The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950. Edited by Sevket Pamuk and Jeffrey Williamson. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xvii, 430. $115.00

Divergence, rather than convergence, has been the name of the game in worldwide “modern economic growth,” at least up to the 1980s. This empirical observation no longer puzzles economists, as it did thirty years ago. In the last two decades, we have taken a more sophisticated approach to the issue of the long-run relative performance of pioneers and latecomers, of core and periphery, of rich and poor countries. If we are currently able to talk of “conditional convergence,” “convergence clubs,” and the like, this is the result of a tremendous cross-fertilization between the so-called “new growth theory,” the pioneering work of Moses Abramovitz and a few others, and new approaches in global economic history. Amongst the latter, the monumental research program of Jeffrey Williamson stands in a class of its own. Thanks to his intellectual inputs and coordination efforts we have rediscovered the so-called “first globalization” and the backlash against it, and are thus better equipped to understand the causes and effects of the current globalization wave, and thus produce plausible scenarios for its future course.