discovery of the americas

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pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

In much of Africa the substantial profits to be had from slaving led not only to its intensification and even more insecure property rights for the people but also to intense warfare and the destruction of many existing institutions; within a few centuries, any process of state centralization was totally reversed, and many of the African states had largely collapsed. Though some new, and sometimes powerful, states did form to exploit the slave trade, they were based on warfare and plunder. The critical juncture of the discovery of the Americas may have helped England develop inclusive institutions but it made institutions in Africa even more extractive. Though the slave trade mostly ended after 1807, subsequent European colonialism not only threw into reverse nascent economic modernization in parts of southern and western Africa but also cut off any possibility of indigenous institutional reform.

Despite such an inauspicious history, it was in England that the first truly inclusive society emerged and where the Industrial Revolution got under way. We argued earlier (this page–this page) that this was the result of a series of interactions between small institutional differences and critical junctures—for example, the Black Death and the discovery of the Americas. English divergence had historical roots, but the view from Vindolanda suggests that these roots were not that deep and certainly not historically predetermined. They were not planted in the Neolithic Revolution, or even during the centuries of Roman hegemony. By AD 450, at the start of what historians used to call the Dark Ages, England had slipped back into poverty and political chaos.

After the seventh century, Ethiopia remained isolated in the mountains of East Africa from the processes that subsequently influenced the institutional path of Europe, such as the emergence of independent cities, the nascent constraints on monarchs and the expansion of Atlantic trade after the discovery of the Americas. In consequence, its version of absolutist institutions remained largely unchallenged. The African continent would later interact in a very different capacity with Europe and Asia. East Africa became a major supplier of slaves to the Arab world, and West and Central Africa would be drawn into the world economy during the European expansion associated with the Atlantic trade as suppliers of slaves.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

For one Spanish chronicler, this was nothing less than ‘the greatest event since the Creation – other than the incarnation and the death of the one who created it’.64 For another, it was clearly God himself who had revealed ‘the provinces of Peru, from which such a great treasure of gold and silver had been concealed’; future generations, opined Pedro Mexía, would not believe the quantities that had been found.65 The discovery of the Americas was soon followed by the import of slaves, bought in the markets of Portugal. As the Portuguese knew from their experiences in the Atlantic island groups and West Africa, European settlement was expensive, was not always economically rewarding and was easier said than done: persuading families to leave their loved ones behind was hard enough, but high death rates and testing local conditions made this even more difficult.

This was glossed over as artists, writers and architects went to work, borrowing themes, ideas and texts from antiquity to provide a narrative that chose selectively from the past to create a story which over time became not only increasingly plausible but standard. So although scholars have long called this period the Renaissance, this was no rebirth. Rather, it was a Naissance – a birth. For the first time in history, Europe lay at the heart of the world. 12 The Road of Silver Even before the discovery of the Americas, trading patterns had begun to pick up after the economic shocks of the fifteenth century. Some scholars argue that this was caused by improved access to gold markets in West Africa, combined with rising output in mines in the Balkans and elsewhere in Europe, perhaps made possible by technological advances that helped unlock new supplies of precious metals.

To cover the shortfalls in agricultural production and to pay for weapons and munitions, the Allies took on huge commitments, commissioning institutions such as J. P. Morgan & Co. to ensure a constant supply of goods and materials.122 The supply of credit resulted in a redistribution of wealth every bit as dramatic as that which followed the discovery of the Americas four centuries earlier: money flowed out of Europe to the United States in a flood of bullion and promissory notes. The war bankrupted the Old World and enriched the New. The attempt to recoup losses from Germany (set at an eye-watering and impossibly high level equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars at today’s prices) was a desperate and futile attempt to prevent the inevitable: the Great War saw the treasuries of the participants ransacked as they tried to destroy each other, destroying themselves in the process.123 As the two bullets left the chamber of Princip’s Browning revolver, Europe was a continent of empires.


Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

Their voyages were, after all, instrumental in reshaping the world. In tandem with Christopher Columbus’s accidental discovery of the Americas, da Gama’s voyage to the Indies would later be hailed as the “big bang” of economic globalization—the moment that catalyzed the transformation of the world from a series of often discrete economic communities into a single complex and multifaceted economic system. Articulating a view that would later be reaffirmed by many others, Adam Smith, the “father of economics,” declared da Gama’s voyage and Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas to be “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.”2 Whether this particular moment was more important than any others in the emergence of a globalized economy is debatable.


pages: 424 words: 108,768

Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, bioinformatics, clean water, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, Google Earth, Khyber Pass, Malacca Straits, megacity, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, peak oil, phenotype, rewilding, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, supervolcano, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

† India’s black peppercorns are botanically very different from bell (sweet) peppers and chilli peppers, which are both fruits of Capsicum plants native to Central and South America. These New World species were unknown to the rest of the world until the great fifteenth-century transfer of domesticated plants and animals that occurred after the European discovery of the Americas, known as the Columbian Exchange. ‡ So much so that in the late seventeenth century, after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, it was agreed that the Dutch claim over Manhattan be ceded to the English in exchange for the spice island of Run, one of the smallest Banda islands. Run is just 3.5 kilometres long, but its acquisition allowed the Dutch to secure their nutmeg trading monopoly in the East Indies.

