Global Economic History Network (GEHN)

Thanks to a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust an International Network of 37 academics from several disciplines and with recognised expertise on the economic histories of several parts of the world came into operation in September 2003, and its programme of research, visiting fellowships and conferences is now underway

1.  Mission

GEHN is an international network of some 38 academics with credentials in several disciplines (history, economics, economic history, anthropology, geography, sociology) and affiliated to universities in Britain, Holland, Italy, Germany, the United States, India and Japan. Thanks to funding from the Leverhulme Trust, a network is now operating to promote research, teaching and co-operation in the innovatory and rising field of global economic history. As historians, participants in GEHN share a common 'agenda' to refine historical consciousness among their students and readerships of their subject. Most people's historical sensibility remains limited in time to the generations of their parents and grandparents; in scope to the cultures they inhabit and is understandably prone to favour states and nations that provide them with personal and common identities. Global history seeks to broaden and deepen people's understanding of themselves, their cultures and their states by extending the geographical spaces and lengthening the chronologies that most historians normally take into their narratives and analyses.

Aspirations to transcend the confines of personal, local, national and European history go back to Herodotus and were certainly present in histories published in the medieval era of Christendom. They blossomed in secular form during the Enlightenment, almost disappeared during the centuries which witnessed the Rise of the West, but have revived again during recent decades of intensified globalization and multiculturalism.

The reasons behind the renaissance in global history are familiar. The means and the media of modern transportation and communication have opened up discourses (in English) around and about the world that are re-shaping identities and transforming behaviour, especially among younger generations. Students arrive at universities more curious about 'other' cultures and are now less easily persuaded to feed on diets of national or western histories. Alas, academe is not constituted to offer the long run, geographically unbounded and ecologically informed access to properly processed historical knowledge that could satisfy their ecumenical interests and nourish a truly cosmopolitan sensitivity for the 21st century. Clearly the chronologies, confined preoccupations and spatial parameters with which national histories have traditionally been delivered are ready for reform. To be recognized as contemporary syllabuses could make space within higher education (in both history and the social sciences) that will analyse major environmental, economic and geopolitical forces at work in the evolution of humanity as a whole; and thereby offer a prospectus that might avoid the condescension of cultures, the myopia of fore-shortened time spans and the arrogance of nations, implicit in dominant styles of writing, studying and communicating historical knowledge.

The mission to include and strengthen global economic history in national systems of higher education is shared by all participants in GEHN. Economic history has, moreover, long been a bridge subject between humanities and social sciences premised on the recognition of a large universal fact; namely that for millennia most people in most places have been preoccupied with obtaining the food, shelter, clothing and manufactured artefacts required to sustain an basic and, only latterly, an agreeable standard of living. Global economic history proclaims the need for long chronological and wide geographical perspectives (as well as the recruitment of theories and insights acquired from the natural and social sciences) in order to represent its preoccupation with material life and to analyse the divergence in productivities and standards of living across time and space.

Although this new field is now developing everywhere, most of the academics involved are scattered in departments around the world and continue to operate as recognized specialists on European, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African and South American studies. As aspirant global historians they are aware of gaps in the published literature, the absences of calibrated data to facilitate comparisons of economic trends across continents and centuries, and acutely conscious of the methodological, epistemological and pedagogic problems they have encountered in attempting to persuade colleagues, students and university administrations that the field is not only contemporary, but can be constructed and communicated at intellectual levels, comparable to those attained in research and teaching on the economic histories of America, Europe, the United Kingdom and Japan.

All members of GEHN anticipate that a co-ordinated programme of workshops, teaching fellowships and a research project, focussed upon a global industry, will leave those involved with the enhanced intellectual capacities, teaching skills and missionary zeal required to take this innovating enterprise in economic history up to higher levels of scholarly excellence. They aim to strengthen the field's prestige and prospects within national systems of higher education and thereby transform the way history is conceived and taught in universities and schools.

2. GEHN's Programme of Conferences, Visiting Fellowships and Collaborative Research

Four partner Institutions (LSE, Irvine, Leiden and Osaka) formulated a three-year programme of academic interchange (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) that includes:

• Ten inter-related conferences that will address five meta themes currently under debate in global economic history
• Short term (one month) Visiting Teaching Fellows
• A project for collaborative research on comparative advantages and labour productivities in the manufacture and export of cotton textiles in Europe, India, China and Japan.

3. Conferences

GEHN has formulated plans for a programme of 10 conferences, three a year in January, June and September 2003-06. The programme has been designed to cover 5 themes in global economic history:

• Theme A: The Formation, Development and Operation of Regional, National and International Markets (Markets);  
• Theme B: The Geopolitical and Imperial Contexts for Economic Activity (Imperialism) 
• Theme C: Religious Values, Ideologies, Family Systems, Promoting and Restraining Economic Growth (Cultures); 
• Theme D: Regimes of the Production of Useful and Reliable Knowledge (Knowledge, Science and Technology); 
• Theme E: The Manufacture and Trade in Cotton Textiles in Eurasia 1498-1914 (Cotton Textiles).

