Mediterranean Labor Markets in the First Age of Globalization

The "Law of One Price" holds that, in an integrated market, sellers flock to the highest price. Using new data on real wages, Caruana Galizia analyses the extent to which regions around the Mediterranean were part of the same labor market during the nineteenth century. Scholars have studied this period of unprecedented international labor flows, or "first globalization," in a global and specific country context, but have lacked a systematic and comprehensive study of the world's old economic core, the Mediterranean. Important questions, once unanswered, are explored in this work, such as: If the Mediterranean labor market really was integrated, then why did globalization affect the Western and Eastern Mediterranean so differently? Why did wage inequality rise in the East while it fell in the rest of the labor-abundant periphery? More broadly, was low emigration from Iberia and the East to blame for the Mediterranean's failed integration with the fast-expanding global economy? This ground-breaking research addresses these questions, relating them to ongoing historical debates on the intensity of intra-Mediterranean integration in goods and labor, to current heated debates on the pressures of North African emigration to Europe, and to discussions on European economic integration more generally. The historical view that the author takes provides an antidote to "presentist" accounts of Mediterranean migration as a particularly late-twentieth century issue.