1 00:00:05,580 --> 00:00:12,390 This is my one and only slide, but I've neglected to put the title of this talk on which I'll just read very quickly to you. 2 00:00:12,390 --> 00:00:24,120 Cosmological foundations for the promotion of embryo science technologies and products and process technologies. 3 00:00:24,120 --> 00:00:30,060 That's in reference to Johal in pre-industrial Europe and late imperial China. 4 00:00:30,060 --> 00:00:31,980 And I want to thank Chris, Rowena, 5 00:00:31,980 --> 00:00:40,110 Jeremy and Andrew for the pleasure of being here and the pleasure of being on a panel with some old and very good friends. 6 00:00:40,110 --> 00:00:47,640 And to seeing so many of my old friends here today who've been with me for some years is in an evangelical way. 7 00:00:47,640 --> 00:00:56,250 Pros Enticing for the development of global history Most of us here have been participants in 8 00:00:56,250 --> 00:01:04,410 a if not the most famous debate in comparative economic history that aspires to become global, 9 00:01:04,410 --> 00:01:10,590 floated long ago as 1981 was, Jeremy said by Erik Jones in the European Miracle. 10 00:01:10,590 --> 00:01:14,460 The current debate is now 22 years old. I mean, it's a thought, isn't it? 11 00:01:14,460 --> 00:01:23,760 We've been talking about this for 22 years and was initiated by four books published at the turn of the millennium by Roy Bean. 12 00:01:23,760 --> 00:01:30,150 One. David Land is going to Frank and, above all, Ken Pomeranz. 13 00:01:30,150 --> 00:01:36,840 I intend to deploy the 20 minutes at my disposal to addressing as briefly as I 14 00:01:36,840 --> 00:01:43,050 can with just one theme in the debate that has endeavoured to explain when, 15 00:01:43,050 --> 00:01:50,730 how and why. A cluster of national economies at the western end of Eurasia attained levels of 16 00:01:50,730 --> 00:01:56,850 labour productivity and income per capita that left the great empires of the west, 17 00:01:56,850 --> 00:02:06,510 south and East Asia for some centuries in a state of stasis or relative backwardness and geopolitical vulnerability. 18 00:02:06,510 --> 00:02:08,880 That's the pomerantz question. 19 00:02:08,880 --> 00:02:18,240 We should all be grateful to the California school and also to the World Systems School of Immanuel Wallerstein, who's just died recently, 20 00:02:18,240 --> 00:02:28,080 and he first stimulating this debate and for rescuing the economic history at the end of the 20th century from the doldrums that it was in. 21 00:02:28,080 --> 00:02:33,090 This has been an exciting debate and we've all really enjoyed being in it, 22 00:02:33,090 --> 00:02:43,290 and they've published a range of questions and theses that have reflected back on our own work as we worked on Europe. 23 00:02:43,290 --> 00:02:48,960 The great divergence by Can is especially memorable because it's replete with assertions, 24 00:02:48,960 --> 00:02:54,870 hypotheses and fruitful areas enough to become a classic in the field. 25 00:02:54,870 --> 00:03:02,460 It is truly global in scope and scale, and as I said, it's done a great deal for our subject. 26 00:03:02,460 --> 00:03:13,620 The when question we had this morning and I'm going to leave that really alone, but the chronology is really a very important question to to answer. 27 00:03:13,620 --> 00:03:21,780 And that's why, as Joel said, we have spent a lot of us have spent years and years on the tedious task of trying to measure real wages 28 00:03:21,780 --> 00:03:29,160 and GDP because it's very important to have a chronology because it's part of our explanatory framework. 29 00:03:29,160 --> 00:03:35,730 And the Pomeranz book would not stand up without a peculiar and particular technology. 30 00:03:35,730 --> 00:03:41,580 I mean, he says, the gap emerges very late goal and I firmly believe together. 31 00:03:41,580 --> 00:03:49,800 I hope I'm not misquoting you, Joe, that it started much earlier. David Landis thought it started a thousand years before that. 32 00:03:49,800 --> 00:03:54,990 It started in the early Middle Ages, and mediaeval estate will no doubt agree with that sentiment. 