Hi everyone and welcome to this, the October edition of the Economic History Podcast. Happy Halloween to you all. and today I had the pleasure of speaking with Professor Kevin O'Rourke. Kevin is Director of Research at the CNRS and he's a Professor of Economics at Sciences Po in Paris. He's also a Fellow of the Centre of Economic Policy Research Group.
And I think for regular listeners to this podcast, his name will be very familiar to most of us. Now we start off today's discussion with Kevin's 2002 paper with Geoff Williamson. in the European Review of Economic History, and that was called When Did Globalisation Begin? We then move on to talk about Kevin's work Tariffs and Growth in the late 19th century, and that was published in the Economic Journal.
in 2000. We also talk about his work with Chris Michener and Kirsten Van Schneider, The Smoot-Hawley Trade War. That was published in the Economic Journal in 2022. Kevin also talks about his work with Alan de Bromhead and Alan Fernehu and Marcus Lamp. in the American Economic Review, and that was called When Britain Turned Inward, The Impact of Interwar British Protection. The review article, which Kevin talked about at the end of our interview, was again co-authored with Alan de Bromhead.
And it was called Should History Change the Way We Think About Populism? And that was published in the Economic History Review in 2024. Now, when we dip in and out of many of Kevin's papers, some of which I have not listed here, but I would very much urge you to go to Kevin's website. That's kevinhorourke.com.
You can find all of his work there, and it was a real privilege to talk to Kevin on how the field has developed, both outside of and within Kevin's own immediate sphere of interest. So I wish you all a pleasant weekend, and I'll talk to you in November. Professor Kevin O'Rourke, thank you very much for agreeing to do this with us on the Economic History Podcast.
Before we start off today's conversation, I'd just like to ask you the usual question and that is, how did you get into economic history in the first place? It was by mistake, really. When I applied to Harvard, I thought that economic history would be something that I'd be interested in because I had a feeling that long run questions of growth and development, you know, the big questions were ones that...
were of interest to me. But then I ended up basically doing trade as one of my fields. And I owe, amazingly, as another field. I did a course with Richard Caves and multinationals. But then... Jeff Sachs was my advisor early on, and he was working with a fellow called Warwick McKibben, and they were doing CGE modelling. So I thought, well, maybe this is something I should learn something about. So I took a CGE course with Larry Goulder, and I had to do a term paper.
And then I did this term paper on the Irish famine. And I went in to talk to Geoff Williamson about this paper. It's like a light bulb went off in my head all of a sudden. I could actually do this, you know, for a living. So it was just complete. It was a complete accident, really, you know. Even though, you know, the first time that I found out I got accepted to Harvard was when I got a letter from Jeff in the post because he obviously had seen my application with it.
expressed interest in growth and history and so on. But no, it was a complete... It was a complete accident. It was basically Jeff was just so enthusiastic. He's a hyper enthusiastic kind of guy and just full of feedback and full of enthusiasm. i just realized i could do this and actually quite a lot of fun you know and it felt like cheating actually when i when i started doing economic history you know because everybody else was scrambling around looking for you know the latest
model the latest you know in those days in you know perfect competition or overlapping generations or whatever it was and you know there was packs of hungry grad students like wolves all trying to see who could you know combine things the fastest and I realised I had a lot more time on the ball. you know, in economic history, nobody was going to scoop me.
on a no Irish fan counterfactual. So yeah, I just found myself a desk in the carols down in Widener Library and spent a very happy couple of years there. So that's it. I still do international. And I kept on going to the International Seminar through my time at Harvard, which is great. Sachs was there and Kallakrishnan was there and Sue Collins was there. And a guy called Richard Cooper was there, whom you might not have known, but he was a real figure.
Back then, he was a trade guy, macro guy, who had a lot of policy experience. And my observation at the time was that there'd be some young fellow presenting a model in the international seminar. Cooper would say, that's very interesting, but actually the way that the world works is this, and it's not how you've described it. And people would sort of listen.
politely and then the seminar would go on as before you know uh whereas in economic history you know the equivalent character was david landis who'd be sitting there and there'd be some young cleometrician and Landis would say, well, that's all very well, but actually that's not how this period of history worked. And when Landis said that, you know, actually you had to respond to that.
