Should history change the way we think about populism?

This paper asks whether history should change the way in which economists and economic historians think about populism. We use Müller's definition, according to which populism is ‘an exclusionary form of identity politics, which is why it poses a threat to democracy’. We make three historical arguments. First, late-nineteenth-century US Populists were not populist. Second, there is no necessary relationship between populism and anti-globalization sentiment. Third, economists have sometimes been on the wrong side of important policy debates involving opponents rightly or wrongly described as populist. History encourages us to avoid an overly simplistic view of populism and its correlates.Open access funding provided by IReLNYUAD Social Science Facult

Four great Asian trade collapses

This paper introduces a new dataset of commodity-specific, bilateral import data for four large Asian economies in the interwar period: China, the Dutch East Indies, India and Japan. It uses these data to describe the interwar trade collapses in the economies concerned. These resembled the post-2008 Great Trade Collapse in some respects but not in others: they occurred along the intensive margin, imports of cars were particularly badly affected, and imports of durable goods fell by more than those of non-durables, except in China and India which were rapidly industrialising. On the other hand the import declines were geographically imbalanced, while prices were more important than quantities in driving the overall collapse

The political economy of the interwar years

This thesis is a collection of essays on the political economy of the interwar years. It aims to address two of the most prominent and characteristic aspects of the interwar international economy; the break-up of the Gold Standard system and the rise of trade protectionism. I argue that extensions to the franchise are crucial to understanding both of these phenomena. Using evidence based on macro-level panel data analysis, micro-level public opinion surveys as well as numerous qualitative sources, I construct an argument that stresses the importance of these changes in voting rights to economic policy decisions; changes that can help explain the unusual nature of the interwar international economy. The effect of the extended franchise will not be examined in isolation however, with the influence of a number of other important aspects of the political and economic environment also taken into consideration. As arguably the most interesting and novel result of these analyses is the suggested effect of the granting of voting rights to women, the voting preferences of women are examined more closely in an additional chapter using a unique record of women’s voting from Weimar Germany. This allows for the difference between men and women’s actual voting preferences to be explored, something that is usually impossible due to the use of secret ballots. The fact that the separation of votes by gender occurred during one of the most important periods in modern history gives the analysis an even greater significance