Searchers, not Planners 
Joe Perkins
- Making Globalisation Work: The Next Steps to Global Justice by Joseph Stiglitz
- The Next Great Globalisation: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich by Frederic Mishkin Buy this book
- The 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 Buy this book
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.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Joe Perkins is a fellow in economics at All Souls College, Oxford.
print layout
tell a friend