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In 2002, the former chief economist of the World Bank, François Bourguignon, and the French development expert Christian Morrisson published an article entitled 'Inequality among world citizens: 1820-1992'.1 Even though the authors used mainly historical data from the past two centuries, the article - published in the American Economic Review - was primarily directed at an economic audience. For most members of the profession, the findings of this enquiry were indeed surprising and challenged conventional wisdom. Bourguignon and Morrisson argued that the disparity in the worldwide distribution of income and wealth has worsened nearly continuously during the past two centuries, except for the crisis-torn 1930s and 1940s. However, the structure of inequality has changed over time. Whereas, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inequality was mainly due to differences within countries, after 1945 it was due to differences between countries. Consequently, in a long-term perspective, the problem of inequality has shifted from a national to a global level.
These findings gave rise to controversy. While many development experts saw their long-standing claim reaffirmed that fostering economic equality constituted the single most important challenge to contemporary global governance, other economists questioned the methodology of Bourguignon and Morrisson. By integrating microeconomic surveys of 138 countries between 1970 and 2000 and population-weighted national accounts into a World Distribution Index (WDI), Xavier Sala-i-Martin presented a completely different picture.2 According to the WDI, global poverty rates declined significantly over the last three decades. In particular, the internal dynamics of the two largest national populations of the world - India and China - had produced wealth that remained unaccounted for in many other studies. Sala-i-Martin concluded: 'The world might just be in a better shape than many of our leaders believe!'3
This controversy paradigmatically displays how strongly the present debate on global inequality is based on historical arguments. Moreover, it underlines that these controversies take place in a highly abstract mode of knowledge production that is, in itself, the result of the intellectual history of the twentieth century. With this special issue, we wish to open up new research trajectories dealing with the genesis of such abstract knowledge claims. At the same time, however, we place them in the context of...