Abstract
Why didn’t the “Great Sea” globalize in the nineteenth century?1 To be sure, the Mediterranean was already far behind the developed parts of Europe by the start of the 1800s. In contrast to British preindustrial success in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Mediterranean between 1500 and 1850 became something of an economic “backwater.”2 In the later nineteenth century, things slightly improved relative to Britain in the eastern Mediterranean but deteriorated in the west.3
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Notes
David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Penguin, 2012).
Eric Hobsbawm, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century,” Past & Present 5 (1954): 34.
Jeffrey Williamson, “Real Wages and Factor Prices around the Mediterranean, 1500–1940,” in Sevket Pamuk and Jeffrey Williamson, eds., The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 45–75.
Gabriell Tortella, “Patterns of economic Retardation and Recovery in South-Western Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Economic History Review 47 (1994): 1–21.
Jaime Reis, “How Poor Was the European Periphery before 1850? the Mediterranean vs. Scandinavia,” in Sevket Pamuk and Jeffrey Williamson, eds., The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 17–44.
James Foreman-Peck and Pedro Lains, “European Economic Development: the Core and the Southern Periphery, 1870–1910,” in Sevket Pamuk and Jeffrey Williamson, eds., The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 76–106.
Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, “Does Globalization Make the World More Unequal?,” in Michael Bordo, Alan Taylor, and Jeffrey Williamson, eds., Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 246.
Michael Bordo, Alan Taylor, and Jeffrey Williamson, eds., Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, “Around the European Periphery, 1870–1913: Globalization, Schooling and Growth,” European Review of Economic History 1 (1997): 153–90.
Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Ch. 3.
Blanca Sánchez-Alonso, “Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed Behind: Explaining Emigration from the Regions of Spain, 1880–1914,” Journal of Economic History 60, no. 3 (2000): 730–51.
George Boyer and Timothy Hatton, “Regional Labor Market Integration in England and Wales,” in George Grantham and Mary MacKinnon, eds., Labour Market Evolution (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 84–106.
Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, Global Migration and the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 113.
By 1890, gross capital to worker-hours and to GDP in America was higher than that in Britain or any other part of Europe, according to Edward Wolff, “Capital Formation and Productivity Convergence over the Long Term,” American Economic Review 81 (1991): 565–79.
Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor, “Globalization and Capital Markets,” in Michael Bordo, Alan Taylor, and Jeffrey Williamson, eds., Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 121–87.
Alan Taylor and Jeffrey Williamson, “Convergence in the Age of Mass Migration,” European Review of Economic History 1 (1997): 27–63.
By the late 1920s, the Maltese population in San Francisco reached around 5,000 persons. Figures are from Lawrence Attard, The Great Exodus, 1918–1939 (Marsa: Publishers Enterprises Group, 1989).
Lawrence Attard, Early Maltese Emigration, 1900–1914 (Malta: Gulf, 1983).
Charles Price, Malta and the Maltese: A Study in Nineteenth Century Migration (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1954), pp. 178–84. By the 1920s, Australia became a major destination for Maltese emigrants due to a relaxation of immigration policy and more imperial support.
Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 95.
Ronald Cunsolo, “Italian Emigration and Its Effect on the Rise of Nationalism,” Italian Americana 12, no. 1 (1993): 62–72.
Blanca Sánchez-Alonso, “What Slowed Down the Mass Emigration from Spain before World War II? A Comparison with Italy,” in Sevket Pamuk and Jeffrey Williamson, eds., The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 297–8.
Blanca Sánchez-Alonso, Las causas de la emigración española (Madrid: Alianza, 1995), Appendix.
Imre Ferenczi and Walter Willcox, International Migrations, Vol. 1 Statistics (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1929), pp. 889–91.
Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), Ch. 2.
Gregory Orfalea, Before the Flames: A Quest for the History of Arab Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988) is another useful source.
Kemal Karpat, “The Ottoman Emigration to America, 1860–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 17 (1985): 175–209.
Charles Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa (London: Taylor and Francis, 1966), p. 271.
Charles Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 271.
Charles Issawi, “The Historical Background of Lebanese Emigration: 1800–1914,” in Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi, eds., The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992), p. 31.
Mahfoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1839–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 76.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), Ch. 11.
Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Census of England and Wales, General Report with Appendices, BPP 1904, Cd. 2174 (Vol. CVIII, 1), (London: Government Printing Office, 1901), Ch. 6.
Census of England and Wales, General Report with Appendices, BPP 1917 Cd. 8678 (Vol. XXXV, 1.). London: Government Printing Office, 1911, Ch. 7.
Niall Ferguson, “British Imperialism Revisited: the Costs and Benefits of ‘Anglobalisation,’” Historically Speaking 4, no. 4 (2003): 21–7 is a leading proponent of this view.
His critics include Pankaj Mishra, “Review: Civilisation: The West and the Rest,” London Review of Books 33 (2011): 10–2. Research that confronts the debate from a trade and real wage convergence angle is needed.
Sevket Pamuk and Jeffrey Williamson, The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950 (London: Routledge, 2000); of all 14 chapters, only one represents North Africa, and does so with Egypt alone.
Charles Issawi, The Fertile Crescent, 1800–1914: A Documentary Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) covers in a fragmentary way Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. The Syria real wage series is based on his work, and is, to the best of my knowledge, the first systematic use of it. Karpat, “Ottoman Emigration to America,” is an excellent survey of Ottoman emigration to the Americas.
J. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 66–70.
Frank Cavaioli, “Patterns of Italian Immigration to the United States,” Catholic Social Science Review 13 (2008): 220. Underlying population data are from www.populstat.info.
Pierre Sicsic, “Foreign Immigration and the French Labor Force, 1896–1926,” in Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, eds., Migration and the International Labor Market, 1850–1939 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), p. 119.
Population data are from Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2003); and www.populstat.info.
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© 2015 Paul Caruana Galizia
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Caruana Galizia, P. (2015). Global Migration and Wage Convergence. In: Mediterranean Labor Markets in the First Age of Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400840_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400840_7
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