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2018 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

6. North’s NIEH as Global History

verfasst von : Matthijs Krul

Erschienen in: The New Institutionalist Economic History of Douglass C. North

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter studies Douglass North’s New Institutionalist Economic History as a contribution to our understanding of the ‘Great Divergence’: that is, the historical shift toward European (or Western) hegemony and the divergence between developed and underdeveloped nations. As Krul shows, North’s work is not solely meant as an analytical tool, but also carries implications for development economics and policy. These follow directly from the North’s analysis of the origins of Western hegemony. For North, the achievement of rich market societies was a rare breakthrough, involving a series of prerequisites that are profoundly difficult to reproduce for other nations. As Krul argues, North’s pessimism about improving institutions clashes markedly with his historical analysis of the rise of the West specifically and renders the latter unpersuasive.

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Vorheriges Kapitel North’s Theory of Cultural Evolution

Nächstes Kapitel Revisiting Polanyi’s Challenge: North and the Limits of the New Institutionalism

In this respect, North and colleagues are actually less pessimistic than some of their predecessors. They argue that Mancur Olson and other public choice theorists are wrong to see the channeling of private interests into organizations as a threat to the market order. Rather, they argue, in open access orders such organizations are important contributions to its functioning, because it is via organizations that political competition primarily takes place, a concept reminiscent of J.K. Galbraith’s ‘countervailing power’ (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009: 141–142; Galbraith 1956).

Note that in these and other such discussions, no evidence from macroeconomics or development economics is offered to prove this point. It is merely asserted, as if self-evident.

See Mirowski (1989) for a longer discussion of this point.

See, among others, Vries (2010) for a discussion of the developmental implications of the ‘California school’ of global historians and of the great divergence question in general.

See also North (1995).

In the context of wider debates about the rise of ‘modernity’ in global history, or indeed about the rise of capitalism as distinct from mercantile society, it is interesting to note the periodization. Compared to many global historians, North and colleagues put the transition itself, the shift in fundamentals marking a qualitative difference in the logic of society, on the late end of the spectrum: in the 1840s–1850s for the United States, the 1830s–1840s for the United Kingdom, and the 1870s–1880s for France.

Some authors operating in the NIE tradition have also been guilty of this: the influential paper by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) on colonial institutions and development trajectories can be read as a salient example of this phenomenon.

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Titel: North’s NIEH as Global History
verfasst von: Matthijs Krul
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: The New Institutionalist Economic History of Douglass C. North
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-94083-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-94084-7

Copyright-Jahr: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94084-7_6