出版社：American Sociological Association Section on Political Economy of the World System
摘要：This paper reviews the growing body of evidence on the relative e conomic standing of different regions of t he world in the late eighte enth and early nine teent h cent uries. In general, it doe s not find support for Euro-cent ric claims regarding Western Europe's early e conomic le ad. The Eurocentric claims are based primarily on e stimates of per capita income, which are plagued by conceptual problems, make demands on historical data that are generally unavailable, and use ques-tionable assumptions to reconstruct early pe r capita inco me. A careful examination of these conjectural estimates of per capita income , howe ver, do es not support claims that Western Europe had a subst ant ial lead over the rest of the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. An examination of several alternat ive indices of living st andards in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth cen-turies—such as real wage s, labor productivity in agriculture, and urbanizat ion—also fails to confirm claims of European superiority. In addition, this paper examines the progress of global disparities—including the presence of regional patterns—using estimates of per capita income