It began to dawn on Europeans that perhaps the lands to the west were all one continuous coastline, that they had stumbled across not a series of new islands, but an entire continent–a whole New World. THE GLOBAL WIND MACHINE The Portuguese had spent the best part of a century inching their way down the coast of Africa before they finally found its southern tip and the gateway into the Indian Ocean. Now, within a generation of the discovery of the Americas in 1492, European sailors ventured across all the world’s oceans and completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth. This was a revolution that heralded the birth of today’s global economy. All this was only possible because mariners had come to understand the patterns of reliable winds and currents around the globe, which now determined the trade routes that brought great riches to Europe.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Getting its retaliation in first A superintelligence with access to Wikipedia will not fail to realise that humans do not always play nicely together. Throughout history, meetings between two civilisations have usually ended badly for the one with the less well-developed technology. The discovery of the Americas by Europeans was an unmitigated disaster for the indigenous peoples of North and South America, and similarly tragic stories played out across much of Africa and Australasia. This is not the result of some uniquely pernicious characteristic of European or Western culture: the Central and South American empires brought down by the Spaniards had themselves been built with bloody wars of conquest.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

With a cabinet of curiosities, you could take in the entirety of the universe and all its complications at a glance. But not only did some of these cabinets appear to be little more than a miscellaneous hodgepodge; it was soon realized that they could never be big enough. Ball quotes a point made by the writer Patrick Mauries: that after the discovery of the Americas there was too much diversity to be contained within a single collection. The world was beginning to be recognized as too various and complex. Now, choices had to be made: What should make it into these rooms, and what could be ignored? Cabinets of curiosities persisted for a long time, in their own way.


Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies by Jared M. Diamond

affirmative action, Atahualpa, British Empire, California gold rush, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, James Watt: steam engine, Maui Hawaii, QWERTY keyboard, the scientific method, trade route

Tensions among the groups that Achmad, Wiwor, Sauakari, and Ping Wah represent dominate the politics of Indonesia, the world's fourth-most- populous nation. These modern tensions have roots going back thousands of years. When we think of major overseas population movements, we tend to focus on those since Columbus's discovery of the Americas, and on the resulting replacements of non-Europeans by Europeans within historic times. But there were also big overseas movements long before Columbus, and prehistoric replacements of non-European peoples by other non-Euro- pean peoples. Wiwor, Achmad, and Sauakari represent three prehistorical waves of people that moved overseas from the Asian mainland into the Pacific.

Let us now return to that collision of hemispheres, applying what we have learned since Chapter 3. The basic question to be answered is: why did Europeans reach and conquer the lands of Native Americans, instead of vice versa? Our starting point will be a comparison of Eurasian and Native American societies as of A.D. 1492, the year of Columbus's “discovery” of the Americas. OUR COMP ARISON BEGINS with food production, a major determi- nant of local population size and societal complexityhence an ultimate factor behind the conquest. The most glaring difference between American and Eurasian food production involved big domestic mammal species. In Chapter 9 we encountered Eurasia's 13 species, which became its chief source of animal protein (meat and milk), wool, and hides, its main mode of land transport of people and goods, its indispensable vehicles of war- fare, and (by drawing plows and providing manure) a big enhancer of crop production.


Lonely Planet Andalucia: Chapter From Spain Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, credit crunch, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, Skype, trade route, urban renewal

But as Almohad power dwindled after the disastrous defeat of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, Castile’s Fernando III (El Santo; the Saint) went on to capture Seville in 1248. Fernando brought 24,000 settlers to Seville and by the 14th century it was the most important Castilian city. Seville’s biggest break was Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492. In 1503 the city was awarded an official monopoly on Spanish trade with the new-found continent. It rapidly became one of the biggest, richest and most cosmopolitan cities on earth. But it was not to last. A plague in 1649 caused the death of half the city’s population, and as the 17th century wore on, the Río Guadalquivir became more silted and less navigable.