And so that's the other thing that I found appealing about economic history was that there was a greater role for actual knowledge of the way that the world actually worked and a greater role possibly for common sense. Now, whether we've lost that over the last couple of decades is something that we could maybe talk about later. But I found that very appealing. Was there any paper that you read or a book or a person along the way that really inspired you or were there a few?
I won't mention Geoff Williamson, though obviously your advisor is crucially important. uh for you and i mean he was a a real giant in the field in those days you know he was very dominant in in american economic history circles and he went on to become even more important globally in the 90s you know uh But not mentioning him, I would say Barry Eichengreen, who was a young assistant professor there at the time.
And I took a course with him. Actually, the only economic history course there that I took for credit ever, I think, was with Barry on the interwar economy. I think that what I like about Barry's work is that, well, it epitomises what you can do as an economic historian that you couldn't do otherwise, you know, because he has this whole story about the gold standard.
worked quite well before World War I, but then with the rise of democracy and so on, it just ended up not working at all. And he argues that. as an economist, but he also argues that as a historian, you know, and he argues that as somebody who takes politics and political economy questions. Seriously. So, yeah, that for me is a real model. It's a reason why economic history should, I think, continue to survive in economics departments. It gives you space.
to ask these rather big and important questions like why did the great depression happen uh that you're never going to be able to fully or why did the industrial revolution happen you know questions that you're never going to be able to fully answer with a killer regression or whatever it is. You just won't. They're not those sorts of questions. But you need some people who are trained as economists to be.
to be asking them i guess barry uh i think of him a little bit as a historical equivalent of danny roderick you know who similarly takes the interaction between politics and economics seriously. So I'd say those two people, even though Danny's not an economic historian, are people who've had a big influence in the way I think about the world and how to do economic history and so on. Even if I don't always do my own work, you know, I have them as a model.
With all of the experience that you've had with all of these people and the literature and, yeah, in Harvard and so on. Is there any advice you would give yourself now looking back at an earlier time or would you give to scholars coming through who want to start out in the field of economic history? I think that's a tough one, you know, because I think the world has really changed over the last 30, 40 years. I think, I mean, back then you could
Basically, I always felt that I could work on what I was interested in. And actually, the turning point in my career as a grad student was when I realised I could actually work on historical questions I was interested in. So, and I mean, if you're not doing that, then what's the point, you know?
I guess looking at the way the market works for young people nowadays, you know, there are so many expectations and views about what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing and so on and so i i'd be kind of wary of saying to a young person yeah you should You should just do what you find interesting, even if, for example, it's quite qualitative, you know, because if you're looking for a job in an economics department, that just may not be the right strategy for you, you know.
I find that troubling, actually. So then I think, well, of the sorts of things that people are doing now that... that I think you could do as an economic historian in full good conscience, you know, because you're not oversimplifying the past and so on. I mean, I think... all of the microeconometric stuff that the Labour people are doing in America around Claudio Golden. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you know, they do it extremely scrupulously and well.
and Leoboustans and Abrametskys and all those kinds of people. It was very scholarly. careful stuff. And you may object to their census linking methods or whatever. That's fine. That's how science works. And so we move forward. And I think the new data, the text mining. stuff that people are doing now is also super. interesting because essentially it's providing us with new data and it's hard to object to.
enterprise is going to provide us with lots of new data so i think that there are things that will get you the sort of technical brownie points that you'll need to get your job in an economics department and but where you can also think as a historian. But I guess what I would say to people is do what you need to do to get tenure you know and then
And then start writing books. That's what I, that's what I like to say to people, you know, because I mean, in fact, I observed that this is what's happening. You know, I observe Walker Hanlon's writing a book now, you know, I observed that, you know, Bustan and Apermitsky have written books and so on because. That's sort of the point of the enterprise, is that we're supposed to be asking questions that are bigger than the questions that can be satisfactorily answered in one article.
