Very subjective reading. British imperialism was not about beating other colonial powers, it was about projecting ideology and the way of life. Its main tool was forcing opium dependency on Chinese population, country is not sovereign as long as significant part of the population is controlled by foreign criminals through physical addiction. What's happening now is a classic imperial boomerang: the West is dependent on Chinese technology, majority of AI engineers are Chinese, at least by descent, and fentanyl is likely a deadly drug deployed by some forces inside China.
As for wealth, what difference does GDP make when half of the population has not even 500$ stashed away, building a house is an impossible dream and a single health problem can make you bankrupt for life?
China is 1.5 billion people with average education level way above USA, those not smart enough to go to college there go to USA and found startups there. The idea that China depends on the western innovation is logically extremely strange. They do need to use Western frameworks to make their technologies accessible in the west, but that's all. I have a gadget from China worth about 10$ which is a thing you put inside your ear and it provides AI-powered on the fly translation in 160 languages. And that's just the most primitive gadget from China you can get
Thanks for the recommendation. This is going on my to read list.
However, I think Heinlein captured the essence of it.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This framing gives Europe the credit for prosperity through internal virtues, yet the primary engines of European wealth came from empire: the transatlantic slave economy, plantation extraction, resource seizure, and enforced global trade routes. European corporations and guilds sat on top of capital created through conquest and coerced labour.
China’s nineteenth-century collapse emerged through warfare, narcotics trade, indemnities, and treaty systems imposed by Britain. These events reshaped state capacity far more forcefully than kinship structures or cultural traits.
A global history of enrichment gains clarity when every source of wealth stands in view: innovation, exchange, and scholarship alongside extraction, violence, and the redirection of global wealth into European financial systems. Without this, the narrative shifts toward an older civilisational hierarchy rather than a full account of how the modern world was built.
So why was China so inventive earlier (and it continued to be inventive in various areas), and now leads in some areas? Has its culture changed so rapidly?
The case of agriculture is instructive - 'invented' in only some seven or eight areas around the globe, despite foragers intimate knowledge of plants and animals. The archaeology and genetics show that in almost every case, agriculturists displaced or eradicated foragers, despite long contact and the worse individual lives of agriculturists. Adoption was rare, absorption not the majority. In short, the leap was made under pressure, not as a consequence of a rise in 'wealth'. Given the varied settings, it cannot be ascribed to culture.
Moving to industry needed to be done only once, as it happened in an inter-connected world. It still involved enormous social upheaval and was adopted again under pressure (including the need to compete politically or be extinguished). Tapping fossil fuels took some time - it was six decades from Newcomen to Watt, in which time steam power had very limited applications and basically needed free fuel. It drew on knowledge of vacuum effects - pioneered in those havens of liberal thought, Germany and Italy. There is no reason to believe that wealth in itself or Lockean nostrums (note that Locke was involved in seizing Irish and native American land) would lead inexorably to the breakthrough.
Thanks for a very interesting review. Two Paths to Prosperity seems to have a few things in common with Joseph Henrich's The Secret of our Success and The Weirdest People of the World. And further back we have Carl Sagan who in his conclusion of Cosmos pointed to the Mediterranean Sea which made it harder to sustain centralized control and easier to exchange ideas and goods.
How much do the authors lean on Scheidel's _Escape from Rome_? Or do they arrive at his same thesis (that the collapse of the Roman Empire and the lack of any centralized replacement was a key long-run driver of the European Great Enrichment) independently?
Very subjective reading. British imperialism was not about beating other colonial powers, it was about projecting ideology and the way of life. Its main tool was forcing opium dependency on Chinese population, country is not sovereign as long as significant part of the population is controlled by foreign criminals through physical addiction. What's happening now is a classic imperial boomerang: the West is dependent on Chinese technology, majority of AI engineers are Chinese, at least by descent, and fentanyl is likely a deadly drug deployed by some forces inside China.
As for wealth, what difference does GDP make when half of the population has not even 500$ stashed away, building a house is an impossible dream and a single health problem can make you bankrupt for life?
China is 1.5 billion people with average education level way above USA, those not smart enough to go to college there go to USA and found startups there. The idea that China depends on the western innovation is logically extremely strange. They do need to use Western frameworks to make their technologies accessible in the west, but that's all. I have a gadget from China worth about 10$ which is a thing you put inside your ear and it provides AI-powered on the fly translation in 160 languages. And that's just the most primitive gadget from China you can get
Thanks for the recommendation. This is going on my to read list.
However, I think Heinlein captured the essence of it.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck.”
Europe managed to have less 'bad luck'.
This framing gives Europe the credit for prosperity through internal virtues, yet the primary engines of European wealth came from empire: the transatlantic slave economy, plantation extraction, resource seizure, and enforced global trade routes. European corporations and guilds sat on top of capital created through conquest and coerced labour.
China’s nineteenth-century collapse emerged through warfare, narcotics trade, indemnities, and treaty systems imposed by Britain. These events reshaped state capacity far more forcefully than kinship structures or cultural traits.
A global history of enrichment gains clarity when every source of wealth stands in view: innovation, exchange, and scholarship alongside extraction, violence, and the redirection of global wealth into European financial systems. Without this, the narrative shifts toward an older civilisational hierarchy rather than a full account of how the modern world was built.
So why was China so inventive earlier (and it continued to be inventive in various areas), and now leads in some areas? Has its culture changed so rapidly?
The case of agriculture is instructive - 'invented' in only some seven or eight areas around the globe, despite foragers intimate knowledge of plants and animals. The archaeology and genetics show that in almost every case, agriculturists displaced or eradicated foragers, despite long contact and the worse individual lives of agriculturists. Adoption was rare, absorption not the majority. In short, the leap was made under pressure, not as a consequence of a rise in 'wealth'. Given the varied settings, it cannot be ascribed to culture.
Moving to industry needed to be done only once, as it happened in an inter-connected world. It still involved enormous social upheaval and was adopted again under pressure (including the need to compete politically or be extinguished). Tapping fossil fuels took some time - it was six decades from Newcomen to Watt, in which time steam power had very limited applications and basically needed free fuel. It drew on knowledge of vacuum effects - pioneered in those havens of liberal thought, Germany and Italy. There is no reason to believe that wealth in itself or Lockean nostrums (note that Locke was involved in seizing Irish and native American land) would lead inexorably to the breakthrough.
Thanks for a very interesting review. Two Paths to Prosperity seems to have a few things in common with Joseph Henrich's The Secret of our Success and The Weirdest People of the World. And further back we have Carl Sagan who in his conclusion of Cosmos pointed to the Mediterranean Sea which made it harder to sustain centralized control and easier to exchange ideas and goods.
What a terrific book review: encapsulating ideas plainly and encouraging further investigation.
How much do the authors lean on Scheidel's _Escape from Rome_? Or do they arrive at his same thesis (that the collapse of the Roman Empire and the lack of any centralized replacement was a key long-run driver of the European Great Enrichment) independently?
Not sure if they cite him there are many many citations