The room off its northern end has an international collection of beautiful, elaborate fans. The Sala de Audiencias (Audience Hall) is hung with tapestry representations of the shields of Spanish admirals and Alejo Fernández’ 1530s painting Virgen de los Mareantes (Virgin of the Sailors), the earliest known painting about the discovery of the Americas. Cuarto Real Alto The Alcázar is still a royal palace. In 1995 it staged the wedding feast of Infanta Elena, daughter of King Juan Carlos I, after her marriage in Seville’s cathedral. The Cuarto Real Alto (Upper Royal Quarters), the rooms used by the Spanish royal family on their visits to Seville, are open for (heavily subscribed) tours several times a day, some in Spanish, some in English.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

If we polled the contemporary political experts regarding the direction of their world, they would concur above all on the spectacular emergence of new empires across the vast landmass between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. These imagined experts might hardly mention the Protestant Reformation in the far northwestern extension of Eurasia, perhaps not even the recent discovery of the Americas. Ming China was surely the world’s manufacturing and demographic giant. Shortly after 1500 the Mughals imposed their imperial rule in the inherently fractitious India. At the very same time the Safavis were ascendant in Iran, the Ottoman Turks forcefully reclaimed the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire, while the Spanish Hapsburgs appeared on their way to establishing a Catholic empire in the West.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Yet even Sir Isaac Newton, father of modern physical science, devoted much of his career to alchemical research. Few were more immoderate in their blindness than sixteenth-century European adventurers, whom John Maynard Keynes regarded as the originators of capitalism. We owe the Europeans’ discovery of the Americas to gold, for gold was the probable motive that drove Christopher Columbus westward: his diary of a voyage that lasted less than a hundred days mentions gold sixty-five times. The Spanish conquistadores who followed – Cortés, Pizarro and their men – were not only brutal and rapacious in their imperialist incursions into Mexico and Peru; by bringing European diseases to the Americas, they also inadvertently wiped out much of the population of the areas they colonised.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

I shall argue that the modern historical era, the past five hundred years, is characterized by Kuznets waves of alternating increases and decreases in inequality. Before the Industrial Revolution, when mean income was stagnant, there was no relationship between mean income level and the level of inequality. Wages and inequality were driven up or down by idiosyncratic events such as epidemics, new discoveries (of the Americas or of new trade routes between Europe and Asia), invasions, and wars. If inequality decreased as mean income and wages went up and the poor became slightly better off, Malthusian checks would be triggered: the population would increase to unsustainable levels and would ultimately be driven down (as the average per capita income declined) by higher mortality rates among the poor.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

The conditions for the Industrial Revolution were prepared by the progress of British society in the corridor. After the end of the Middle Ages the center of gravity of economic activity in Europe had started moving north toward the Netherlands and England. This was intimately connected with the discovery of the Americas and the impact of the new economic opportunities this created on the race between state and society. Countries that were better poised to take advantage of these opportunities in ways that strengthened state and society were able to move ahead institutionally and then economically. In England, the existing balance of power favored society so that the Tudor state in the sixteenth century was unable to exert monopoly control over access to trade.

So while England, France, and the Netherlands moved up in the corridor, Poland, Hungary, and other parts of Eastern Europe launched deeper into the lands of the Despotic Leviathan. Potentially divergent influences on a nation’s political development come not only from military threats or demographic shocks but also from major economic opportunities. Such a change reconfiguring European trajectories arrived with the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Bartolomeu Dias. Once again, the different balances between state and society produced divergent responses. In England, as we mentioned in Chapter 6, the tight limits on what the crown and its allies could do in terms of monopolizing overseas trade meant that it was new groups of merchants that benefited most from these economic opportunities.


Your Own Allotment : How to Find It, Cultivate It, and Enjoy Growing Your Own Food by Russell-Jones, Neil.

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, discovery of the americas, Easter island, information retrieval, Kickstarter, mass immigration, spice trade

Zanzibar is a well-known producer of spices. I have been there and visited a spice farm, which was fascinating. The spice trade made many people very rich as people sought spices to improve the flavour of food, and also to help to preserve it. The expeditions to the west that resulted in the discovery of the Americas were attempts to find a route to the spice islands of Africa and the East Indies that would break the monopoly of the Arab traders. Popular herbs Below are some of the more popular herbs grown in gardens and allotments. Basil (ocimum basilicum) Basil likes the Mediterranean warmth of its original climate and thrives in a greenhouse or outside as an annual in sunny spots in UK gardens.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

But the most spectacular thing is what happens to the bottom line – the developing world. It grows by 404 per cent after 1989. It is this that prompted the British economist Douglas McWilliams, in his Gresham lectures, to nominate the last twenty-five years as the ‘greatest economic event in human history’. World GDP rose by 33 per cent in the 100 years after the discovery of the Americas, and GDP per person by 5 per cent. In the fifty years after 1820, with the Industrial Revolution underway in Europe and the Americas only, world GDP grew by 60 per cent, and GDP per person by 30 per cent. But between 1989 and 2012 world GDP grew from $20 trillion to $71 trillion – 272 per cent – and, as we’ve seen, GDP per person increased by 162 per cent.