And so I've always thought that the purpose of the article is it's quality control for individual building blocks that will build a bigger story. And I suppose the good news is that people like the ones I've just mentioned, they do seem to be doing that. And so that makes me positive about the future. But at the same time, I think it's very difficult.
for people right now, especially if you're approaching this from the economics angle. You could also obviously go to it from the history side, and I guess there the constraints are different. We'll turn now, Kevin, to your own work. You've already mentioned you started out working in trade and whatnot. So can you explain to us? why trade is important for economic development in the first place.
well i mean i think markets are developed are important for for economic development i don't think you have to be a whiggish northian smiths acolyte to you know believe that
And so then the question is, why is international trade important? And it's the extension of the market beyond the borders of the state, I suppose. And then... well an obvious point to make then is it probably isn't equally important for all countries you know so you know i think i think uh it's very difficult to imagine an industrial revolution in britain without trade it's just too small
you know it has key resources like like coal but it doesn't have cotton you know it doesn't have the markets for you know all these mass-produced textiles you know that it's going to be sending all around the world you know it doesn't have the agricultural base that will feed this growing population. So for Britain, trade was, I believe, absolutely crucial for its takeoff to modern growth.
I don't know enough about China to be able to say what I'm going to say with great confidence, but I can imagine that you could tell a counterfactual Chinese takeoff to growth story if things had gone differently, you know, without a lot of external trade just because of the scale of the country, you know. The market's already pretty big there once they've unified it with canals and so on. So I think it's very contextual, you know.
And I think that, therefore, the impact of protection on development is also very contextual. That's something that Danny Roderick... But I think it's something that just jumps out at you if you look at the historical records, you know. You mentioned trade spilling across over national borders. Can you tell us what you mean? or is there a meaning of the term globalization? I think that we should be Catholic in our attitude to what globalisation involves, you know. So, I mean, De Vries...
in that article of his where he made a distinction between the hard globalization that Jeff and I were associated with at the time and softer types of globalization. I think that's fine.
as far as it goes but it's it's still only binary you know and i think you could probably enlarge it make it a much more continuous kind of thing you know so i mean there's long distance trade in obsidian going back astonishingly long time in the past you know there's trading lapis lazuli thousands of years ago there's the uruk trade
with the Taurus Mountains, you know, the Bronze Age trade that we're learning a lot about now. You know, there's the trade in the Muslim Islamic empires. There's the European trading companies. You know, there's trade today. I mean, they're all... fascinating and important. And I think at this stage, you know, my attitude is, if you want to call them globalization, that's...
That's absolutely fine with me. You know, what I what I do also think, however, since there's obviously a reason why you asked me that question is that. You know, not all globalisations are the same in their causes and in their consequences, you know. And I do still believe that the globalisation of the late 19th century was... not just quantitatively more significant than what we had seen before, but it was qualitatively.
different in the sense that you have actual incomes of workers and landlords in Europe being affected by trade with. farmers in Kansas or, you know, in the Russian empire or whatever. And I don't think you get those kinds of hexagonal effects. applied to such long distances in previous centuries you know but but but that's that's as much as i would uh say about that at this stage i think well there is the hard and soft approach which you mentioned but in one
sort of prominent paper that you've written, you tried to kind of time the beginning of globalization. You've already mentioned the late 19th century, but in that paper, what At which point in time do you really see it and can you tell us about how you find that? Yeah, I mean, you know, it wasn't just us, you know, it was other people as well. I mean, it was people like Nick Harley who had that paper where he looked at freight rates and he said, look, you know, they're pretty flat.
if you discount the North series that was idiosyncratic in various ways, until the 1840s, and then they dropped like a rock because of steamships and so on. So it's not just us, you know. So in that paper, as I guess you know, we argued that these new technologies set and process a motion of intercontinental.
price convergence and that's what we thought was important to focus on and i think that that paper was useful because it sparked a debate and moved the thing forward and you know we have in that paper particular of how to measure integration. And I do still think that looking at price convergence is a very sensible thing to do if you're interested in measuring.
integration, but a lot of the criticisms of that paper by Flynn and Giraldas and others are also well taken. I mean, there clearly is a lot of intercontinental interactions well before the 1840s. And indeed, in Power and Plenty, like Ron Findlay and I, we do push back the story of interactions between major world regions well back into the past you know
And speaking of which, a competing theory is that the age of discovery would have been the first era of globalization. Why in that paper did you sort of discount that era as being the first major globalization? Well, because if you look at The movement of prices, we didn't see the same sorts of price convergence.
