1 00:00:05,130 --> 00:00:16,020 Thank you, Andrew, for the kind words almost. You feel like we should just pause and just throw questions hoping now after that. 2 00:00:16,020 --> 00:00:24,390 But thanks to also to Rowena, Chris and Andrew, I did very little on this. 3 00:00:24,390 --> 00:00:38,730 You guys did all the the hard work and the follow through, and this has been a really for me second conversation of ideas and and reflections. 4 00:00:38,730 --> 00:00:40,200 It can't help but be personal. 5 00:00:40,200 --> 00:00:52,530 Also for me, coming coming back to Oxford, because as I mentioned earlier, there had been the initial workshop at St. Anthony's on Eric Jones. 6 00:00:52,530 --> 00:01:00,150 But in my own doctoral dissertation here that I wrote initially under Christopher Platt 7 00:01:00,150 --> 00:01:05,340 and then Patrick's guidance comparing Argentine and Canadian economic development, 8 00:01:05,340 --> 00:01:11,130 I hadn't really thought of it in the language of divergence that all that came afterwards. 9 00:01:11,130 --> 00:01:20,220 But I was thinking of myself very much in the field of comparative economic history and Patrick's urging, reading, mark, block and others. 10 00:01:20,220 --> 00:01:24,630 And so feel and to some extent like we're coming full circle. 11 00:01:24,630 --> 00:01:28,290 So I'm going to pose two questions. 12 00:01:28,290 --> 00:01:35,310 One of them is possibly a rhetorical question for us all as we think about the relationship 13 00:01:35,310 --> 00:01:40,740 between global economic history or what might be reframed as the history of the global economy, 14 00:01:40,740 --> 00:01:48,030 which is a slightly different artefact. The first question, which is possibly the rhetorical one it is, 15 00:01:48,030 --> 00:01:57,570 are the guiding questions that have consumed economic historians and some global historians now spent. 16 00:01:57,570 --> 00:02:05,170 I mean, have we run through the course of a trial balloon this one yesterday with with Patrick? 17 00:02:05,170 --> 00:02:07,020 And let me just say, I think so. 18 00:02:07,020 --> 00:02:18,480 I think this conference, it might might be one of the reminders that that that that cycle may have have run its course. 19 00:02:18,480 --> 00:02:26,310 And I'll explain why in just a minute. This does not mean that all this work has not been fruitful. 20 00:02:26,310 --> 00:02:35,610 In fact, on the contrary, I don't think just because we can bring closure on debates means that, you know, the debates have been sterile. 21 00:02:35,610 --> 00:02:40,050 But convergence miracles breakouts, however, 22 00:02:40,050 --> 00:02:48,480 have been so closely tied to the field of development and growth economics and to some extent 23 00:02:48,480 --> 00:02:57,810 tied to the narratives of Western civilisation as efforts to try to overcome those narratives. 24 00:02:57,810 --> 00:03:04,410 And they were enormously important in trying to destabilise and to dissenters some of these. 25 00:03:04,410 --> 00:03:09,390 I'll come back to why I think we might be coming to a close on that in just a minute. 26 00:03:09,390 --> 00:03:17,940 The second question is what role does public policy play in global economic history or the history of the global economy? 27 00:03:17,940 --> 00:03:22,770 Is it possible that the ways in which global history and economic history, 28 00:03:22,770 --> 00:03:31,460 which are these two convergent fields that we've been pushing at flourished in the long neoliberal era? 29 00:03:31,460 --> 00:03:40,220 Is it possible that they together inadvertently left the state out or to be even the problem? 30 00:03:40,220 --> 00:03:45,800 Does this even more? How inadvertent was this omission? 31 00:03:45,800 --> 00:03:56,870 Was it just a coincidence that the state slipped out of our narratives at the same time as it slipped out of its control of the economy? 32 00:03:56,870 --> 00:04:04,580 Both of these questions addressed some of the foundations of what we've been debating today and yesterday. 33 00:04:04,580 --> 00:04:11,960 So in the first one, I'd like to suggest that we consider reframing what's come to be kicked around 34 00:04:11,960 --> 00:04:20,270 here as convergence and divergence discussions to integration and disintegration, 35 00:04:20,270 --> 00:04:26,780 or perhaps the tensions over interdependence over long distances or interdependence between 36 00:04:26,780 --> 00:04:33,410 strangers of people who do not see each other or know each other for the rising and falling, 37 00:04:33,410 --> 00:04:38,060 spreading and merging narratives are not irrelevant. 38 00:04:38,060 --> 00:04:43,370 And we have learnt a great deal about mechanisms from Patrick's knowledge. 39 00:04:43,370 --> 00:04:53,090 Regimes are the role of ideas, extraction, perceptions of of world making processes that are even imposed from without. 