In Avoiding Previous Blunders, Virginia Postel discusses the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, a five-volume set just published by Oxford University Press that, according to its preface, “covers nothing less than the entire material existence of the human past”:
Did you know that the oldest records of chemical pest control date back 4,500 years, to Sumerian farmers who used sulfur compounds to kill insects and mites?Or that a century ago, railroad companies accounted for half the securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange? (Before the railroads, with their huge demand for capital, securities markets traded almost entirely in government debt.)
Or that in 1850, shoemaking employed more workers in the United States than any other manufacturing business?
The past doesn’t look quite like we tend to picture it: many of the people who got rich from the Industrial Revolution were not industrialists, but landowners who held urban real estate or property with access to water power or mines. From 1880 to 1914, unions went on strike at least 50 times to stop American employers from hiring black workers. Above all, Professor Mokyr says, ‘in the Middle Ages and in classical antiquity, the destitute were the vast majority of the population.’