Big Economic History

Abstract

This paper reviews the history of human economic activity from the time Homo sapiens appeared to the present. The first aim is to provide a coherent narrative of the economic history of this period. The second aim is to quantify economic activities where time series data is available and to use economic theory to explain the trends and turning points. It examines the history of three central time series – the aggregate human population, output per capita and human‐induced species extinctions. It concludes with some brief observations on the contribution of Big Economic History to Big Human History.

New Approaches to Economic History

“…This is a particularly interesting case as several big historians, economic historians and others have put forward a mathematical function that purports to describe the time path of human population and some have described this result as a law. (Korotayev (2018) and Lloyd (2021) list several studies.) The first of these was by the engineers Von Foerster et al (1960).…”

“…I have recently coined the term big economic history (Lloyd, 2021). The scope of big economic history is limited to the time scale of the human history, roughly the last 300,000 years, and it is further limited to an examination of the economic activities only of the human species.…”

“…I am critical of the conclusion that the hyperbolic function describes the time path of world aggregate population (Lloyd, 2021). First, I note that, while the authors produce a good fit statistically, the fitted function does not pick up the accelerations in the growth of human population that occurred in the demographic transitions that happened in the neolithic revolution, the industrial revolution and the period post 1950.…”

“…All of these have been advanced in specific instances of migration. (See Bellwood (2013) and Lloyd (2021) for discussion.) Finding the causes of migrations calls for the use of a panel database of many migration observations at different times and locations.…”

Agro-Technological Systems in Traditional Agriculture Assistance: A Systematic Review

“…Homo sapiens began to expand around the world less than 100,000 years ago, despite this it was not until 13,000 B.C. when the Agricultural Revolution began [1]; the postice age in ad hoc to Holocene climates in stationary tropical and temperate latitudes, mainly [2]. Since then, various agricultural practices have emerged worldwide in diverse cultures.…”