Path dependence, time lags and the birth of globalisation: A critique of O'Rourke and Williamson

In a recent issue of the European Review of Economic History (vol. 6, 2002, pp. 23–50), Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson dismiss claims by ‘World historians…[who] argue that globalisation is a phenomenon which stretches back several centuries, or even several millennia’ (p. 23). Rather, O'Rourke and Williamson insist that ‘[g]lobalisation did not begin 5, 000 years ago, or even 500 years ago. It began in the early nineteenth century. In that sense, it is a very modern phenomenon’ (p. 47). O'Rourke and Williamson offer an explicit model of world trade that predicts specific outcomes; and they marshal empirical evidence to support their contention that there was no global economy until the early decades of the nineteenth century.