EH.R: Economic history of the world

What immediately comes to my mind is that in Sidney Pollard's _Wealth and Poverty: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century_ (Oxford University Press, 1990) there are time lines of key events and developments for each 15 year interval he covers, some 6 in all. However, since each of these time lines has some 6 dimensions, I am not sure the end result is much of a "nutshell" overview --and that just covers the twentieth century. Another more nutshell overview you might look at is the plot of World population against time from 1 million B.C. to the present with key economic developments noted above. This plot is included in various pieces by Robert Fogel--one being if I recall his American Econocmics Association Presidential address and published in the American Economic Review; he uses it to exhibit the idea of techno-physio evolution. Michael Kremer also uses it in his 1990 Quarterly Journal of Economics article on population growth and technical change. It is also printed in Douglass North's recent book, _Understanding the PRocess of Economic Change_ (PRinceton, 2005) on p.89. This does plot in one graph key economic developments against time for all of human history. David Mitch University of Maryland Baltimore County >