Robert Allen

Global Distinguished Professor of Economic History Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA Carleton College, MA and PhD Harvard Univesity

bob.allen@nyu.edu

Research Websites: Re-Counting the Past

Research Areas: Economic History, Technological Change, Public Policy

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Bob Allen is a Global Distinguished Professor of Economic History at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and a Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He received his doctorate from Harvard University. He lectured at the University of British Columbia from 1975 to 2001. He was then a Professor of Economic History at Oxford University until 2014, when he joined NYU AD.

Allen has written on why some countries are rich and others poor, the causes and consequences of industrialization, English agricultural History, the extinction of whales, the origins of the coal economy, communist economic development, the global History of wages, prices, and living standards, and the measurement of global poverty. He is currently researching and writing on the economic and political structure of Arabia and on the origins of agriculture and the first states.

His books include Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850 (1992), Farm to Factory: A Re-interpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (2003), The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009), Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (2011), and The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (2017). Global Economic History has been translated into fourteen languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Korean, Basque, and Greek).

Allen’s books and articles have won prizes, including the Arthur H. Cole Prize, the Fritz Redlich Prize, the Gyorgy Rank Prize (twice), and the Explorations Prize (twice). His book on the British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective was chosen as a book of the year by the Economist and the Times Literary Supplement.

Bob Allen was president of the Economic History Association in 2012-3. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Canada.