Daniel Speich

The use of global abstractions: national income accounting in the period of imperial decline

This article explores the history of a conceptual world economic order of nations created by statistically minded economists over the last seventy years. Drawing upon work by Colin Clark, Richard Stone, and Simon Kuznets from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, it reconstructs the rise of new economic indicators referring to economic inequality. Two forms of intellectual practice can be identified that characterized a remarkable shift in knowledge production in Anglo-American economics in the period of French and British imperial decline. One was new methods of counting and comparing income, which produced a sensational new view of the world as a place of enormous poverty. The other was the belief that these issues could be solved by applying a limited set of policy recommendations to all economies in the world.

Draining the Marshlands, Disciplining the Masses: The Linth Valley Hydro Engineering Scheme (1807-1823) and the Genesis of Swiss National Unity

The first large-scale hydro technical project of modern Switzerland, the Linth Valley hydro engineering scheme (1807‐1823), has been considered to be ‘a great moral endeavour’. The paper asks, what historical conditions made it possible to conceive of hydro technical engineering in moral categories? Following the political views of the main promoter of the scheme, Hans Konrad Escher (1767‐1823), it shows, that within a specific ideological framework no clear-cut distinctions were drawn between the natural, the technical and the social. Rather, within this early example of environmental management, genuinely technical means of engineering were successfully used to address both urgent political and social problems of the time. The main argument is, that the act of draining marshlands successfully promoted national unity and set important preconditions for the later to be founded liberal nation state.

Travelling with the GDP through early development economics’ history

In the vast body of development theoretical knowledge one element has been of a considerable longevity: the abstraction of a Gross Domestic Product to represent a given economic entity. This paper suggests approaching the history of development thinking by travelling with the GDP through this discourse. The GDP has been contested as an indicator of economic development ever since it was first put to use in the 1940s. However, the specific mode of knowledge which is expressed in this abstraction has opened up a quite universally shared frame of reference in which a North-South-Divide became operational. The paper argues that GDP figures have become facts that travel easily across the globe because constant work is being undertaken to uphold the conditions for their mobility. Based on this observation the development endeavour can be located historically in a manifold constellation of the statistical acquisition of economic insight, political utopia, state intervention, the emerging prospect of economic planning in capitalist and noncapitalist systems and the quest for the international standardization of economic knowledge production.