The imperial roots of global trade

Abstract

Throughout history empires facilitated trade within their territories by building and securing trade and migration routes, and by imposing common norms, languages, religions, and legal systems, all of which led to the accumulation of imperial capital. In this paper, we collect novel data on the rise and fall of empires over the last 5000 years, construct a measure of accumulated imperial capital between countries, and estimate its relationship with trade patterns today. Our measure of imperial capital has a positive and significant effect on trade beyond potential historical legacies such as sharing a language, a religion, a legal system, or links via natural trade and invasion routes. This suggests a persistent and previously unexplored influence of long-gone empires on current trade.

Real Effects of Information Frictions: When the States and the Kingdom Became United

“…The variance of the price difference falls by even more, by 93 percent. 7 Are these drops causally related to the transatlantic telegraph? The troublesome history of that connection is in favor of this interpretation: the timing of its success was driven by technical "luck" and the weather affecting the advancement of the cable-laying steam-ship and its ability to locate and repair breaks.…”

Connected and extracted: Understanding how centrality in the global wheat supply chain affects global hunger using a network approach

“…The centrality measures point to the importance of countries who are critical to the supply chain, beyond quantity and volume. Centrality measures point to the importance of and the effect of early nation states establishing supply routes and also the later empire building efforts of these states—Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—through colonization [ 27 ]. With the exception of Germany, France and Russia, the other top European countries (based on volume) by centrality measure are not significant exporters of wheat and wheat by-products.…”

“…While Belgium’s interests mainly targeted African countries (Congo DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tangiers) [ 48 ], the Dutch were far more prolific in their efforts and established colonies beyond Africa, in Asia, North America, and Europe as well [ 49 ]. These trading routes long established on the backs of the slave trade and colonial rule, allow countries such as Belgium and Netherlands to be nourished through their exertion of path dependent influence, despite their own lack of production capacity [ 26 , 27 ]. Other countries that exhibit similar levels of nourishment despite production capacity, also tend to have high degrees of centrality in the wheat network—with Samoa being the exception.…”

“…Though scholars also find that trade does not improve nutrient adequacy of low/lower-middle income countries substantively, and that on average low/lower-middle income countries imported 70% less foods to meet adequacy needs than upper-middle/high income countries [ 25 ]. Evidence also suggests that the growth experienced by western countries was in large part due to their colonizing efforts, that allowed colonizers access to better trade routes and ports of entry in Africa and Asia [ 26 , 27 ]. The accumulation of such imperial wealth through the usurpation of indigenous property indicates the importance of positionality in trade to nation building and we argue access to nourishment.…”

Imperial Rule and Long-Run Development: Evidence on the Role of Human Capital in Ottoman Europe

“…On the one hand, an influential body of scholarship (Acemoǧlu et al, 2001;Dell, 2010;Lee & Schultz, 2012) suggests that certain forms of imperial rule were particularly detrimental, even if the extent of this phenomenon and the causal mechanisms underlying it are still elusive. On the other hand, an emerging stream of work (Becker et al, 2016;Gökmen et al, 2017;Wahl, 2017) identifies some positive effects of imperial rule on long-run development. We contribute to this debate by considering an imperial experience that is important but relatively little understood, that of Ottoman rule in Europe.…”