pages: 341 words: 111,525

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher

airport security, blood diamond, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, failed state, Live Aid, Livingstone, I presume, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade

The Congo's output of the occasional shipment of ivory or raffia could not compete with the huge volume of silks and spices available in Asia and, in the face of commercial competition, the Portuguese soon found another asset they could take from the Congo - slaves. Slavery was a long-established practice among African tribes. Any raiding party that successfully attacked a neighbour would expect to return with slaves. But what made the Portuguese demand for slaves different was its scale. The simultaneous discovery of the Americas by European explorers created an apparently limitless demand for labour to work on the plantations of the New World, and in Europe's African toeholds slavery was turned overnight from a cottage industry into a major, global concern. The effect on the Congo was devastating. The plunder of people started out on a small scale in the early 1500s, with Portuguese traders paying Congolese warriors for the occasional slave they brought back with them from raids.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Why it started there – rather than, say, China or India, which had been comparable to Western Europe in their levels of economic development until then – is a subject of intense and long-running debate. Everything from the Chinese elite’s disdain for practical pursuits (like commerce and industry), the discovery of the Americas and the pattern of Britain’s coal deposits has been identified as the explanation. This debate need not detain us here. The fact is that capitalism developed first in Western Europe. Before the rise of capitalism, the Western European societies, like all the other pre-capitalist societies, changed very slowly.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Some Methodological Issues and Definitions Notes References Acknowledgments Index CHAPTER 1 THE CONTOURS OF THE POST–COLD WAR WORLD [The bourgeoisie] compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. —Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) At the particular time when these discoveries [of the Americas and the East Indies] were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another.


Lonely Planet Best of Spain by Lonely Planet

augmented reality, bike sharing, centre right, discovery of the americas, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, market design, place-making, retail therapy, trade route, young professional

But Almohad power dwindled after the disastrous defeat of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, and Castilla’s Fernando III (El Santo; the Saint) went on to capture Seville in 1248. Fernando brought 24,000 settlers to Seville and by the 14th century it was the most important Castilian city. Seville’s biggest break was Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492. In 1503 the city was awarded an official monopoly on Spanish trade with the new-found continent. It rapidly became one of the biggest, richest and most cosmopolitan cities on earth. 1 El Arenal & Triana Colonising caballeros made rich on New World gold once stalked the streets of El Arenal on the banks of the Río Guadalquivir, watched over by Spanish galleons offloading their American booty.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Because the language is so incomprehensible, most users simply scroll to the bottom of the document and click the “I agree” button without so much as a quick glance.30 “Exploration” and territorial annexation in historical colonialism were enacted by advances in the technologies of transportation and the sciences of management. Following the “discovery” of the Americas, a global network for the flow of goods and information began to take shape, a network whose infrastructure continues to be visible today and whose development was part and parcel of the growth of Western science and technology. Francis Bacon, for instance, made an explicit connection between long-distance travel (that is, colonial expansion and the knowledge transfers it unleashed) and the growth of various scientific disciplines.31 Since the colonies could not be managed directly by the metropolis, they had to be objectified through scientific means and represented through emerging forms of records that could travel through time and space and thus conquer complexity.


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Lovejoy's estimates show that an average of about 2,500 slaves were exported each year between 1450 and 1600; but this figure rose to 18,680 per year for the period 1601 to 1700, and reached a peak of 61,330 per year during the following century (1701 to 1800); even at the end of the nineteenth century (ninety years after abolition) it was still running at an average of 33,300 slaves per year.10 The surge in numbers can be attributed to the discovery of the Americas and the European taste for sugar. Columbus discovered the Caribbean islands and North America for Spain in 1492; Pedro Alvares Cabral discovered Brazil for Portugal in 1500. Both the Caribbean islands and the Brazilian coastlands were ideally suited for the production of sugar; both regions were inhabited by people whom Pêro Vaz da Caminha (a chronicler who sailed with Cabral) described as ‘people of good and pure simplicity [with] fine bodies and good faces’.11 But their natural attributes were no defence against the disease and labour demands of the Portuguese settlers, who began to establish sugar plantations in Brazil during the 1540s.

