Thank you, Andrew, for the kind words almost. You feel like we should just pause and just throw questions hoping now after that.
But thanks to also to Rowena, Chris and Andrew, I did very little on this.
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.
It can't help but be personal.
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.
But in my own doctoral dissertation here that I wrote initially under Christopher Platt
and then Patrick's guidance comparing Argentine and Canadian economic development,
I hadn't really thought of it in the language of divergence that all that came afterwards.
But I was thinking of myself very much in the field of comparative economic history and Patrick's urging, reading, mark, block and others.
And so feel and to some extent like we're coming full circle.
So I'm going to pose two questions.
One of them is possibly a rhetorical question for us all as we think about the relationship
between global economic history or what might be reframed as the history of the global economy,
which is a slightly different artefact. The first question, which is possibly the rhetorical one it is,
are the guiding questions that have consumed economic historians and some global historians now spent.
I mean, have we run through the course of a trial balloon this one yesterday with with Patrick?
And let me just say, I think so.
I think this conference, it might might be one of the reminders that that that that cycle may have have run its course.
And I'll explain why in just a minute. This does not mean that all this work has not been fruitful.
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.
But convergence miracles breakouts, however,
have been so closely tied to the field of development and growth economics and to some extent
tied to the narratives of Western civilisation as efforts to try to overcome those narratives.
And they were enormously important in trying to destabilise and to dissenters some of these.
I'll come back to why I think we might be coming to a close on that in just a minute.
The second question is what role does public policy play in global economic history or the history of the global economy?
Is it possible that the ways in which global history and economic history,
which are these two convergent fields that we've been pushing at flourished in the long neoliberal era?
Is it possible that they together inadvertently left the state out or to be even the problem?
Does this even more? How inadvertent was this omission?
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?
Both of these questions addressed some of the foundations of what we've been debating today and yesterday.
So in the first one, I'd like to suggest that we consider reframing what's come to be kicked around
here as convergence and divergence discussions to integration and disintegration,
or perhaps the tensions over interdependence over long distances or interdependence between
strangers of people who do not see each other or know each other for the rising and falling,
spreading and merging narratives are not irrelevant.
And we have learnt a great deal about mechanisms from Patrick's knowledge.
Regimes are the role of ideas, extraction, perceptions of of world making processes that are even imposed from without.
This came up with Rebecca's intervention.
We've learnt a lot about actors from the last panel on households scaling all the way up to supply chains that, for instance,
featured in Williams paper institutions Alexandra and Andrews scales and units from the silk trade that Georgia and Dagmar explored.
And the timing questions, which I do think are critical that say, Leandra and Bishnu explored and to a large extent,
all of these insights helped challenge the old Eurocentric or at least the
triumphalist precepts of the modernist Stadio ways of framing the narratives.
It does matter if the narrative is about leapfrogging or about reversals of fortune, for instance.
But the driving concerns with talking about success or failure,
advancement or backwardness accentuated smug smuggle Gareth in here accentuated the comparison over the reciprocity that Peter's
point in the previous panel about the connectedness that precedes the trajectories sometimes got lost in those earlier framings.
One might talk about reciprocal comparison I would call for,
and this is part of perhaps throw it out as an agenda for thinking about interdependency to help spotlight.
And I think this last panel helped illustrate this the unfairness and the unevenness
of the integrative processes that the sort of the comparative framings left out.
And in a way, the panels have been probing the micro foundations of global interdependence,
from luxuries to labour, from silver and silk to Zambian copper.
But in a more fractured age ours that coincides also with a more integrated one.
That is that what we find is that with interdependence comes the problem,
but the challenge of inequality, inequalities that are produced by the nature of integration itself.
And so we might think of the effect of Piketty on how we formulate narratives about global integration
that thinks about the distributional consequences and the conditions for interdependency.
Bailey, Chris Bailey once put it as the rising icing morph ism across societies coinciding with the complexity, increasing complexity within them.
We can reformat that as interdependence with inequality.
It's turning a 45 degree turn on. On his formulation, how we begin to see decreasing in some cases inequality across societies,
but rising inequality within them as a result of global integration.
So that inequality is closely. It's not just coincident, but is causal, tied in in very complex causal ways with global integration.
And I am not sure we have a good fix on these dynamics in different times and places.
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.
But I wonder if that might set the stage for a new agenda for thinking about the can you know,
the conversations across global history and economic history for long with climate change that Andrew reminded us just now,
this is surely the most pressing policy concern of our day.
Moreover, our ability to tackle the one that is climate change is closely affected by the other for the struggle for survival,
and the advent of interdependence meant drilling, ever literally drilling ever deeper into a particular model of an energy regime.
For the paradox of convergence and the spread of the globalisation of industry, of course, has been to globalise the addiction to carbon.
