Colossus

Home > Other > Colossus > Page 43
Colossus Page 43

by Niall Ferguson


  20. Diamond, “Promoting Real Reform in Africa,” p. 31; national income data from the World Bank.

  21. Sachs and Warner, “Economic Reform,” esp. p. 36. See also their “Fundamental Sources of Long-run Growth,” pp. 184–88.

  22. Chiswick and Hatton, “International Migration.”

  23. Rodrik, “Feasible Globalizations,” p. 19.

  24. Lucas, “Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?”

  25. Baldwin and Martin, “Two Waves of Globalization,” p. 20.

  26. Schularick, “Development Finance,” p. 20f, chart 2.

  27. Easterly, Elusive Quest, p. 58f.

  28. See, e.g., Sachs, “Tropical Underdevelopment.”

  29. See Acemoglu et al., “Colonial Origins” and the same authors’ “Reversal of Fortune.”

  30. Landes, Wealth and Poverty of Nations, p. 217f.

  31. Barro, “Determinants of Economic Growth.” The three others were the provision of secondary and higher education, the provision of health care and the promotion of birth control.

  32. North and Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment.”

  33. Ferguson, Cash Nexus. See also Sylla, “Shaping the U.S. Financial Sstem.”

  34. Lindert, “Voice and Growth.”

  35. “Zambia received $2 billion of aid in 1985 dollars since 1960. If all the aid had gone into investment, and investment had gone into growth, its per capita income would now be $20,000. In fact it is $600”: Easterly, Elusive Quest, p. 42.

  36. “Governments so often cause low growth [by creating] poor incentives for growth: high inflation, high black market premiums, high budget deficits, strongly negative real interest rates, restrictions on free trade, excessive red tape, and inadequate public services”: ibid., p. 239.

  37. According to one estimate, the private international assets of poor countries’ residents may amount to two trillion dollars, the equivalent of almost 40 percent of poor countries’ combined GDP in 2000: Schularick, “Development Finance,” p. 32.

  38. James K. Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana, “Africa’s Odious Debts,” Project Syndicate, June 2003.

  39. Diamond, “Promoting Real Reform in Africa,” p. 6. The number of African countries holding democratic elections has risen slightly since the nadir of the 1980s and now stands at nineteen, but only a quarter of these offer their citizens meaningful civil and political freedom. The distinction between liberal and illiberal democracy is explored at length in Zakaria, Future of Freedom. For an illuminating critique, see Dia-mond’s review in Journal of Democracy, 14, 4(2003), pp. 167–71.

  40. Acemoglu et al., “African Success Story,” p. 2f.

  41. Ibid., p. 4. Acemoglu et al. give no credit whatever to the legacy of British colonial rule. Another interpretation might be that, compared with (for example) Zimbabwe, the rulers of Botswana have done relatively little to dismantle the British system of noncorrupt administration.

  42. Diamond, “Promoting Real Reform in Africa,” p. 9.

  43. Collier and Hoeffler, “Economic Causes of Civil War.” Cf. Collier, “The Market for Civil War,” Foreign Policy, May–June 2003, pp. 38–45; “The Global Menace of Local Strife,” Economist, May 24, 2003.

  44. Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict.”

  45. For a useful introduction to the noneconomic facets of globalization, see Held et al., Global Transformations.

  46. Though it should be emphasized that there are limits to how far a complete standardization of economic institutions could be—or for that matter needs to be—taken: Rodrik, “Feasible Globalizations” As Rodrik argues, there is more than one path to prosperity; witness the diversity of institutional arrangements in the world’s largest economies. However, that is not an argument against trying to establish one or other of the successful institutional frameworks in countries that have failed to grow their own. It is not that every country needs to choose among the nation-state, democracy and global economic integration; it is just that some nation-states—usually undemocratic ones—need to have globalization forced upon them.

  47. Ibid., pp. 6–10. For the evidence that the late nineteenth century was indeed the “first age of globalization,” see O’Rourke and Williamson, “When Did Globalization Begin?” See also their Globalization and History.

  48. By one measure (net customs revenue as a percentage of net import values) France was in fact more liberal from the 1820s until the mid-1870s: John Vincent Nye, “Myth of Free-Trade Britain.” The real significance of British free trade is that the British retained it even after globalization began to drive down commodity prices in the 1870s.