40 00:04:53,090 --> 00:04:55,970 This came up with Rebecca's intervention. 41 00:04:55,970 --> 00:05:07,580 We've learnt a lot about actors from the last panel on households scaling all the way up to supply chains that, for instance, 42 00:05:07,580 --> 00:05:19,280 featured in Williams paper institutions Alexandra and Andrews scales and units from the silk trade that Georgia and Dagmar explored. 43 00:05:19,280 --> 00:05:28,370 And the timing questions, which I do think are critical that say, Leandra and Bishnu explored and to a large extent, 44 00:05:28,370 --> 00:05:35,390 all of these insights helped challenge the old Eurocentric or at least the 45 00:05:35,390 --> 00:05:43,170 triumphalist precepts of the modernist Stadio ways of framing the narratives. 46 00:05:43,170 --> 00:05:50,640 It does matter if the narrative is about leapfrogging or about reversals of fortune, for instance. 47 00:05:50,640 --> 00:05:57,420 But the driving concerns with talking about success or failure, 48 00:05:57,420 --> 00:06:14,580 advancement or backwardness accentuated smug smuggle Gareth in here accentuated the comparison over the reciprocity that Peter's 49 00:06:14,580 --> 00:06:28,080 point in the previous panel about the connectedness that precedes the trajectories sometimes got lost in those earlier framings. 50 00:06:28,080 --> 00:06:32,880 One might talk about reciprocal comparison I would call for, 51 00:06:32,880 --> 00:06:42,150 and this is part of perhaps throw it out as an agenda for thinking about interdependency to help spotlight. 52 00:06:42,150 --> 00:06:48,660 And I think this last panel helped illustrate this the unfairness and the unevenness 53 00:06:48,660 --> 00:06:58,990 of the integrative processes that the sort of the comparative framings left out. 54 00:06:58,990 --> 00:07:05,620 And in a way, the panels have been probing the micro foundations of global interdependence, 55 00:07:05,620 --> 00:07:15,250 from luxuries to labour, from silver and silk to Zambian copper. 56 00:07:15,250 --> 00:07:22,750 But in a more fractured age ours that coincides also with a more integrated one. 57 00:07:22,750 --> 00:07:27,760 That is that what we find is that with interdependence comes the problem, 58 00:07:27,760 --> 00:07:36,550 but the challenge of inequality, inequalities that are produced by the nature of integration itself. 59 00:07:36,550 --> 00:07:45,880 And so we might think of the effect of Piketty on how we formulate narratives about global integration 60 00:07:45,880 --> 00:07:55,600 that thinks about the distributional consequences and the conditions for interdependency. 61 00:07:55,600 --> 00:08:08,170 Bailey, Chris Bailey once put it as the rising icing morph ism across societies coinciding with the complexity, increasing complexity within them. 62 00:08:08,170 --> 00:08:13,140 We can reformat that as interdependence with inequality. 63 00:08:13,140 --> 00:08:23,800 It's turning a 45 degree turn on. On his formulation, how we begin to see decreasing in some cases inequality across societies, 64 00:08:23,800 --> 00:08:30,220 but rising inequality within them as a result of global integration. 65 00:08:30,220 --> 00:08:43,300 So that inequality is closely. It's not just coincident, but is causal, tied in in very complex causal ways with global integration. 66 00:08:43,300 --> 00:08:49,840 And I am not sure we have a good fix on these dynamics in different times and places. 67 00:08:49,840 --> 00:08:59,560 I mean, it comes up over and over again in and across all of the panels right up to the to the one we just finished. 68 00:08:59,560 --> 00:09:04,660 But I wonder if that might set the stage for a new agenda for thinking about the can you know, 69 00:09:04,660 --> 00:09:14,800 the conversations across global history and economic history for long with climate change that Andrew reminded us just now, 70 00:09:14,800 --> 00:09:19,900 this is surely the most pressing policy concern of our day. 71 00:09:19,900 --> 00:09:29,260 Moreover, our ability to tackle the one that is climate change is closely affected by the other for the struggle for survival, 72 00:09:29,260 --> 00:09:41,290 and the advent of interdependence meant drilling, ever literally drilling ever deeper into a particular model of an energy regime. 73 00:09:41,290 --> 00:09:54,550 For the paradox of convergence and the spread of the globalisation of industry, of course, has been to globalise the addiction to carbon. 74 00:09:54,550 --> 00:10:02,080 So that's the sort of the first question about where we stand in the long cycle of the convergence, 75 00:10:02,080 --> 00:10:07,090 divergence debate and thinking how we might reformat those. 