Global Economic History is listed as title number 282 in Oxford's Very Short Introduction series. It is numbered just after such titles of moment as Jesus, Viruses, Derrida, Madness, and Dictionaries. Titles with at least tangential relevance to economic history did weigh in considerably earlier such as Marx at 28, Engels at 91, and perhaps of more pertinence, Capitalism at 108, and The Great Depression and New Deal at 166. Robert Allen, quite undaunted by such ordering, opens this volume by trumpeting economic history as “the queen of the social sciences.”

On the inside front flap, Oxford's Very Short Introductions are described as aspiring to be “expert, concise, but far from bland.” Allen has produced a volume that complies with all three criteria. He does not shy away from offering provocative generalizations while displaying admirable command of literatures spanning a broad chronological and geographical range. At almost 150 pages, albeit duodecimo ones, and organized into nine chapters, Allen's book provides more depth than one might expect from the “very short” moniker. Yet his exposition is pithy and lucid.

As Allen suggests, cliometricians have been particularly active in recent years in engaging with global perspectives. Whereas in the early days of cliometrics some fifty years ago, efforts at quantification focused on the United States and Britain, more recently they have been active in developing quantitative sources for China, the Ottoman Empire, and Latin America among other regions of the world. A further spur to global comparison has been prompted by the California School associated with Kenneth Pomeranz among other historians who argue that China and other regions of Asia were far more poised to undergo industrialization and modern economic growth in the late eighteenth century than previously recognized.

This leads Allen to start his book with the great divergence question: when and why did some countries of the world come to experience far more rapid growth in income per capita than other countries resulting in the large disparities in income per capita observed throughout the world today? After locating emergence of the great divergence in the sixteenth century, he then explicates how Western opening up of global commerce set the foundations for this divergence centuries before the start of industrialization. His exposition of early British industrialization and the subsequent rapid growth of the United States and Western Europe as well as sluggish growth in Africa, Latin America, and India features Allen's induced innovation view of the determinants of technology, articulated at fuller length in his other recent publications. High labor and low-energy costs led Britain to mechanize industry early while low labor costs made the resulting high productivity manufacturing technologies unsuitable for Sub-Saharan Africa or India. Allen certainly acknowledges the role not only of geography but of culture, intellectual environment, and institutions though he devotes rather less attention to these nonmaterial factors than some might prefer.

But in addition to technology, Allen also features rather prominently the role of policy. He identifies “the standard development strategy” (p. 41) that he argues that initially the United States and then Germany employed to first catch up with and then surpass Britain in industrial output and technological prowess. This strategy, according to Allen, consisted of four policies: 1) integrating markets through improving transportation infrastructure, 2) use of tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing, 3) government chartering of banks to stabilize currency and finance, and 4) promotion of mass schooling to facilitate invention and diffusion of technology. Allen argues, however, that the efforts of Imperial Russia and Japan to apply this standard model in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of Latin American countries to do so later in the twentieth century yielded only modest gains. Instead, he asserts in his final chapter that what promoted the rapid economic growth experienced in the mid-twentieth century by the Soviet Union and Japan as well as more recently in post-Mao China and in South Korea was the shift by these economies from Allen's “standard” set of policies to what he terms “Big Push industrialization.” He defines this as “constructing all the elements of an advanced economy—steel mills, power plants, vehicle factories, cities, and so on—simultaneously” (p. 131). After offering many provocative and sweeping claims, Allen concludes with a more agnostic epilogue acknowledging that which of the many policies pursued by rapidly growing countries were most effective remains actively contested and that it is uncertain whether policies effective in one country could be so elsewhere.

Given his space limits, Allen's account is remarkably comprehensive in its geographical coverage. His chapter on the Americas devotes extended attention to South as well as North America. And he devotes a separate chapter to Africa. His chapter titled “The Great Empires” devotes less space to empires as such than it does to textiles in a discussion of the impact of globalization on deindustrializing China and India. While Asia does not get a chapter of its own, Japan does get extended treatment in the chapters on latecomer and big push models of industrialization. China and India are not neglected, but they could arguably have been given fuller treatment.

Both Allen's panoramic empirical comparisons and his ready policy interpretations of the sources of economic growth invite challenge. However, the more serious limitations of the book may be those of omission. First, Allen does not acknowledge let alone engage with accounts of global divergence that go back to Paleolithic times such as that of Jared Diamond and more recently of Ian Morris. Second, while not unaware of the presence of other issues in economic history, such as those of income inequality and the political economy of government policy, these are subordinated to the great divergence question.

Nevertheless, Allen's book provides a quite valuable pedagogical resource. It offers a model for undergraduate majors of cogent applied economics. Its modest price and readability make it attractive as an assigned textbook. And instructors may find Allen's attention-grabbing figures and provocative explanations helpful in preparing their own lectures.