ABSTRACT
By comparison with the nineteenth century, the twentieth has been very much more turbulent, both economically and politically. Two world wars and a great depression are sufficient to substantiate this claim without invoking the problems of more recent times. Yet despite these setbacks Europe’s economic performance in the present century has been very much better than anything recorded in the historical past, thanks largely to the superboom conditions following the post-Second World War reconstruction period. Thus in the period 1946-75, or 1950-73, the annual increase in total European GNP per capita was 4.8 and 4.5 per cent respectively, as against a compound rate of just under 1 per cent in the nineteenth century (1800-1913) and the same during the troubled years between 1913-50. As Bairoch points out, within a generation or so European per capita income rose slightly more than in the previous 150 years (1947-75 by 250 per cent, 1800-1948 by 225 per cent) and, on rough estimates for the half-century before 1800, by about as much as in the preceding two centuries.1
