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Peer Vries



Professor of Economic and Social History, University of Vienna

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:
July 2016

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:
»Japan and the Great Divergence«

Project outline:
Japan was the first major, non-Western country that industrialized and knew modern economic growth. It took off already before 1914 and for many decades it was the only non-Western »developed«, country. In debates on the Great Divergence it, however, strangely enough up until now is all but absent. I want to put Japan fully on the map of global economic history: it is a big, important country historically and an extremely interesting case theoretically. A new analysis and interpretation of the case of Japan from new theoretical perspectives / new theories about growth in economics and in a new global historical perspective as that emerged in the many texts on the Great Divergence is long overdue. My approach will be systematically comparative: I will compare the case of Japan with a) the claims made in the most recent theories about economic growth and b) with the claims made in the most recent analyses in global economic history about the origins of modern economic growth and the Great Divergence. (Peer Vries)

Research partner:
Peer Vries folgt der Einladung von Werner Plumpe (Professor für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte an der Goethe-Universität) und dem Historischen Kolleg des Forschungskollegs Humanwissenschaften.

Scholarly profile of Peer Vries


Peer Vries ist Professor für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte an der Universität Wien. Er studierte und promovierte an der Universität von Leiden und war dort bis 1997 hauptsächlich in der Lehre tätig. Mit einer interdisziplinären Perspektive und einem Schwerpunkt auf ökonomischen und sozialen Aspekten lehrte er vor allem globale Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Methodologie der Geschichtswissenschaft und Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit.

Er ist am Posthumus Institute aktiv, einem Zusammenschluss zu Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte forschender Wissenschaftler aus den Niederanden und Belgien, sowie der European graduate School for Training Economic and social-historical Research (ESTER), einem Netzwerk von etwa 50 europäischen Universitäten, in dessen Rahmen er Doktoranden mit Forschungsvorhaben auf dem Feld der Globalgeschichte betreut.

Peer Vries ist darüber hinaus Mitglied der Academia Europaea und war Mitglied des European Research Councils for the Study of the Human Past. Er war Mitgründer des Global Economic History Network sowie des Journal of Global History und ist Herausgeber von The Library of Economic History Association sowie Redaktionsmitglied von der Global Economic History Series.

Main areas of research:
Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, Globalgeschichte, Vergleichende Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Ursprünge des modernen Wirtschaftswachstums, die Frage nach der Entstehung und dem Fortbestand der »Great Divergence«

Selected publications:
  1. Review of Sven Beckert's: »Empire of Cotton: A Global History«, New York 2014, In: Journal Of World History, Vol. 28, 1 (forthcoming spring 2017).
  2. »What we do and do not know about the Great Divergence at the beginning of 2016«, in: Historische Mitteilungen der Ranke Gesellschaft (im Erscheinen).
  3. »Economic reasons of state in Qing China: a brief comparative overview«, in: Philipp Rössner (Hg.), Economic growth and the origins of modern political economy: Economic reasons of state, 1500 – 2000, Abingdon, Oxon und New York: Routledge 2016, S. 204-220 (im Erscheinen).
  4. »States: A subject in global history«, in: Catía Antunes und Karwan Fatah-Black (Hg.), Explorations in globalization and history, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge 2016, S. 155-176.
  5. State, economy and the Great Divergence. Great Britain and China, 1680s to 1850s, London: Bloomsbury Publishing 2015.
  6. Escaping poverty. The origins of modern economic growth, Wien und Göttingen: V&R-Unipress 2013.
  7. Zur politischen Ökonomie des Tees. Was uns Tee über die englische und chinesische Wirtschaft der Frühen Neuzeit sagen kann, Wien: Böhlau 2009.
  8. Global history, Innsbruck und Wien: StudienVerl 2009.
  9. Via Peking back to Manchester: Britain, the Industrial Revolution, and China, Leiden: Research School CNWS 2003.

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