in the 17th and 18th centuries that we did for the 19th century which sort of makes sense because you know of mercantilist uh trading companies monopolizing trade routes you know because of constant warfare and because of technological progress that was was was certainly there it wasn't non-existent you know cornwick and more than have written about that for example um and and many others as well but it clearly wasn't at the same
scale or pace as what we saw in the 19th century. So yeah, we took this view that the 19th century was was very different, you know, and obviously it sparked a big debate, actually, you know, so it was a heavily cited paper, you know, which doesn't mean... which is a good reminder that not everybody who cites you agrees with you. We've already talked about the 19th century. I've seen many works, including Barry Eichengreen, who you've mentioned already.
kind of citing the 1990s as the next time that globalization reached the height. that it did in the late 19th century. In an earlier work, you looked at the 19th century globalization, but you looked at it in terms of tariffs, but tariffs were a big deal in the late 19th century. Can you talk us through what types of tariffs you were looking at and what you were interested in studying? Well, the whole point of globalization history, I think, was that...
Globalisation can undermine itself because it causes winners and losers precisely because of these hexagonal forces that I was mentioning earlier. That's a predictable consequence. of globalisation and equally predictable is the political reaction that this is likely to give.
rise to, you know. And so, I mean, in Paul Byrock's phrase, What the losers managed to do in many countries in Europe was to erect tariffs that were artificial oceans that were compensating, if you like, for the real oceans that had been shrunk by these new transportation. technologies. So the anti-globalisation, backlash and commodity markets in those days largely took the form of tariffs.
And then the anti-globalisation backlash in labour markets took the form of labour, of migration restrictions of various sorts that we also talk about in that book. And I would say that that was a useful message to put out there in the 1990s. And I would say that. You know, we end the book with a sort of, you know, making the obvious point that just, you know, it happened before it could happen again.
So I feel okay about that because, I mean, it has, you know. What I would say, however, is that there was a reason why we were writing the history that way then. You know, all history is the history of the present. Talking about anti-globalisation, backlashes in the past was the history of the present, because already in the 1990s, there were people like Richard Freeman asking, you know, are wages determined in Beijing and so on. This stuff was in the air already then, you know.
It's a matter of regret that the policymakers of the 1990s, you know, really did not worry about these distributional consequences of globalization, because I think everything that has happened since has been sort of grimly predictable, really. for that paper that you had in the economic journal where you looked at the effects of tariffs on growth before you kind of dive into what the main results were
Can you give us an idea about what economic theory would have said and or other studies would have said about tariffs effects on growth before you did that paper? Economic theory is completely ambiguous. regarding the impacts of tariffs on growth. Now, unfortunately, the trade theory people
in my view, have moved away from looking at the dynamic implications of trade policy. There was a wonderful burst of activity connected with the Peltman and Grossman back in the early 90s. They had a lovely book. on trade and growth, where they clearly show how ambiguous the relationships are between trade and tariffs and growth rates. I mean, the trade people have sort of moved in different. directions. And this was the point that Roderick made always, that theoretically it's ambiguous.
In the context of the 1990s, however, Far more influential, really, I think, was this famous paper by Saxon Warner, you know, in 1995, where they argue, look, the world is much more globalised than it's ever been, and this is going to be very good for growth. And they had some empirical evidence. along those lines. And so it was important, I think, to insist that the theory is ambiguous.
And then as an economic historian, I think what you want to insist on is that these relationships are largely to be very contextual in nature. And if you remember back to the little essay that Bob Solo wrote. in this Bill Parker volume that everybody should read, you know, on the role of economic history. He says that's one of our big functions is to remind people that there isn't one meta model that...
that fits all times and places, you know. And there's no reason to expect that the impact of protection and growth would be the same across space. across time. And so... While we were working on globalisation history, I thought, well, I'd look and see what the relationship was between tariffs and growth rates in the late 19th century. And I got the quote-unquote wrong results, you know.
What result was that, Kevin? Which was, well, it was an anti-Saxon Warner result. It was that higher tariffs were associated with... higher growth rates. So that didn't end up in the book. I ended up publishing it separately as an as an article. It's one of these cross-country regressions of the sort that were popular in the 1990s that have all sorts of problems with them, of course, that we all know about.
So that was the EGA paper in 2000. I think more convincing to me is the paper I did with Sybilla, who was a grad student at Trinity. She was my first grad student. And she's done perfectly well for herself, I must say, down in Germany. But we'd said, well, look, what does theory say? Models where there are tariffs probably have to have more than one good. You know, you're importing one good and you're exporting another good, you know. And so these very simplistic.
models where you look at the rate of protection and correlate that with the growth rate are missing the obvious point that it matters what you protect. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the average rates of protection were in agriculture and industry and also on these colonial commodities. you know, tea, sugar, because it's hard to think of a reason why those tariffs should have an effect on growth.