  49. Bairoch, “European Trade Policy” p. 139.

  50. Edelstein, “Imperialism: Cost and Benefit,” p. 205.

  51. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 141.

  52. Ibid., p. 432.

  53. Williamson, “Land, Labor and Globalization.”

  54. See Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, esp. p. 212.

  55. Clemens and Williamson, “A Tariff-Growth Paradox?”

  56. Irwin, “Tariff-Growth Correlation of the Late Nineteenth Century.”

  57. Constantine, “Migrants and Settlers,” p. 167.

  58. Williamson, “Winners and Losers”; idem, “Land, Labor and Globalization.”

  59. Engerman, “Servants to Slaves,” p. 272.

  60. Tinker, New System of Slavery.

  61. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp. 161–63.

  62. Maddison, World Economy, table 2–26a.

  63. Davis and Huttenback, Mammon, p. 46.

  64. Maddison, World Economy, table 2–26b.

  65. According to Clemens and Williamson, “about two-thirds of [British capital exports] went to the labor-scarce New World where only a tenth of the world’s population lived, and only about a quarter of it went to labor-abundant Asia and Africa where almost two-thirds of the worl’s population lived”: Clemens and Williamson, “Where Did British Foreign Capital Go?”

  66. Obstfeld and Taylor, “Globalization and Capital Markets,” p. 60, figure 10.

  67. Ibid., table 2.

  68. Schularick, “Development Finance,” p. 14 and table 4.

  69. Drazen, “Political-Economic Theory of Domestic Debt.”

  70. The definitive statement is Bordo and Rockoff, “Gold Standard as a ‘Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.’ ”

  71. Eichengreen and Flandreau, “Geography of the Gold Standard,” table 2.

  72. Bordo and Kydland, “Gold Standard as a Commitment Mechanism,” p. 56; Bordo and Schwartz, “Monetary Policy Regimes,” p. 10.

  73. Bordo and Rockoff, ‘ “Good Housekeeping,’ ” pp. 327, 347f.

  74. Ferguson, Empire, esp. ch. 4. A modern survey of forty-nine countries concluded that common-law countries offered “the strongest legal protections of investors.” The fact that eighteen of the countries in the sample have the common law system is of course almost entirely due to their having been at one time or another under British rule: La Porta et al., “Law and Finance.”

  75. Schularick, “Development Finance,” table 5.

  76. For more details, see Ferguson, “City of London.”

  77. I am grateful to Alan M. Taylor for making these data available to me.

  78. Lindert and Morton, “How Sovereign Debt Has Worked.”

  79. As demonstrated by Obstfeld and Taylor, “Sovereign Risk.” For a contrary argument, see Bordo and Rockoff, “Adherence to the Gold Standard.”

  80. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp. 439, 570. See for a detailed discussion, J. M. Keynes, “Foreign Investment and National Advantage,” in Moggridge (ed.), Collected Writings, vol. 19, part I, pp. 275–84.

  81. MacDonald, Free Nation Deep in Debt, p. 380.

  82. Atkin, “Official Regulation,” pp. 324–35.

  83. Writing in the 1950s, the Canadian historian Harold Innis declared: “The constitution of Canada, as it appears on the statute book of the British Parliament, has been designed to s
ecure capital for the improvement of navigation and transport”: Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 233.

  84. Ibid., p. 584f.

  85. Hale, “British Empire in Default.”

  86. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 439.

  87. J. M. Keynes, “Advice to Trustee Investors,” in Moggridge (ed.), Collected Writings, vol. 19, part 1, p. 204f.

  88. Maddison, World Economy, p. 264, table B-21.

  89. Calculated from figures ibid., p. 112.

  90. Dutt, “Origins of Uneven Development.”

  91. Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts.

  92. See, e.g., Raychaudhuri, “British Rule in India,” pp. 361–64.

  93. See Washbrook, “South Asia, the World System, and World Capitalism,” p. 480f.

  94. Roy, Economic History of India, p. 42ff.

  95. Ibid., p. 250.

  96. Maddison, World Economy, table 2–21b. The “drain” of resources from Indonesia to Holland was substantially larger and more deserving of that appellation. It is nevertheless undeniable that Indian monetary policy was governed with managing this transfer of resources, not with maximizing Indian output, as its principal objective.

