Economy How Far Back in Time Have Historians Estimated the Rate of Economic Growth and the Economic Power of Various Empires History Stack Exchange

economy - How far back in time have historians estimated the rate of economic growth and the economic power of various empires? - History Stack Exchange #

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I’m wondering if historians have figured out a way to combine historical datasets perhaps by using some kind of economic equivalent of Dendrochronology, where lots of different historical datasets …

Prior to mechanization and exploiting alternative energy sources (like fossil fuels, wind and water), the economic unit we really care about was the calorie.

Societies lived and died on how many calories of food it produced for people, which determined the workforce size. How much work did it require to generate those calories? How much surplus work was available to be harnessed?

And animals became just another way to turn food calories into work.

We can see this happening in the relatively recent era. Malthusianism describes how a society gets richer, generates more food, has a population increase, and the wealth per person falls back to near-starvation levels. Then a disease or famine hits, the population falls, and food production doesn’t fall as far, resulting in a society richer per person, and population growth occurs as fewer children die in infancy.

Graphs of (estimated) GDP per capita vs (estimated) population levels produce this relatively neat feedback loop, as increased wealth per person leads to increased population which drops wealth which causes population to fall, which increases wealth per person, etc.

Modern industrial societies have escaped this trap, with a quite small percentage of labour and societies’ available energy being spent on feeding humans. Without being “trapped” with most of our energy being put towards food, we use work to solve other problems - build mines, infrastructure, devices, etc - that in turn yield more work output. This causes a divergence in the GDP per capita - the economic activity we can do per person - that the pre-industrial world never experienced anything of similar magnitude.

And we have relatively good data going back to the edge of this industrialization, where the vast majority of the “work” a society does is dedicated to producing food to feed the people. And you can’t get much poorer than this, because if you do your population starves, and to the best of our ability to tell nobody got much richer (per capita) than this.

This, in turn, means we can look at the infrastructure projects and work out how many food calories it would take to build them - how many worker-hours as well as animal-hours - and look at the total capacity of the society (in terms of calories of food grown) and compare those two numbers.

This information is often available even if more detailed economic data is missing. Taxes are often levied on food produced, for example, so we have extensive records of food production levels. For the Egyptians, we even have records of employment - from salary negotiations, labour disputes, etc - going back 1000s of years, plus information about how the various structures were built (we know how the Egyptians built pyramids because they wrote it down and we can read it - ignore the “ancient mysteries” nonsense).

There are a few limits to our knowledge. Like, how hard was it to produce those levels of food? But even there we can find census information, and make assumptions.