Deadline: April 8, 2023
Center for the History of Global Development – Shanghai University
There are two principal master narratives about modern global development. One is a positive story of significantly improved quality of life for people around the world. This perspective is especially taken by scholars studying health. Over the last 200 years, people around the world have grown taller and lived longer, the result mainly of better nutrition, better housing, better clothing, higher incomes, more tax revenues and better healthcare policies. Despite an eight-fold increase of the global population since 1800, the percentage of malnourished has steadily decreased, and the rate of people dying of famine has dropped to a tiny fraction of those at any time during the last two centuries. Angus Maddison has documented the spectacular (albeit unequal) growth in global wealth, while Robert Fogel and Dora Costa have demonstrated the intertwined character of the changes in human bodies and inventions: better nutrition and living standards have enabled people to work with more strength and better cognitive abilities for longer hours, resulting in further improvements in nutrition and living conditions in a “techno-physio evolution” of continuous improvements. Nobel Prize laureate Angus Deaton has framed such improvements in health and living standards as “escapes” from earlier fates of hunger and premature death. Steven Pinker has argued that modern societies have kept becoming more peaceful, with violence increasingly exceptional and considered outside of accepted social norms, and the late public health specialist Hans Rosling, insisted on the overall positive tendencies of world development in a book aptly entitled Factfulness: Ten Reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think (2018).
Continue reading “CFP: Integrating Histories of Development: the Good, the Bad, and the Joined (Shanghai University)”
