TY  - JOUR
AU  - O'Rourke,Kevin H.
AU  - Williamson,Jeffrey G.
TI  - After Columbus: Explaining the Global Trade Boom 1500-1800
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8186
PY  - 2001
Y2  - March 2001
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8186
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8186.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Kevin H. O'Rourke
All Souls College
Oxford University
Oxford OX1 4AL, UK
Tel: + 44 (0)1865 279 348
Fax: 353-1-6772503
E-Mail: kevin.orourke@all-souls.ox.ac.uk

Jeffrey G. Williamson
350 South Hamilton Street #1002
Madison, WI 53703
Tel: 608-441-0023
Fax: 608-204-0783
E-Mail: jwilliam@fas.harvard.edu
AB  - This paper documents the size and timing of the world inter-continental trade boom following the great voyages in the 1490s of Columbus, da Gama and their followers. Indeed, a trade boom followed over the subsequent three centuries. But what was its cause? The conventional wisdom in the world history literature offers globalization as the answer: it alleges that declining trade barriers, falling transport costs and overseas 'discovery' explains the boom. In contrast, this paper reports the evidence that confirms unambiguously that there was no commodity price convergence between continents, something that would have emerged had globalization been a force that mattered. Thus, the trade boom must have been caused by some combination of European import demand and foreign export supply from Asia and the Americas. Furthermore, the behavior of the relative price of foreign importables in European cities should tell us which mattered most and when. We offer detailed evidence on the relative prices of such importables in European markets over the five centuries1350-1850. We then offer a model which is used to decompose the sources of the trade boom 1500-1800.
ER  -