Either way, and we found a pretty strong positive correlation between industrial tariffs. and growth rates and because this was published a bit later you know the referees pushed us to prove provide an instrument, which we duly did, which you can either take seriously or not, which is the case with most of these instruments. So I would still say that's a correlation, but it's a correlation that I believe in. because it matches what we think.
happened in the late 19th century. You know, we know that the Americans protected and industrialized and the Germans did and many other countries did, you know. And this is Bob Allen's view, isn't it? He talks about the standard growth model. He talks about tariffs, banking, railways, education, you know. And yeah, so in that context, I think.
positively associated with growth. And that does not mean that Sachs and Warner are necessarily wrong because they were talking about the late 20th century is a different time, different period. You can't generalize. No. Okay, well, you've worked on all areas of globalisation to varying degrees. And as we have you on, I can't not ask you. about average tariff rates in say the late 19th century compared to those which we're familiar with from the 1930s compared to the present.
So if you start with the present and you look back, how we're talking about the rise of protection and the rise of tariffs again, how do present day tariffs say? compare with those of say the 1930s or the late 19th century. I think we're still living in an extraordinarily globalised world. And I don't think that that has changed. I mean, obviously there has been a rise in protection, but it's nothing like what we observed in the 19th century.
So obviously we'll see what happens now with the American election. We'll see what happens then. I think we still live in a very globalised world. It's important to make that point politically also.
you can have a bit of intervention in markets without us immediately ending up in the 1930s again. I mean, the other point is that the 1930s, it wasn't just tariffs, was it? It was non-tariff barriers to trade, and those are... and those are a very very important part of the total package and you know countries like france or you know
Germany or many others indeed. The rise of protection is often associated with, say, the aftermath or around the time of the Great Depression. And one of the first shots often cited as being fired is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Can you explain to listeners who aren't familiar with that tariff what it actually was? Well, it was basically a rather large tariff increase brought in by the Americans.
in June 1930, which was entirely consistent with their tariff history, of course, because they had traditionally been a protectionist country. I suppose in the context of the Great Depression, though, it signalled that the Americans were not going to keep their markets open to help other countries.
you know export their way to out of the depression you know it meant that they were certainly not going to be the consumer of last resort this is a kindle burger sort of a point you know i mean actually they never were going to be i don't think in the context of the time given where they were At that stage, what it led to then as a wave of retaliation. And, you know, in this paper with Chris and Kirsten, we try to measure those retaliation.
and we actually find that they're very, very big, you know. So this is part of a broader project that I've had going now for... for a long time now looking in greater detail at the impact of interwar protection now to date we're just looking at the impact on trade flows uh you know and there's enough to be doing getting on with uh just even just looking at that
I thought this was important to do because I'm a historian of trade. The interwar period is the great example of protectionism. We always say... what a terrible thing it was and so on. But there's not been as much quantitative work on the impact of protectionism then as you might think that there should have been.
And a lot of the work that was done, you know, back in the 1990s, it was using the methods of the time and it was using the data available at the time, you know, before we were able to connect with these very big data sets and so on. And it was always looking at average measures of protection yet again and aggregate trade flows. And it was using gravity methods to assess the impact of.
aggregate protection on aggregate trade flows in a pre-structural gravity context. So they weren't... measuring, they weren't quantifying the impact of protection the way that you would nowadays, given the kind of key theoretical and empirical breakthroughs that were made at the start of the century by people like Jim Anderson and others. And so I thought, well, if we get more fine grained data on...
trade policies, maybe we'll find different impacts. So most of my work has been looking at the impact of protection commodity by commodity. So we collect commodity specific. data on trade flows and on tariffs and on non-tariff barriers. And generally, we found that these trade policy interventions had bigger effects on trade flows than you would have otherwise thought. In the Smoot-Hawley
paper, we go a different route. It's still looking at aggregate trade flows, but we're increasing the frequency. So we're looking at these things quarterly. And that seemed like a good idea because a lot of the... things that countries did to retaliate against Smoot-Hawley, you know, they weren't, they didn't involve easy to measure things like tariffs, you know, they involved various non-tariff measures, you know, and so really to identify those effects, you're having to rely on the timing.