Sailors were warned to be silent; facts about the discoveries were carefully garbled; maps and navigation charts were removed from contemporary books, and the making of globes, maps, and charts became the privilege of a single family, whose loyalty to the Portuguese crown was unquestioned.12 Direct action included standing orders which instructed Portuguese sea-captains to seize all foreign vessels encountered on the West African coast and cast their crews into the sea.13 But of course word did leak out, and vessels of other nations persistently defied the Portuguese monopoly. After 1492 the attention of an avaricious neighbour, Spain, was diverted from West Africa by the discovery of the Americas, but the French and the English, the Dutch and the Danish, would not be kept out. Often they not only traded in the territories that Portugal had claimed but took additional profit by seizing Portuguese vessels as well. Between 1500 and 1531, for example, French ships alone captured more than 300 Portuguese vessels in West African waters and along the coast of Brazil.14 During the sixteenth century the Portuguese expanded their empire to include territories spread around the globe from South America to the Spice Islands of the Far East.


pages: 449 words: 129,511

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The timetable became a biblically important volume in all libraries and some households; the concept of time zones and their application to cartography all stemmed from railways’ imprint of timekeeping on human society. Yet, before the chronological influence of railways, there was one other profession that above all others truly needed the most precise timekeeping. It was that which had been developing fast since the European discovery of the Americas in the fifteenth century and the subsequent consolidation of trade routes to the Orient: the shipping industry. Navigation across vast and trackless expanses of ocean was essential to maritime business. Getting lost at sea could be costly at best, fatal at worst. Also, because the exact determination of where a ship might be at any one moment was essential to the navigation of a route, and because one part of that determination depends, crucially, on knowing the exact time aboard the ship and, even more crucially, the exact time at some other stable reference point on the globe, maritime clockmakers were charged with making the most precise of clocks.* And none was more sedulously dedicated to achieving this degree of exactitude than the Yorkshire carpenter and joiner who later became England’s, perhaps the world’s, most revered horologist: John Harrison, the man who most famously gave mariners a sure means of determining a vessel’s longitude.


pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

The emergence from autocracy toward freedom had happened in a few northern Italian cities. But freedom only had a future if it continued to spread. FREEDOM MOVES TO THE ATLANTIC The most famous son of Genoa, Christopher Columbus, would inadvertently make possible the spread of freedom. The boom in European trade after the discovery of the Americas gave freedom new strongholds 800 miles north of Genoa. Economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson of MIT and political scientist James Robinson of Harvard have been pioneers in reintroducing historical research into economics, with the aim of explaining economic development. In a prominent 2005 article,21 they tackled the question of why the frontiers of freedom had shifted from northern Italy to Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

Now, by ditching the equilibrium while sticking with math, economists are finding better ways to describe the dynamics of growth and change. A key word in the new growth theory is “endogenous”—that is, arising from within. In an equilibrium, all disturbance must by definition come from outside. Explaining a spurt in economic growth requires a deus ex machina such as the discovery of the Americas or the invention of the electric motor. In new growth theory, the technological drivers of growth are depicted as the result of economic forces and decisions.31 Bringing this concept of endogenously generated change to the shorter-term fluctuations of the market is a more complex endeavor.


pages: 632 words: 159,454

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

Turning to England, Smith observed that American silver did not seem ‘to have had any very sensible effect upon the price of things in England till after 1570; though even the mines of Potosi had been discovered more than twenty years before’.45 Yet, of the modern economists, it was John Maynard Keynes who most frequently returned to the theme of the discovery of the Americas and their effect on the modern world. In 1930 he wrote: ‘The modern age opened . . . with the accumulation of capital which began in the sixteenth century. I believe . . . that this was initially due to the rise of prices, and the profits to which that led, which resulted from the treasure of gold and silver which Spain brought from the New World into the Old.’46 The possibilities thrown up by the expansion of Spain into the Americas, with the flow of bullion and treasure which accompanied the discovery of new mines, fascinated Keynes.


pages: 501 words: 145,097

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Donner party, estate planning, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, James Watt: steam engine, Joi Ito, Khyber Pass, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, plutocrats, safety bicycle, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

Diary of My Travels in America, tr. Stephen Becker. New York: Delacorte Press, 1977. Lyell, Charles. A Second Visit to the United States of North America. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855. ———. Travels in North America in the Years 1841–1842. New York: Charles E. Merrill, 1909. Mann, Charles C. 1493: How Europe’s Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth. London: Granta, 2011. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Masters, Edgar Lee. Spoon River Anthology. New York: Macmillan, 1916; Signet Classics, 1992.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

It would be Europeans that reached out across the Atlantic Ocean to take possession of a vast landmass that, prior to Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis cosmographia of 1507, simply did not appear on maps: America – named after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci.* It was Europe’s monarchies – above all Spain and England – who, vying for souls, gold and land, were willing to cross oceans and conquer whole continents. To many historians, the discovery of the Americas (broadly defined to include the Caribbean) is the paramount reason for the ascendancy of the West. Without the New World, it has been asserted, ‘Western Europe would have remained a small, backward region of Eurasia, dependent on the East for transfusions of technology, transmissions of culture, and transfers of wealth.’1 Without American ‘ghost acres’ and the African slaves who worked them, there could have been no ‘European Miracle’, no Industrial Revolution.2 In view of the advances already achieved in Western Europe both economically and scientifically prior to large-scale development of the New World, these claims seem overblown.


