China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy,
reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained
economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China?
Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the
nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest
of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of
research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political
differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible
both for China s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe s
difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early
industrialization.
Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how
economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative
prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of
institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on
institutional change has surprising implications for understanding
modern transformations in China and Europe and for future
expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic
history, essential to any larger social science account of modern
world history.
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