Then you probably do want to go at a higher frequency than just annual, you know. So we had monthly for some, we'd quarterly for others. We end up doing a quarterly thing and we get big, big effects actually. so that was kind of interesting so so in general i think the message is that trade policy back in the 30s had had really big effects actually on trade flows but what other effects
Could a country retaliate with other than tariffs? Well, there could be quotas. There could be, you know, in the context of fixed exchange rate regimes where, you know, there's a lot of exchange controls. going in, you know, they might have discriminated against the Americans in that way. In some cases, there were consumer boycotts and so on. So it's the whole range of different things, you know. It's perfect. Okay.
The other major economy of the time you looked at with other co-authors was Britain, your paper When Britain Turned Inward, and you've published more papers around the huge data set that you have there. With respect to the United Kingdom, when it turned inward differ from other countries.
Well, that's still an open question because we've written a few papers on countries in the British Empire and we're now beginning to look at countries beyond the British Empire. So whether it was atypical or not remains to be. I suppose the British response, they go for tariffs much more than quotas. which was handy for us, actually, because it meant that it was easier to quantify and the tariffs were fairly easily available and so on.
The storyline, if you like, that's emerging from the quantitative work we're doing, you know, is that they are discriminating a lot in favour of the empire. and other members of the empire are doing the same thing and so this imperial trade block that is emerging is actually seriously distorting international trade flows, you know, privileging trade flows within the empire at the expense of countries. outside the empire. So that's one storyline, another storyline that's emerging.
for Britain is that one country that seems to always get clobbered by these discriminated trade policies is Japan. And we're finding that not just in the case of Your Britain, Canada, India, we've kind of looked at those. We have work on the Dutch East Indies as well. We're finding the Japanese are similarly getting. getting clobbered there. So myself and Marcus Lampa, who is the major co-author, main co-author in this, he's been there.
15 years or something, you know, when we eventually get to write a book, I guess that that'll be one of the big themes is how the world economy fragmented into these imperial trade blocs. echoes there with all the stuff you hear about now about french shoring and you know that sort of thing in a paper on japan you did you looked at the effects of blocking them out of markets and what it meant for the likelihood of them Can you talk about that? The work that I've been doing with Marcus.
literally the impact of tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade on trade flows. And it turns out that it needs an awful lot of work to do that properly. So that's what we've been doing. But one of the reasons why I find this interesting is that there are suggestions in the literature at the time that this fragmentation of the world economy... didn't just reflect the geopolitical tensions of the time, but also helped to exacerbate them.
And of course, we know how the 1930s ended. Now, you don't want to write the histories in a way that makes World War II inevitable or something. That would be bad history, as we know. But I am interested in the relationship between war and peace in a way that's an interest I've had since I worked with Ron on Power and Plenty because, you know, war was a big theme. in that book. And, you know, if there are these links then in the 1930s, I mean, that seems like a very interesting period too.
So there's a sort of separate strand then of my work that's largely involved this other co-author, Roberto Bonfatti. in Padua, who is a trade guy and he can do empirics and he can also do theory, you know, where we're looking at the relationship between war and trade. Because there is the liberal peace hypothesis associated with Montesquieu and Cobden and all sorts of people that have globalisation. You shouldn't have war. And then 1914 is a problem for that.
And there's also a bunch of sort of, quote unquote, rational choice models of war. So you have people like Robert Powell in the IR literature. where war arises because you cannot credibly commit to behave well in the future. And so in particular, countries that are becoming more powerful over time can't credibly commit not to throw their weight around in the future.
And therefore, the people who are powerful now, but will see their relative power slip, may have an incentive to do something before it's too late. That would seem to imply that the hegemon of the period should attack the follower during the follower's rise. But it was actually Japan who attacked America, not vice versa, you know. So again, the simple model predictions don't seem to work. So myself and Roberta have a paper.
explain these two paradoxes, Japan attacking America and 1914 and globalization by saying, well, one thing that's happening when followers are rising is they're undergoing structural change. They're becoming more import dependent, more dependent on imports of food and raw materials. And the hegemon of the time may have the power to blockade you.
