Findlay and O'Rourke on World Trade: 1000-2000

I have received a copy of ‘Power and Plenty: trade, war, and the world economy in the second millennium’ by Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke from Princeton University Press and I intend to review it as I read it in the New Year.

In snatches I have read of it so far I think it covers on a grand scale a most relevant range of topics to compliment my interest in the political economy of Adam Smith.

In Wealth Of Nations (and in his Lectures on Jurisprudence), Adam Smith too wrote to a similar theme about world trade from the fall of Rome in the 5th century to the 18th century.

It will be interesting the compare how Smith’s ‘conjectures’ about how philosophy, politics, governance, law, languages, morals, and political economy evolved from when none of these existed to when they reached where they were in the second half of the 18th century. And how they stand in the history of world trade to 2000.

I shall keep you posted when my first essay is ready.

Meanwhile, I am within days of completing the files for my book, ‘Adam Smith: the moral philosopher and his political economy’ for Palgrave’s new series, Great Thinkers in Economics. General Editor, A. P. Thirlwall.

I am currently checking references, eliminating repetition and awkward sentence structures, and losing more words (I’ve cut 18,000 so far, with about 5,000 to go – every word lost a real pain).

Still, the 14 chapters read ‘better’ (6,000-8,000 words each), I think…