for providing us with, and guiding us through, the data. Carol Shiue and Wolfgang Keller were kind enough to share their scans of the Chinese trade data with us, and we are very grateful to them. Sascha Becker very generously spent time in the library photographing an out of print book for us and we owe him a special debt of gratitude. Thanks also to Andy Seltzer and an anonymous referee, and especially to Anders Mikkelsen who spent many many hours typing in data. This paper has been written as part of a longer-run project on trade and trade policy during the interwar period. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the ERC, under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013), ERC grant agreement 249546; the Oxford History Faculty’s Sanderson Fund; and the John Fell OUP Research Fund.