76 00:10:07,090 --> 00:10:12,760 My my second question is, well, what role does a policy make in all of this? 77 00:10:12,760 --> 00:10:19,720 Well, many years ago, a group of political scientists that came out of Social Science Research Council, 78 00:10:19,720 --> 00:10:28,810 an organisation based in New York, a cluster led by Theta Catchpole and a few others argued for quote, bringing the state back in. 79 00:10:28,810 --> 00:10:31,990 And I think many people responded to that feeling well. 80 00:10:31,990 --> 00:10:40,120 The state was always there, but I think what they meant by that was the state has not been conceptualised as an 81 00:10:40,120 --> 00:10:48,310 arena itself that helps construct how people represent and organise social interests. 82 00:10:48,310 --> 00:10:53,530 Sometimes I wonder whether we need to do it in the same spirit. 83 00:10:53,530 --> 00:11:03,220 This does not presume that the state has been absent. It's been throughout our conversations, but it's a backdrop to the story. 84 00:11:03,220 --> 00:11:16,540 Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, noted that the changes in the global narrative as he saw them that it became harder and harder to sustain 85 00:11:16,540 --> 00:11:26,170 the hope which became increasingly utopian as we were as we were reminded in the photograph of Andreas, 86 00:11:26,170 --> 00:11:36,460 is twin up here on the screen that a republic could insulate itself from Dagmar and Georgios Silk. 87 00:11:36,460 --> 00:11:39,280 That is luxuries. Right? 88 00:11:39,280 --> 00:11:51,970 So that the Republic had was being drawn into something that would be seen as by the 19th century as the world market or Williams sugar, 89 00:11:51,970 --> 00:12:00,880 so that the International Division of Labour and the Market or Market Society would transform daily lives. 90 00:12:00,880 --> 00:12:07,150 And of course, this is where a is shared hairdressers. 91 00:12:07,150 --> 00:12:11,230 Other client would argue that the spread of market societies. 92 00:12:11,230 --> 00:12:17,830 If you read the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto would erase all borders. 93 00:12:17,830 --> 00:12:26,890 But now we and so the irrelevance of borders. But now we ask how can a society master its new needs, 94 00:12:26,890 --> 00:12:34,810 which includes this question of thinking about new energy regimes with an open international economy? 95 00:12:34,810 --> 00:12:40,510 And I think Patricia will talk a little bit about that sort of the governance challenges and thinking about these things. 96 00:12:40,510 --> 00:12:49,000 But the domain of the polity, especially the democratic one, is the domain of smaller scales of towns, 97 00:12:49,000 --> 00:12:53,950 of cities, of provinces and at its largest scale, the nation. 98 00:12:53,950 --> 00:12:59,260 And one might say that the EU is growing pains reminds us of how challenging it 99 00:12:59,260 --> 00:13:04,870 has been to create domains of politics at higher scales than the nation state. 100 00:13:04,870 --> 00:13:11,830 Yet the domain of the economy, as Smith and Marx pointed out, is the domain of the world. 101 00:13:11,830 --> 00:13:19,450 So there's a disjunction, and between the spheres of our togetherness split in some senses between our disciplines itself, 102 00:13:19,450 --> 00:13:25,910 between economics, political science and history. 103 00:13:25,910 --> 00:13:35,090 As just the last panel showed, Peter May and Andreas remind us that accumulation and interdependence go together, 104 00:13:35,090 --> 00:13:42,890 that it requires producing exclusions and externalising the costs of the process itself. 105 00:13:42,890 --> 00:13:45,620 One might say that the Anthropocene. 106 00:13:45,620 --> 00:13:55,580 I mean, Andrew and I had not pre rehearsed this at all, but the the living in the Anthropocene may require us to change our questions. 107 00:13:55,580 --> 00:14:09,320 That is to think about the EXTERNALISATION. Practises that are indigenous to the model of the economy has to be part of our stories about it. 108 00:14:09,320 --> 00:14:19,460 What is more, the world domain of the economy has not and never did eclipse the domain of the polity. 109 00:14:19,460 --> 00:14:27,920 When we've talked about policy today and yesterday, it's been in response, in fact, to global economic shifts. 110 00:14:27,920 --> 00:14:34,430 Patrick's knowledge regimes, the water systems and water stress in India, the outrage in 1919. 111 00:14:34,430 --> 00:14:48,590 And China. In other words, that the rights that emanate from global interdependence or the processes that emerge out of global interdependence really 112 00:14:48,590 --> 00:15:02,780 signify the polity of nations and cities and the policies that they adopt will manage the way a global integration occurs. 