Growth, we are told, is the principal good and chief preoccupation of the modern world – widely viewed as the most influential economic idea of the 20th century, a condition showing little real sign of diminishing in the early decades of the 21st (Schmelzer, 2016). With remarkable speed and uniformity, an economic notion of development has become installed at the heart of our global values – the core purpose of human society, the primary goal of policy making, and our collective secular religion (McNeill, 2000; Taylor, 2009; Smil, 2019). In 1909, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote: ‘[t] o the modern scientist, the phenomena of growth and change are the … most consequential facts observable in economic life’ (Veblen, 1909).

The idea that growth is the natural condition of human society is curious in at least two respects. First because it is a relatively recent phenomenon. For almost 2,000 years, up to the middle of the 18th century, expansion in global economic output was negligible (Figure 1.1). And second because as a strategy for advancing the human race, economic growth appears to be rapidly running out of road (De Long, 1988; Szreter, 2003; Steffen et al, 2015).

This is not to suggest that wealth was somehow absent from the world prior to the Industrial Revolution. Rather that prosperity was created and consumed without being captured through systemic processes of investment and productive development. Long-run average growth in England between 1270 and 1750 appears to flatline at, or close to, zero. But a closer look shows rapid micro-cycles of expansion and contraction between + 5 per cent and -5 per cent (Broadberry and Wallis, 2017). Pre-industrial societies were just poorly equipped to preserve and build on these growth spurts – to channel additional productivity to further productive use.

Trade between Europe, Asia, Iberia, Africa and the Americas blossomed between 1350 and 1700. But wealth – concentrated among social and political elites in the midst of gruelling, largely agrarian subsistence – was valued primarily as a matter of consumption and display, designed to manifest the prestige and political power of sultans, popes and princelings, providing collateral and securing lines of credit to pay for military action and territorial conquest (Jardine, 1996).