So that's the sort of the first question about where we stand in the long cycle of the convergence,
divergence debate and thinking how we might reformat those.
My my second question is, well, what role does a policy make in all of this?
Well, many years ago, a group of political scientists that came out of Social Science Research Council,
an organisation based in New York, a cluster led by Theta Catchpole and a few others argued for quote, bringing the state back in.
And I think many people responded to that feeling well.
The state was always there, but I think what they meant by that was the state has not been conceptualised as an
arena itself that helps construct how people represent and organise social interests.
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to do it in the same spirit.
This does not presume that the state has been absent. It's been throughout our conversations, but it's a backdrop to the story.
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
the hope which became increasingly utopian as we were as we were reminded in the photograph of Andreas,
is twin up here on the screen that a republic could insulate itself from Dagmar and Georgios Silk.
That is luxuries. Right?
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,
so that the International Division of Labour and the Market or Market Society would transform daily lives.
And of course, this is where a is shared hairdressers.
Other client would argue that the spread of market societies.
If you read the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto would erase all borders.
But now we and so the irrelevance of borders. But now we ask how can a society master its new needs,
which includes this question of thinking about new energy regimes with an open international economy?
And I think Patricia will talk a little bit about that sort of the governance challenges and thinking about these things.
But the domain of the polity, especially the democratic one, is the domain of smaller scales of towns,
of cities, of provinces and at its largest scale, the nation.
And one might say that the EU is growing pains reminds us of how challenging it
has been to create domains of politics at higher scales than the nation state.
Yet the domain of the economy, as Smith and Marx pointed out, is the domain of the world.
So there's a disjunction, and between the spheres of our togetherness split in some senses between our disciplines itself,
between economics, political science and history.
As just the last panel showed, Peter May and Andreas remind us that accumulation and interdependence go together,
that it requires producing exclusions and externalising the costs of the process itself.
One might say that the Anthropocene.
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.
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.
What is more, the world domain of the economy has not and never did eclipse the domain of the polity.
When we've talked about policy today and yesterday, it's been in response, in fact, to global economic shifts.
Patrick's knowledge regimes, the water systems and water stress in India, the outrage in 1919.
And China. In other words, that the rights that emanate from global interdependence or the processes that emerge out of global interdependence really
signify the polity of nations and cities and the policies that they adopt will manage the way a global integration occurs.
Even the experiment I I'm very anxious to hear Patricia's thoughts on this,
even the experiment in the construction of international institutions that these are world products themselves.
That is that global integration and interdependency has produced these categories and institutions of shared life like the nation,
like all the other institutions that want to kind of pre-empt too much what Patricia is going to be saying,
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.
Danny Roderick, the economist at Harvard has a term, recalls the globalisation paradox, which I like a lot,
in which he argues that the very nature of integration produces risks and hazards
that summon citizens to make demands on the states to handle these pressures.
RE signifies the state, and May has reminded us this morning about how the racialisation of social categories got deployed to separate
to segregate by creating borders and exclusions to manage the accumulation process for households themselves.
But for a long time, we have been presuming that interdependence or a sort of a conception of
interdependence that created the domain of the world economy would mean that the state,
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.
We have possibly left the state out of our discussions about these forces.
I want to kind of wrap this up, it doesn't mean it's been absence altogether.
Of course, it comes up in the form of organising empires to Joel's macro comparison of the feuding,
middle scale competitive competition rackets in Europe to the integrated and the more cohesive model of the
Chinese state or in Williams Beggar Thy Neighbour policies that set off some of the scramble for resources.
But where does that leave policies or where the domain of the polity and the domain of the world market overlap?
I was struck by Coward's argument about the deep sort of the great acceleration having
deep tap roots in what he calls Monsoon Asia and that shift from coal to oil in the
image she had of Tokyo Bay that was up on the screen earlier in the land reclamation
process about the ways in which resources got mobilised to alter nature and of course,
the thousands or millions of workers and the amount of capital that got deployed to
transform Tokyo Bay that we might think about how the mobilisation of workers across borders
also meant the creation of borders and policies that would Rebecca's been using the word
inscribing that would create a mechanism to distribute rents from global supply chains.
This came up in entry's this paper came up in May and everywhere. And in fact,
in Williams proposition that labour organisations labour organising was aimed at trying to
reclaim some of the links within supply chains to harvest those rents for communities.
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
and creating options for there's a connexion between interdependence and policy that is about managing risks,
managing bodies, mobilising resources and excluding and integrating at the same time for
interdependence produces the need to separate and to distinguish at the same time.
This also opens up the possibility for thinking about choices because the politics in global history and economic history have sometimes been absent,
so we might think about the politics of our narratives a fragile yet inescapable togetherness in a new key.
Thanks very much.