113 00:15:02,780 --> 00:15:07,730 Even the experiment I I'm very anxious to hear Patricia's thoughts on this, 114 00:15:07,730 --> 00:15:17,030 even the experiment in the construction of international institutions that these are world products themselves. 115 00:15:17,030 --> 00:15:27,680 That is that global integration and interdependency has produced these categories and institutions of shared life like the nation, 116 00:15:27,680 --> 00:15:36,170 like all the other institutions that want to kind of pre-empt too much what Patricia is going to be saying, 117 00:15:36,170 --> 00:15:48,290 but that we might think of the state not just happening to be there, but being central in the way interdependence and inequality get conjugated. 118 00:15:48,290 --> 00:15:58,850 Danny Roderick, the economist at Harvard has a term, recalls the globalisation paradox, which I like a lot, 119 00:15:58,850 --> 00:16:04,850 in which he argues that the very nature of integration produces risks and hazards 120 00:16:04,850 --> 00:16:10,580 that summon citizens to make demands on the states to handle these pressures. 121 00:16:10,580 --> 00:16:21,200 RE signifies the state, and May has reminded us this morning about how the racialisation of social categories got deployed to separate 122 00:16:21,200 --> 00:16:30,080 to segregate by creating borders and exclusions to manage the accumulation process for households themselves. 123 00:16:30,080 --> 00:16:36,980 But for a long time, we have been presuming that interdependence or a sort of a conception of 124 00:16:36,980 --> 00:16:43,790 interdependence that created the domain of the world economy would mean that the state, 125 00:16:43,790 --> 00:17:00,410 in Lenin's terms, would eventually wither away. So the globalisation paradox suggests that we think of it, in fact, in the other direction we have. 126 00:17:00,410 --> 00:17:10,220 We have possibly left the state out of our discussions about these forces. 127 00:17:10,220 --> 00:17:14,480 I want to kind of wrap this up, it doesn't mean it's been absence altogether. 128 00:17:14,480 --> 00:17:23,060 Of course, it comes up in the form of organising empires to Joel's macro comparison of the feuding, 129 00:17:23,060 --> 00:17:31,040 middle scale competitive competition rackets in Europe to the integrated and the more cohesive model of the 130 00:17:31,040 --> 00:17:41,740 Chinese state or in Williams Beggar Thy Neighbour policies that set off some of the scramble for resources. 131 00:17:41,740 --> 00:17:52,840 But where does that leave policies or where the domain of the polity and the domain of the world market overlap? 132 00:17:52,840 --> 00:17:59,560 I was struck by Coward's argument about the deep sort of the great acceleration having 133 00:17:59,560 --> 00:18:06,250 deep tap roots in what he calls Monsoon Asia and that shift from coal to oil in the 134 00:18:06,250 --> 00:18:10,840 image she had of Tokyo Bay that was up on the screen earlier in the land reclamation 135 00:18:10,840 --> 00:18:17,170 process about the ways in which resources got mobilised to alter nature and of course, 136 00:18:17,170 --> 00:18:21,790 the thousands or millions of workers and the amount of capital that got deployed to 137 00:18:21,790 --> 00:18:30,340 transform Tokyo Bay that we might think about how the mobilisation of workers across borders 138 00:18:30,340 --> 00:18:37,960 also meant the creation of borders and policies that would Rebecca's been using the word 139 00:18:37,960 --> 00:18:44,890 inscribing that would create a mechanism to distribute rents from global supply chains. 140 00:18:44,890 --> 00:18:49,330 This came up in entry's this paper came up in May and everywhere. And in fact, 141 00:18:49,330 --> 00:18:57,100 in Williams proposition that labour organisations labour organising was aimed at trying to 142 00:18:57,100 --> 00:19:05,830 reclaim some of the links within supply chains to harvest those rents for communities. 143 00:19:05,830 --> 00:19:13,060 I could go on in the examples, but I wonder whether we could put them together to think about the state as a space that creates interests 144 00:19:13,060 --> 00:19:21,820 and creating options for there's a connexion between interdependence and policy that is about managing risks, 145 00:19:21,820 --> 00:19:29,530 managing bodies, mobilising resources and excluding and integrating at the same time for 146 00:19:29,530 --> 00:19:36,760 interdependence produces the need to separate and to distinguish at the same time. 147 00:19:36,760 --> 00:19:48,730 This also opens up the possibility for thinking about choices because the politics in global history and economic history have sometimes been absent, 148 00:19:48,730 --> 00:19:57,160 so we might think about the politics of our narratives a fragile yet inescapable togetherness in a new key. 149 00:19:57,160 --> 00:20:01,680 Thanks very much.