1.1 Education and Globalization in the Long Run
Today, human capital is recognized as one of the core determinants of economic growth, and a component of human development and well-being (Hanushek and Woessmann 2012; United Nations Development Programme 2016). Human capital is broadly defined as the skills and abilities possessed by individuals (Goldin 2016) and can be measured by numeracy, literacy and standardized test scores capturing cognitive capabilities. Although human capital can be acquired through channels that are independent from formal education, like experience and learning-by-doing in the workplace, the two concepts are almost seen as synonyms in modern society—even though they are not the same thing.
Mass schooling, as measured by primary school enrollments and school expenditures, has risen dramatically in the last two centuries. This evolution was mirrored by a decided growth in the extent of globalization: apart from a setback between World War I and World War II, international flows of goods and services, capital and people have intensified, a phenomenon prompted by technological progress and falling transport costs, as well as improvements in communications, leading to both commodity and factor price convergence.
This generalized path of global human capital accumulation hides remarkable national and regional disparities. Researchers have relied on age-heaping as a proxy for numeracy in the past (A’Hearn et al. 2009), showing that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, almost the whole population of North-Western European countries possessed some basic numerical abilities (Crayen and Baten 2010). Despite this, in 1870, the only areas of Western Europe where literacy had spread substantially were the France, Germany and Great Britain (Pamuk and van Zanden 2010). However, throughout much of the rest of the World in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, exposure to primary education was still uncommon. Primary school enrollment rates in most of Latin America ranged between 15 and 45 percent in 1900 (Frankema 2009; Chaudhary et al. 2012); according to Benavot and Riddle (1988), in the same year, primary enrollment rates stood at below 20 percent in most Asian countries, with the exception of Japan (c. 50 percent); according to Frankema (2012), in 1938, average school enrollment rates in sub-Saharan Africa still ranged from 5 to 20 percent. Today, average world primary school enrollments fluctuate around 100 percent. World adult literacy rates are approaching 90 percent (they stood at 86 percent in 2016), but average adult literacy rates within sub-Saharan Africa are still as low as 64 percent, being around 57 percent for women.1
A substantial increase in globalization—which we define as the integration of labor, goods and capital markets on a global scale—is also suggested by various measures. For example, during a first wave of globalization (1820–1914), substantial commodity-price convergence between countries has been documented (Neal 2015, p. 212, Fig. 10.2), together with the convergence of government-bond yields across industrial-core nations (Neal 2015, p. 188, Fig. 8.2) and falling trans-oceanic transport costs (Hatton and Williamson 2005, p. 38, Fig. 3.1, p. 41, Table 3.3). Most importantly for the growth of schooling and human-capital flows, gross migration has increased remarkably in the second half of the nineteenth century and until World War I (Hatton and Williamson 2005, Chapter 2, pp. 73, 75; Bandiera et al. 2013), prompting falling international wage dispersion by amplifying the mechanism of factor price convergence (Hatton and Williamson 2005, Chapter 6). Openness began to decline with a globalization backlash starting in the late nineteenth century, coming abruptly to an end with World War I. The interwar period saw the attempt at restoring international cooperation—as shown by the willingness to resume the gold standard—which failed in the face of the 1929 crisis and growing nationalism.
After the disruptions created by World War II, integration and cooperation was achieved in the postwar period through Bretton Woods and other important institutional agreements, with further liberalization and capital-market integration starting in the 1980s (Eichengreen 2008). Indeed, figures on long-term trade and openness have underlined several similarities, and some differences, between a first (1820–1914) and second (post-1970) globalizations; likewise, while aggregate measures of the extent of financial integration and migration show a high integration of international markets during the late nineteenth century as well as today, specific features of capital and labor flows—directions, participating countries, etc.—differ substantially (Schularick 2006; Gibson and Jung 2006).
Both the striking increase in mass education and the growing extent of global market integration have been studied extensively; yet, the two aspects have never been explicitly linked in a comprehensive analysis of the spread of schooling worldwide, particularly in the very long run. The analysis of schooling and education policy in a long-term perspective remains mostly linked to the investigation of national case studies and national school acts, although important attempts at understanding how national school legislation interacts with local socioeconomic, cultural and institutional conditions to determine education through a genuine comparative perspective have been made (Westberg et al. 2019). Alternatively, studies based on a global and transnational perspective have tried to connect globalization and education but have remained mostly focused on the last few decades. Finally, one aspect that is crucial but neglected by several analyses of the issue is diversity across world regions and countries, such as cultural diversity and varying power structures—the latter referring to, e.g., different colonial education projects aimed to train colonial elites serving the metropole (Jackson 2016). Likewise, changes in economic incentives due to globalization, like returns to education, opportunity costs and employment opportunities, should be addressed by analyses linking globalization and human capital accumulation.
1.2 Globalization and Education: Toward an Interpretative Framework
Several studies in economics and economic history have aimed at shedding light on the relationship between national education policy and national, regional and local conditions—such as the demand for education given employment opportunities, skill premia and the opportunity cost of schooling; yet, they have done so mostly neglecting the role of global forces as important determinants of education.
Within this line of research, a link between the empowerment of the masses and the development of publicly funded schooling has been highlighted (see Mitch 2013 for an extensive overview): In the case of nineteenth-century Prussia, Cinnirella and Hornung (2016) show that high landownership inequality hampered the diffusion of schooling; a similar argument is advanced by Beltrán Tapia and Martinez-Galarraga (2018) concerning pre-industrial, nineteenth-century Spain. Both articles are consistent with the hypothesis elaborated by Lindert (2004) and tested for the mid-nineteenth-century USA by Go and Lindert (2010). The authors find that more extended electoral franchise did result in increased school financing for publicly funded schools, although the final outcome was conditional on the concentration of decision-making power in the hand of elites—i.e., the existence of more or less restricted ruling classes. More mixed results are found for other countries. For example, in both Sweden and Austria in the long nineteenth century, there seems to be no quantitative evidence of a negative relationship between the strength of elites and schooling. Cvrcek and Zajicek (2019) explore a school reform undertaken in Imperial Austria in 1869. According to their analysis, large landowners were (mildly) in favor of school modernization, while urban and business interests supported public schooling. They find that the strongest opposition to promoting mass education came from rural areas, where the suffrage was most numerous. Similarly, Andersson and Berger (2018) support a traditional thesis in the historiography of Sweden’s development, arguing that landed elites advanced mass schooling as part of their historical role...