Growth and inequality at the center of the dialogue between Thomas Pickett and Kenneth Pomeranz

It experienced dazzling economic growth from the middle of the 18th century^e century, is Western Europe inseparable from its colonial domination of other continents, and especially from the enslavement of Africans? Are slavery and colonialism factors that explain current inequalities between nations and, in the richest nations, between social classes, which are increasingly “racialized” by the legacy of slavery and immigration from former colonies?

These issues, laden with ideological and political stakes, merited a debate between the economist who knew how to put the question of inequality at the top of his discipline’s agenda, Thomas Pickett, and the historian who opened the debate about the origins of the “roots”. The Big Difference’ between Europe and the rest of the world in the 19th century^e Century, Kenneth Pomeranz.

for Thomas Pickett, big difference Kenneth Pomeranz’s flagship book, published in 2000, and his own book A Brief History of Equality, Published in 2021 – “The one that best sums up the message I want to convey”, It specifies – not two different or mutually exclusive stories, but a complementary story.

In big difference He observes, says the American historian “A very important role” Towards slavery and colonization, the rise of European power and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: 75% of the cotton produced in Europe comes from the first half of the 19th century.^e century, slave plantations in the southern United States.

But, adds Thomas Pickett, Kenneth Pomeranz also demonstrated the central role of environmental constraints. Massive deforestation since the 14th century^e The century pushes the Europeans – and above all the British, who destroyed their forests to build a navy – to loosen the ecological constraint by globalization of trade to seize other resources, other lands, before monopolizing them only and only a second time through colonial conquest. In 1830, the United Kingdom imported products equivalent to 1.5 to 2 times more arable land than was available on its territory.

Materials accounting

True, economists have disputed the weight of colonial trade in Britain’s economic boom, noting that it represented only 2% of UK gross domestic product (GDP) at the time. But Thomas Pickett contrasts this strictly monetary accounting with material accounting, an approach he also credits with Pomeranz’s work. How could British industry be raised, asks the French economist, without deporting millions of slaves who produce tons of cotton, without the capital, social prestige, and political influence of slave traders and colonial producers?