Searchers, not Planners

Joe Perkins

• BuyMaking Globalisation Work: The Next Steps to Global Justice by Joseph Stiglitz
  Allen Lane, 358 pp, £20.00, September 2006, ISBN 0 7139 9909 8
• BuyThe Next Great Globalisation: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich by Frederic Mishkin
  Princeton, 310 pp, £17.95, October 2006, ISBN 0 691 12154 0
• BuyThe White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly
  Oxford, 380 pp, £16.99, September 2006, ISBN 0 19 921082 9

Complaints about the impact of economic globalisation are not new. On 9 December 1719, in response to the growth in cotton imports from India, the merchants and traders of Bristol submitted a petition to the House of Commons claiming that ‘the visible decay of the Woollen Stuff Manufacture must be attributed to the almost general wearing of India Chints, Callicoes and Linen . . . whereby many Thousands that were employed, are ruined, and the Poor unemployed, which, if not timely prevented, will be most fatal to the Woollen Manufacture.’ Dozens of similar petitions eventually met with success: the 1721 Calico Act prohibited the importing of Indian cottons for domestic consumption. From Chinese cigarette manufacturers concerned by imports of Marlboros, to American computer technicians whose jobs are under threat from outsourcing to India, many firms and workers would like similar policies to be adopted today.