pages: 621 words: 157,263

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, public intellectual, Simon Kuznets, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

The source of this labour was partly the former feudal retainers and armies, partly the population displaced by agricultural improvements and the substitution of pasture for tillage. With the rise of manufactures nations begin to compete as such, and mercantilism (with its trade wars, tariffs and prohibitions) arises on a national scale. Within the manufactures the relation of capitalist and labourer develops. The vast expansion of trade as the result of the discovery of the Americas and the conquest of the sea-route to India, and the mass import of overseas products, notably bullion, shook the position both of feudal landed property and of the labouring class. The consequent change in class relations, conquest, colonisation ‘and above all the extension of markets into a world market which now became possible and indeed increasingly took place’26 opened a new phase in historical development.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Without it, the growth of science would have been impossible as there could have been no codifying or dissemination of scientific discoveries. Then there is the three-masted sailing ship, which allowed large vessels to sail close to the wind, permitted the Portuguese and then their European imitators to sail around the world. Without this GPT, there would have been no circumnavigation of the globe; no discovery of the Americas, leading to new centres of power and productive capacity; no European colonisation; no long-distance sea trade; no rich European merchant class; no consequent financial innovations, such as joint stock companies and marine insurance, to deal with the risk and uncertainty of long voyages; and less possibility of the principles of magnetism being understood.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Madeira experienced a phenomenal boom and bust, with sugar production rising from 280 tons in 1472 to 2,500 tons in 1506, before falling 90% by 1530. In the process, Madeira, whose name means island of wood, was almost completely deforested, since sugar production required massive amounts of energy.16 After the discovery of the Americas, the Portuguese first planted sugar cane in Brazil in 1516, and started to produce a commercial crop after 1550. At first they relied on indigenous workers, but there was a huge death rate from disease. So they focused instead on slaves from West Africa, where there was a rivalry between the kings of Congo and Ndongo (modern Angola) over who should be their main supplier.17 For African leaders who handed over prisoners of war, or other unfortunates captured during raids, it was a highly lucrative business.


Spain by Lonely Planet Publications, Damien Simonis

Atahualpa, business process, call centre, centre right, Colonization of Mars, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, intermodal, Islamic Golden Age, land reform, large denomination, low cost airline, megaproject, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The room gives on to the pretty Patio del Yeso, a 19th-century reconstruction of part of the 12th-century Almohad palace. PATIO DE LA MONTERÍA The rooms on the western side of this patio were part of the Casa de la Contratación, founded by the Catholic Monarchs in 1503 to control American trade. The Sala de Audiencias contains the earliest known painting on the discovery of the Americas (by Alejo Fernández, 1530s), in which Columbus, Fernando El Católico, Carlos I, Amerigo Vespucci and Native Americans can be seen sheltered beneath the Virgin in her role as protector of sailors. PALACIO DE DON PEDRO (MUDEJAR PALACE) He might have been ‘the Cruel’, but between 1360 and 1364 Pedro I humbly built his exquisite palace in ‘perishable’ ceramics, plaster and wood, obedient to the Quran’s prohibition against ‘eternal’ structures, reserved for the Creator.

From the train station ( 902 24 02 02) three daily trains head to Seville (€7.50, 1½ hours). Return to beginning of chapter LUGARES COLOMBINOS The Lugares Colombinos (Columbus Sites) are the three townships of La Rábida, Palos de la Frontera and Moguer, along the eastern bank of the Tinto estuary east of Huelva. All three played key roles in the discovery of the Americas and can be combined in a single day trip from Huelva, the Doñana area or the nearby coast. La Rabida pop 600 In this pretty and peaceful town, don’t miss the 14th-century Monasterio de La Rábida ( 959 35 04 11; admission €3; 10am-1pm & 4-7pm Tue-Sat Apr-Jul & Sep, 10am-1pm to 6.15pm Tue-Sat Oct-Mar, 10am-1pm & 4.45-8pm Tue-Sat Aug, 10.45am-1pm Sun year-round), visited several times by Columbus before his great voyage of discovery.

