How the social organisation of Europe and China shaped their divergent economic and political trajectories over the past millennium.
In the eleventh century, when Europe was still backward and poor, China was a rich and sophisticated civilisation. Yet Europe became the birthplace of democracy and the Industrial Revolution, driving the Great Enrichment, while China stagnated until the end of the twentieth century and was always ruled by autocracies. Two Paths to Prosperity traces the emergence of two very different social organisations in premodern China and Europe the clan and the corporation showing how they were key factors in the economic and political divergence of these two great civilisations.
In this landmark book, three leading economists offer a bold new account of why Europe and China evolved along such different trajectories. In the early Middle Ages, public goods like risk sharing, religious worship, education, and conflict resolution were provided by nonstate organizations in both societies. China increasingly relied on kin-based cooperation within clans, while weaker kinship ties in Europe gave rise to corporations such as guilds, universities, and self-governing towns. Despite performing similar functions, clans and corporations were built on very different principles with lasting consequences until today.
Providing a novel answer to a fundamental question in economic and political history, Two Paths to Prosperity shows how extended kinship in Chinese society facilitated the consolidation of autocracy and hindered innovation and economic development, and how corporations in Europe influenced emerging state institutions and set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.
About the Author :
Avner Greif is the Bowman Family Endowed Professor Emeritus in Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
Joel Mokyr, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University and Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University.
Guido Tabellini is the Intesa Sanpaolo Chair in Political Economics and Vice President at Bocconi University.
Review :
"A New Yorker Best Book of the Year"
"A Financial Times Summer Read"
"A thousand years ago, as Europeans waded through the Middle Ages, their Chinese contemporaries were living in a civilization that was among the most sophisticated in the world. So why, in the centuries that followed, did Europe become richer and more powerful than China? In their ambitious history, Greif, Mokyr (a winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics), and Tabellini suggest that cultural values and social organizations helped establish divergent paths. Confucianism held sway in China, where kinship groups managed local life. But in Europe, where family bonds were looser, strangers cooperated in organizations such as guilds and self-governing towns—institutions that gave rise to capable states, flourishing markets, and the Industrial Revolution."
"Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini and Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr bring contemporary social science to bear on the key junctures in European and Chinese history. Along the way, they explore the most fundamental causes of growth, freedom, and innovation that led to the Industrial Revolution and still matter today."---Dr. James Herndon, Asian Review of Books
"[This] book is exemplary."---Paul Seabright, Times Literary Supplement
"[Two Paths to Prosperity] addresses the fundamental question of why Europe and then European offshoots, notably the US, managed to get so far ahead of the other great civilisations, including China’s, both technologically and economically, between the 17th and 20th centuries…. The argument is eye-opening"---Martin Wolf, Financial Times
"Wonderful. . . . I'm a big fan of your new book."---Tyler Cowen, Conversations with Tyler
"In Two Paths to Prosperity, Greif, Mokyr, and Tabellini apply their formidable analytical powers to explaining the divergent trajectories followed by China and Western Europe."---Graham Brownlow, Economic History Review
"The book is an impressive work written by three academics at the top of their field. While little of what is offered is new, it presents a remarkable synthesis of previous research by the authors as well as that of numerous scholars in the field of economic history. Indeed, it is difficult to do justice to the vast breadth of scholarship on offer, as the book enters into dialogue with myriad voices to digest the economic, social and political evolution of Eurasia over the past millennium. It is an example of interdisciplinary scholarship at its finest, using work across different fields to create a coherent and contextualised portrait of multi-regional development across time."---James Hodgson, LSE Review of Books