Conferences have been designed to address components of a metanarrative in history and canonical social science concerned with 'Economic Divergence'. Divergence is the question of when, where, how and why did labour productivities between the West and East of Eurasia diverge, and lead to gaps in standards of living that became clearly discernible over the 19th century and which continue to widen even today.

Our conferences will survey and rigorously consider five major themes, as listed above, contextualised and specified by their local convenors in prospectuses. In format, these meetings will be based on pre-circulated papers, structured discussion and followed up by papers published on the GEHN website and the LSE departments working paper series. It is anticipated that a proportion of the papers will also appear either in volume form or in recognized academic journals for economics, economic history and global history - including LSE own new journal in the field - The Journal of Global History.

10 Conferences in Global Economic History

Members of the Network have agreed:

• to attend two or more of these 3-day conferences; 
• to offer papers which will address the selected theme (as specified and elaborated by local convenors;
• to circulate a summary of papers ahead of time;
• to complete texts for the GEHN website and (potentially) for the GEHN working paper series published and distributed from LSE

Local convenors are responsible for:

• designing mission statements and programmes;
• selecting papers; and 
• the logistical arrangements for each conference

Subject to limitations on numbers (20-25 per conference) and budgetary constraints, convenors may invite other interested academics and graduate students to attend workshops. Those outside the network interested in participating in a particular workshop should contact the GEHN Administrator, Tracy Keefe at LSE ( gehn@lse.ac.uk ) who will forward their names and brief CV to local convenors.

4. Visiting Teaching Fellows

Eight selected visiting teaching fellows will spend up to one month at Irvine, LSE, Leiden and Osaka in order to gain first hand information and experience of course design, teaching and examining for this new field in history and social science. All participants in the network will also become informed about the scale, scope, methods and epistemological assumptions of courses for teaching and approaches to research in global economic history across a range of cultures and universities in Europe, North American, India and East Asia.

5. The Collaborative Research Project "Comparative Advantages and Labour Productivities in a Global Industry: the Manufacture and Export of Cotton Textiles in Eurasia 1498-1914"

For centuries before the mechanization of the English industry which occurred between the times of Kay (1733) and Roberts (1824) the labour, skills, capital and organisation engaged in the preparation, spinning, weaving, finishing and export of cloth and yarn manufactured from cotton fibres was located to an overwhelming extent in South and East Asia (India, China and Japan).

Although merchants from the Italian city states imported cotton fibres and textiles from the east since the Middle Ages, and centres for cotton textile production existed in the Italian Peninsula, Iberia and Germany long before the Peace of Westphalia, it was not really until the second half of the 17th century that the sale and production of cotton cloth took hold in the economies of western Europe. Thereafter, British, continental European and North American cotton textiles expanded to reach a position of dominance as the world's first fully mechanized urban factory industry. When, how and why Europeans acquired and maintained their clear comparative advantages in the manufacture and export of cotton textiles needs to be explored for it's potential to contribute significant insights to the currently dominant debate in history on divergence in labour productivities and real wages between east and west.

The research project aims to publish working papers, a book in economic history that will be global in scope and concerned with the forces of demand, supply, technology and political economy that shifted comparative advantages for a major industry from east to west and back again. It's aim is to reconfigure the considerable volume of national sources (European and Asian) in order to construct a long run economic history of one significant "global industry" that will be analytically rigorous and based as far as possible on foundations of reliable data related to production, trade, prices, wages and productivity.

The Research Officer in charge of the project (Dr Giorgio Riello of LSE) and the graduate student reading for a doctorate concerned with the cotton textile industry in China (Pilar Gimeno, also at LSE) report directly to a supervisory committee of the department of economic history at the school which includes Patrick O'Brien, Kent Deng and Max Schulze.

The project also enjoys participation and advice from several members of GEHN including: Robert Allen (Oxford), Janet Hunter (LSE), Parasannan Pathasarathi (Boston), Om Prakash (Delhi), Ken Pomeranz (Irvine), Tirthanakar Roy (Pune), Osamu Saito (Tokyo), Kaoru Sugihara (Osaka), Jan Luiten van Zanden (Utrecht) and David Washbrook (Oxford), with interests and experience in the industry.

Two conferences (January 2005 and Osaka, January 2006) will be devoted to the development of cotton textiles into a global industry.

Scholars and students interested in this project should contact the Research Officer, Giorgio Riello at LSE g.riello@lse.ac.uk GEHN is enthusiastic to establish links with academics and doctoral students working on the cotton textile industry.

Patrick K. O'Brien
Centennial Professor of Economic History, LSE
Convenor of GEHN

GEHN Network Members
GEHN Working Papers

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