Posada Restaurante Dos Orillas (927 65 90 79; www.dosorillas.com; Calle de Cambrones 6; meals €25-30; lunch & dinner Tue-Sat, lunch Sun; ) Just as the hotel is a gem, so the restaurant is a place of quiet, refined eating, whether al fresco on the patio or in dining room with its soft-hued fabrics. Vegetarian dishes include pasta with broccoli and cheese and courgettes stuffed with oyster mushrooms; carnivores won’t go hungry. * * * EXTREMADURA & AMERICA Extremeños jumped at the opportunities opened up by Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492. In 1501 Fray Nicolás de Ovando from Cáceres was named governor of all the Indies. He set up his capital, Santo Domingo, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. With him went 2500 followers, many of them from Extremadura, including Francisco Pizarro, the illegitimate son of a minor noble family from Trujillo.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

The changes in the countryside may have been even more momentous. This is the period during which we see the emergence of the yeoman farmers and skilled artisans as both economic and social forces. The social changes that were underway accelerated because of England’s overseas expansion. The “discovery” of the Americas by Columbus in 1492 and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco da Gama in 1497 opened up new, lucrative opportunities for Europeans. England was a latecomer to the colonial adventures, and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, it had no significant colonies abroad and a navy that was barely strong enough to confront the Spanish or the Portuguese.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

In the light of the economic transformation of so many former colonies after 1950, it is clear that the significance of decolonization and national liberation in the first two decades after the Second World War has been greatly underestimated in the West, especially Europe. Arguably it was, bar none, the most important event of the twentieth century, creating the conditions for the majority of the world’s population to become the dominant players of the twenty-first century. As Adam Smith wrote presciently of the European discovery of the Americas and the so-called East Indies: To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from these events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned . . . At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.


Lonely Planet London by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Etonian, financial independence, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, place-making, post-work, Russell Brand, Skype, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent

Richard III didn’t have long to enjoy the hot seat: he was killed in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor, first monarch of the eponymous dynasty. Tudor London London became one of the largest and most important cities in Europe during the Tudor reign, which coincided with the discovery of the Americas and thriving world trade. Henry’s son and successor, Henry VIII, was the most ostentatious of the clan, instructing new palaces to be built at Whitehall and St James’s, and bullying his lord chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, into gifting him Hampton Court. Begging was treated very harshly in 16th century London.


Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

These new global cities, epitomized by London, therefore appear to share several characteristics, above all: the internationalization of their economy through the entry of firms from other parts of the world; the increasing ethnic diversity of their workforce and population; and, as a consequence of the first two, increasing inequality.6 Such assumptions lack historical perspective, viewing the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in particular against the background of the relative equality of the post-war consensus years; failing to take account of the history of globalization, which has impacted upon everyday life since the European ‘discovery’ of the Americas; as well as ignoring the role of local, national, continental and international migration in the evolution of many of the major metropolises which exist in the world today over decades if not centuries. While London has much in common with many of the other global cities which exist today, it has, purely from the point of view of migration, five characteristics that help to make it unique.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

This makes the last five centuries more manageable. But it also represents reality: the oceans had become intimately interconnected, as a quick glance at the Portuguese, Dutch or Danish maritime networks quickly shows. This interconnection of the oceans was the great revolution that followed the discovery of the Americas and of the route from Europe to Asia by way of the southern tip of Africa, and it has received too little attention. One important theme of this book is the human occupation of previously uninhabited islands, beginning with the extraordinary achievements of Polynesian sailors in settling the scattered islands of the largest ocean of all.

However, the persecution waned and the community recovered.50 Aden was also a base from which the Cairo merchants sent letters eastwards to India, with information about the state of the pepper market – anticipating where prices would be profitable was fundamental to the business practice of these merchants, who were not mere passive agents.51 The sailing season out of Aden was, by natural circumstances, well co-ordinated with that of the Mediterranean, with ships setting out for India at the start of autumn, which gave time for goods that were being carried down the Red Sea to reach their eastern Mediterranean destinations from as far away as Sicily, Tunisia and Spain. Aden was therefore a nodal point not just in the Indian Ocean maritime networks, but in what can reasonably be called (before the discovery of the Americas) a global network that stretched from Atlantic Seville to the Spice Islands of the Indian Ocean. Broadly speaking the port was very lively from the end of August to May of the following year. Ships converged on Aden from India, Somalia, Eritrea and Zanj (east Africa), so that Aden became a market where the produce of Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean was exchanged.52 V Moving deeper into the Indian Ocean, the Egyptian merchants who had called in at Aden took advantage of the monsoons to head across the open sea to India.


Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Richard III didn’t have long to enjoy the hot seat, however, as he was deposed within a couple of years by Henry Tudor, the first monarch of the dynasty of that name. Return to beginning of chapter TUDOR LONDON London became one of the largest and most important cities in Europe during the reign of the Tudors, which coincided with the discovery of the Americas and thriving world trade. Henry’s son and successor, Henry VIII, was the most ostentatious of the clan. Terribly fond of palaces, he had new ones built at Whitehall and St James’s, and bullied his lord chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, into gifting him Hampton Court. His most significant contribution, however, was the split with the Catholic Church in 1534 after the Pope refused to annul his marriage to the non-heir-producing Catherine of Aragon.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

During the first half of the second millennium, the leading candidates for the source of this earth-shaking economic transformation would have been China, India, and the Islamic world, not Europe. Proposed explanations for “Why Europe?” emphasize the development of representative governments, the rise of impersonal commerce, the discovery of the Americas, the availability of English coal, the length of European coastlines, the brilliance of Enlightenment thinkers, the intensity of European warfare, the price of British labor, and the development of a culture of science. I suspect that all of these factors may have played some role, even if minor in some cases; but, what’s missing is an understanding of the psychological differences that began developing in some European populations in the wake of the Church’s dissolution of Europe’s kin-based institutions.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Remarkably, until the end of the eighteenth century, labour relations in parts of Eurasia, Western Europe, India, China and Japan developed in a similar way, namely by increasing the input of labour on the market – that of men and, now, women and even children – called the ‘industrious revolution’.3 However, this increased labour intensity in vast areas of Eurasia, in what was home to perhaps the largest part of the global population at that time, cannot hide the fact that Western Europe was stealing a march in other areas, to the extent that, from around 1800, it would dominate the whole world. This happened in a number of steps. Firstly, the discovery of the Americas swiftly culminated in conquest, and the existing tributary labour relations of the Aztecs and the Inca were upended, with great benefits for the Spanish and Portuguese and later the Dutch, French, English and other invaders. Secondly, captives sold to Europeans in the ports of West Africa were put to work as slaves on plantations in the Americas.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Yet the last two hundred years have seen more economic growth than all earlier history put together. The reason, Pomeranz explains in his important book The Great Divergence, is that western Europe, and above all Britain, just got lucky. Like Frank, Pomeranz sees the West’s luck beginning with the accidental discovery of the Americas, creating a trading system that provided incentives to industrialize production; but unlike Frank, he suggests that as late as 1800 Europe’s luck could still have failed. It would have taken a lot of space, Pomeranz points out, to grow enough trees to feed Britain’s crude early steam engines with wood—more space, in fact, than crowded western Europe had.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

But it wouldn’t be his last campaign – he would run once more at the age of 92, winning 23% of the vote in the 2000 presidential election. Thousands would mourn his death two years later, despite that he had prolonged the Trujillo-style dictatorship for decades. His most lasting legacy may be the Faro a Colón, an enormously expensive monument to the discovery of the Americas that drained Santo Domingo of electricity whenever the lighthouse was turned on. Breaking with the Past The Dominican people signaled their desire for change in electing Leonel Fernández, a 42-year-old lawyer who grew up in New York City, as president in the 1996 presidential election; he edged out three-time candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez in a runoff.


Italy by Damien Simonis

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, bike sharing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, company town, congestion charging, dark pattern, discovery of the americas, Frank Gehry, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, large denomination, low cost airline, Murano, Venice glass, pension reform, period drama, Peter Eisenman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

By the mid-15th century, Venice was swathed in golden mo­saics, imported silks and clouds of incense to cover the belching, sulphuric smells that were the downsides of a lagoon empire. But events beyond Venice’s control took their toll. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the Venetian territory of Morea (in Greece) in 1499 gave the Turks control over Adriatic Sea access. The Genovese gained the upper hand with Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492, calling dibs on New World trade routes. Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1498, opening up new trade routes that bypassed the Mediterranean – and Venetian taxes and duties. As it lost its dominion over the seas, Venice changed tack and began conquering Europe by charm.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

Public holidays January 1 New Year’s Day (Año Nuevo) Easter (Semana Santa) national holidays on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday May 1 Labour Day (Día del Trabajo) May 21 Navy Day (Día de las Glorias Navales) marking Chile’s naval victory at Iquique during the War of the Pacific June 29 St Peter and St Paul (San Pedro y San Pablo) July 16 Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Solemnidad de la Virgen del Carmen, Reina y Patrona de Chile) August 15 Assumption of the Virgin Mary (Asunción de la Virgen) September 17 If it falls on a Monday, an extension of Independence celebrations September 18 National Independence Day (Fiestas Patrias) celebrates Chile’s proclamation of independence from Spain in 1810 September 19 Armed Forces Day (Día del Ejército) September 20 If it falls on a Friday, an extension of Independence celebrations October 12 Columbus Day (Día del Descubrimiento de Dos Mundos) celebrates the European discovery of the Americas November 1 All Saints’ Day (Día de Todos los Santos) December 8 Immaculate Conception (Inmaculada Concepción) December 25 Christmas Day (Navidad) Festivals January 20 San Sebastián. Spaniards brought the first wooden image of San Sebastián to Chile in the seventeenth century. After a Mapuche raid on Chillán, the image was buried in a field, and no one was able to raise it.