And if that's the case, then actually the follower, even though they're rising, that sounds like they're getting more powerful over time. But the fact that they're becoming more independent. more dependent on imports and more subject to blockade potentially in the event of war, that could actually mean that their relative power is slipping over time. And so they might then try to... Yeah, in a sense, have a war to eliminate the threat of blockade. And it sort of...
maps onto, I think, part of what happened in the Pacific, you know, in 1941. And we also talk about Adam Tews' arguments about the Nazi war economy there. And we talk about Avner Offer's arguments about the Anglo-German trade rivalry and so on. So I find these issues very interesting. We're currently working on a paper that... possibly will be even more complicated in terms of modeling where we'd like now to get a meta model where you could nest the liberal peace hypothesis.
and this alternative, more pessimistic view of what globalization could do to war and peace. It's quite complicated. The liberal peace hypothesis is all about, I suppose, the consumption cost. associated with war. So you need to have countries that are consuming, but then you also need to have them competing over some geopolitical issues. So you have consumption and you have arming decisions. It's intertemporal.
you know, there has to be something that interferes with trade in the event of a war. So there's a lot going on in all of these models, but it's kind of interesting. It's a sort of a side project. you know in a sense if we were going to write that our book marcus and i
I mean, in a sense, what would make it interesting would be if you could bring in those issues. But of course, we haven't done the work, so it may just end up being a trade policy book. That's okay as well. You recently considered the present trends in populism in the light of economic history. What past episodes were you looking at in particular and which conclusions did you draw from it? Yeah, so this is with another of my former grad students, Alan DeBromhead. We had a...
We were asked to do a survey paper for the Economic History Review on what economic history had to say about populism, which is obviously something that interests me because I've been interested in anti-globalisation backlashes for a long time. populists today are often associated with such anti-globalization backlashes. But what we ended up doing is writing a paper that was largely about the US populists of the late 19th century.
I think the first point that we really wanted to make, and this is... not an original point to make, and it would seem, I think, completely banal to American historians of populism, is that the People's Party, the populists, as they were called, they weren't populists.
in the sense that we use the term today, you know, in that they weren't claiming, they certainly were contrasting the interests of the plane people of the planes, you know, as opposed to the terrible elites who were screwing them, you know. in a variety of ways. So that's true. But they never claimed that, you know, only they. spoke for the people and that if you disagreed with them then you weren't really one of the people you know so that's which is i think the the jan verner muller
kind of view of what populism involves. Lots of people say, we're for the people and against the elite. If you say everybody who says that is populist, then it's so broad a category has become useless. The thing that makes it pernicious is that you say, if you disagree with me, you're not really American or you're not really French or whatever. theory the populists aren't in that mode nor were they backward-looking nostalgic reactionary people frightened of modernity and
and this kind of thing. Actually, they were very interested in new agricultural techniques. They were very interested in education and so on. Yes, there were... a lot of populists who are racist, but there were also black populists. Yes, there were populists who were anti-Semitic, but the Hofstadter view...
that the root of all American antisemitism doesn't really work. Because if you think about these fancy people up at Harvard and so on who are absolutely antisemitic, they were hardly being influenced by these firebrands down.
on the prairie so so it's this kind of in a sense I mean, nothing we say in that article is particularly original, but I think it's useful to point out to social scientists that sometimes they use labels in a way that... no longer reflect what the history profession thinks about the phenomenon.
in question. And I think it sort of matters, you know, because I mean, this Richard Hofstadter view that, as far as I can see, is being just completely exploded by the historians, you know, this view of people as being basically acting in ways that are dangerous for democracy, because they are... reactionary or nostalgic or you know don't understand modernity or whatever you know if you take that view of what populism is and transpose it
to the world today then what you're saying is that you know these people who are voting ways that you don't like they're they are simply deplorable you know and uh and if we could only educate them for example you know and explain you know the the benefits of free trade and so on you know then all would be well but i i just don't think that's the way the world works you know i think i think as economists we we you know we we
uh assume correctly in my view that people tend to you know want to do the best for themselves they can they're trying to do and so why would you not apply that basic logic to to people who are voting the wrong way And so maybe there are material grievances there that need to be addressed by politicians.
So, yeah, I found that an interesting paper to write, actually. Professor Kevin O'Rourke, it's been a privilege to talk to you. Thank you so much for giving us your time on these subjects. Thanks very much, Sean.