  97. Roy, Economic History, p. 241.

  98. Ibid., pp. 22, 219f., 254, 285, 294. Cf.McAlpin, Subject to Famine.

  99. Roy, Economic History, pp. 32–36, 215.

  100. Ibid., pp. 258–63.

  101. Ibid., p. 46f.

  102. Ibid., p. 257.

  103. Maddison, World Economy, p. 110f.

  104. Roy, Economic History, p. 226–29.

  105. See Goldsmith, Financial Development of India.

  106. Thanks to the liberalization of the 1990s, India has since managed to nar-row that gap.

  107. Stephen Haber, Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, “If Economists Are So Smart, Why Is Africa So Poor?” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2003.

  CHAPTER 6: GOING HOME OR ORGANIZING HYPOCRISY

  1. Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 449–54.

  2. Ibid., p.509.

  3. Yergin, Prize, pp. 186–90, 195–97, 201,204.

  4. Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, p. 509.

  5. Newsday, April 9, 2003.

  6. New York Times, April 11, 2003.

  7. “Transcript of President Bush’s Remarks on the End of Major Combat in Iraq,” New York Times, p. A16.

  8. New York Times, February 27, 2003.

  9. Financial Times, April 7, 2003

  10. New York Times, July 15, 2003.

  11. “Elections in Iraq a Possibility Next Year, Bremer Says,” New York Times, July 31, 2003.

  12. Steven R. Weisman, “Powell Gives Iraq 6 Months to Write New Constitution,” New York Times, September 26, 2003.

  13. “Iraqi Handover to Be Speeded Up,” http://news.bbc.co.uk, November 2, 2003.

  14. Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, p. 449f.

  15. Ibid., p. 453.

  16. Ibid., p.497, 503.

  17. Ibid., p. 507f.

  18. Ibid. p. 508.

  19. Yergin, Prize, p. 195.

  20. A good selection of Bell’s correspondence can be found at http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letters.

  21. Gertrude Bell to her father, August 28, 1921, http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/letters//11448.htm.

  22. Calculated from figures in Constantine, “Migrants.”

  23. Maddison, World Economy, p. 110.

  24. Calculated from figures in Kirk-Greene, On Crown Service.

  25. Potter, India’s Political Administration, pp. 68–70; Symonds, Oxford and Empire, pp. 185–93.

  26. He was beaten by his future antagonist at the Treasury, Otto Niemeyer.

  27. Kirk-Greene, On Crown Service.

  28. Between 15 and 25 percent of all undergraduates who matriculated at Balliol, Keble, St. John’s and Corpus Christi colleges ended up in some kind of imperial employment: Symonds, Oxford and Empire, p. 306.

  29. Machonochie, Life in the Indian Civil Service.

  30. Tony Allen-Mills, “Rumsfeld Plan for a Tight Little Army Hits Trouble on the Right,” Sunday Times, September 21, 2003. Cf. Stephen Fidler and Gerard Baker, “The Best-laid Plans?,” Financial Times, August 3, 2003.

  31. Felicity Barringer and David E. Sanger, “U.S. Drafts Plan for U.N. to Back a Force for Iraq,” New York Times, September 3, 2003.

  32. Statistical Abstract of the United States 2002, table 495; Porter (ed.), Atlas of British Overseas Expansion.

  33. Statistical Abstract of the United States 2001, table 494.

  34. http://dbease.mconetwork.com/dbEase/cgi-bin/go_getpl.

  35. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook.

  36. International Herald Tribune, October 16–27, 2002.

  37. See Kurth, “Migration.”

  38. Department of Defense, “Population Representation in the Military Services” (2001), table 3.3.

  39. Ash, History of the Present, p. 375. This may be to overlook the growing importance of more recently arrived ethnic minorities, notably Hispanic and Asian first- and second-generation immigrants.

  40. Yale University Office of the FAS Registrar; Yale University Office of Institutional Research. I have since heard that this lone student of the Near East is working in California.

  41. Yale University Office of Development; Yale University Office of Institutional Research.

  42. Porch, “Occupational Hazards,” p. 40.

  43. San Jose Mercury News, March 18, 2003.

  44. Reuel Marc Gerecht, “The Counterterrorist Myth,” Atlantic Monthly, July-August 2001.

  45. Woodward, Bush at War, p. 201.

  46. Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2003.

  47. http://www.peacecorps.gov/about/index.cfm.

