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A History of the European Economy
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In this short book, I try to outline the history of the European economy—which is somewhat different from an economic history of Eu- rope. By “European economy,” I mean a world economy in the sense of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, one that is of course located in Europe and has some common aspects and some common institutions; one that is somewhat integrated, as its different parts are linked by trade and other relations more intensively than they are linked with other sys- tems; and one that achieves some kind of organic unity (despite diversity, which is typical of Europe).
This economic Europe has rarely coincided with the geographical en- tity that has been and is called “Europe,” and both have had uncertain and changing boundaries, especially to the east, toward Asia. Indeed, Eu- rope, which makes up only 7 percent of the Earth’s land surface, has been called a small peninsula of Asia, and no clear geographical boundary de- marcates it from the rest of the Eurasian land mass. The Ural Mountains never were a barrier; for centuries, hordes of nomads from the steppes of central Asia invaded Europe, which suffered greatly from their incur- sions. This was one reason why, up to about 1700, Russia was not consid- ered part of Europe; it entered thanks to Peter the Great and his succes- sors but left after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and whether it has reentered is not yet perfectly clear. Likewise, the Eastern European satel- lites of the Soviet Union were outside Europe from 1945 to 1989. During that period, Europe stopped at the Iron Curtain. Europe, thus, is the work of humans, not nature, and as such has always had a variable geometry
François Crouzet - Personal Name
1st Edtion
0-8139-2024-8
NONE
A History of the European Economy
Economics
English
The University Press of Virginia
2001
USA
1-351
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