  48. I am grateful to Bill Whelan for his help on this point.

  49. “What Baghdad Really Thinks,” Spectator, July 19, 2003.

  50. See the astute remarks on this subject by the high representative in Bosnia, in a speech he gave in June this year: Ash-down, “Broken Communities.”

  51. President Bush, speech at the American Enterprise Institute, New York Times, February 26, 2003.

  52. For a somewhat flawed discussion of these issues, see Pei, “Lessons of the Past.” Pei also overlooks South Korea.

  53. Lydia Saad, “What Form of Government for Iraq?,” Gallup Organization, http://www.gallup.com/poll/tb/goverpubli/20030923d.asp.

  54. Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul, “Rushing Elections Will Only Hurt Iraq,” San Jose Mercury News, September 28, 2003.

  55. Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 24.

  56. Ibid., p. 131.

  57. Shannon, Gladstone, p. 301.

  58. Ibid., p. 302f.

  59. Ibid., p. 304.

  60. Roberts, Salisbury, p. 229.

  61. Ibid., p. 266.

  62. Shannon, Gladstone, p. 306.

  63. Judd, Empire p. 97.

  64. Shannon, Gladstone, p. 318.

  65. Ibid., p. 305.

  66. Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 139.

  67. Shannon, Gladstone, p. 318.

  68. Roberts, Salisbury, p. 343.

  69. Matthew, Gladstone, vol. 2, p. 135.

  70. Calculated from figures in Crouchley, Economic Development, p. 274ff.

  71. Calculated from the figures in Stone, Global Export of Capital.

  72. Fieldhouse, “For Richer, for Poorer,” p.121.

  73. Their lot was far from disagreeable; see Lawrence Durrell’s intoxicating Alexandria Quartet of novels.

  74. All statistics from Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia, Oceania.

  75. According to a briefing in February 2004: by Lorenzo Perez, head of the IMF’s Iraq mission team, loans to Iraq may be possible in the second half of 2004: IMF Survey, 33, 2, February 2, 2004, p. 18.

  76. See Krasner, “Troubled Societies” and his Organized Hypocrisy.

  77. Ashdown, “Broken Communities.”

  CHAPTER 7: “IMPIRE”: EUROPE BETWEEN BRUSSELS AND BYZANTIUMr />
  1. Glennon, “Why the Security Council Failed.”

  2. Chris Patten, “The State of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership,” Trilateral Commission, October 20, 2002.

  3. George Parker and Daniel Dombey, “Berlusconi Eyes Bigger E.U. Role on World Stage,” Financial Times, July 1, 2003.

  4. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Peril of Too Much Power,” New York Times, April 9, 2002.

  5. “A European Armaments, Research and Military Capabilities Agency shall be established to identify operational requirements, to promote measures to satisfy those requirements, to contribute to identifying and, where appropriate, implementing any measure needed to strengthen the industrial and technological base of the defense sector, to participate in defining a European capabilities and armaments policy, and to assist the Council of Ministers in evaluating the improvement of military capabilities”: European Convention, “Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe,” CONV 850/03, Brussels, July 18, 2003.

  6. See, e.g., Andrew Sullivan, “The Euro Menace: The USE vs. the USA,” Sunday Times, June 16, 2003.

  7. Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review (2002). Cf. Kagan, Of Paradise and Power.

  8. France is, by a considerable margin, the world’s most popular tourist destination, accounting for more than 10 percent of all international tourist arrivals in 2000: World Tourist Organization. The second most popular is the United States, but the third, fourth and fifth places go to EU members: Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom.

  9. Huntington, “Lonely Superpower.”

  10. Kupchan, End of the American Era, pp.119, 132.

  11. “Washington today, like Rome then, enjoys primacy, but is beginning to tire of the burdens of hegemony…. And Europe today, like Byzantium then, is emerging as an independent center of power, dividing a unitary realm in two”: ibid., pp. 131, 153.

  12. Cooper, “Postmodern State.”

  13. Joseph Nye, “The New Rome Meets the New Barbarians: How America Should Wield Its Power,” Economist, March 23, 2002. See also Joseph Nye, “Lessons in Imperialism,” Financial Times, June 16, 2002. Cf. Bergsten, “American and Europe.”

  14. Mearsheimer, Tragedy, p. 385.

  15. Paul M. Kennedy, “What Hasn’t Changed Since September 11th,” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2002.

 

‹ Prev