33 00:03:54,990 --> 00:04:05,760 But anyway, so that's the so that's really I'm not going to do that because I've written three papers, as I said this morning with my good colleague, 34 00:04:05,760 --> 00:04:08,850 the content in World Economics, 35 00:04:08,850 --> 00:04:17,940 the Journal of World History and in the economic history of you saying that the cow's net him paradigm really is very, very difficult. 36 00:04:17,940 --> 00:04:23,340 The further east you go, it was always very difficult to do anything about the Roman of Empire. 37 00:04:23,340 --> 00:04:28,830 But when you get to the Ottoman Empire or the mogul empire, let alone the Ming Chen period, 38 00:04:28,830 --> 00:04:36,150 it is extremely difficult to find the kind of numbers that Simon Kuznets himself would have said. 39 00:04:36,150 --> 00:04:42,780 Those numbers will actually do. They are plausible conjectures at the moment. 40 00:04:42,780 --> 00:04:49,800 I don't think we even have plausible conjectures. That was the thrust of the three papers that I wrote. 41 00:04:49,800 --> 00:04:59,890 My view is that given the absence of secure and plausible macro statistical data for the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman and other empires that. 42 00:04:59,890 --> 00:05:04,960 First to these airports as a whole, which is what we're trying to do, 43 00:05:04,960 --> 00:05:12,310 that all we can do is to compare a familiar range of institutions recognised by economists, 44 00:05:12,310 --> 00:05:19,900 sociologists, anthropologists and historians as obstructive or promotional for economic growth. 45 00:05:19,900 --> 00:05:25,890 I mean, movie discussing this theory since Doug Norths famous book, so we know quite a lot now. 46 00:05:25,890 --> 00:05:33,160 And he thought quite hard and long about the nature of the institutional preconditions for economic growth. 47 00:05:33,160 --> 00:05:38,680 And we can see whether they were absent or present in these great empires. 48 00:05:38,680 --> 00:05:47,320 And to what degree at the end of a long career in economic history, which goes way back to 1960, 49 00:05:47,320 --> 00:05:56,350 allow me to assert that there is or never will be a generally accepted theory amongst us for economic growth. 50 00:05:56,350 --> 00:05:59,290 We've been working along these lines for years. 51 00:05:59,290 --> 00:06:08,830 Nevertheless, amongst the multiplicity of factors and inputs that are promotional for that desirable process. 52 00:06:08,830 --> 00:06:16,120 And this has been virtually ignored by the California school and delegated by recent postmodern scholarship, 53 00:06:16,120 --> 00:06:23,950 is the view of the luminous and complex literature of cultures as if the cultures of Christendom. 54 00:06:23,950 --> 00:06:30,640 Let's, let's use the right word. It's a contentious word as permeated by modern science. 55 00:06:30,640 --> 00:06:38,860 I mean, that's that's what I'm going to be talking about. That permeation was present in the Middle Ages was gradual. 56 00:06:38,860 --> 00:06:48,190 Cyclical. Subject to repression and confined to a tiny bit increasing segment of European societies. 57 00:06:48,190 --> 00:06:52,030 John Hughes's vital few, which Joel was talking about. 58 00:06:52,030 --> 00:06:55,510 But he had a different view to few from the few that I have in mind, 59 00:06:55,510 --> 00:07:02,020 and my view is a little bit bigger than his when he gave a very good lecture at the academy this week. 60 00:07:02,020 --> 00:07:07,090 This statement has become Eurocentric and contentious. 61 00:07:07,090 --> 00:07:18,550 Cultural permeation almost certainly accelerated between the times of Copernicus died in fifteen forty three and Newton, who died in 1727. 62 00:07:18,550 --> 00:07:26,230 The so-called scientific revolution, which I think was the label given to that particular period by Butterfield. 63 00:07:26,230 --> 00:07:28,240 He happens to be at Cambridge, but never mind. 64 00:07:28,240 --> 00:07:37,480 None of us are perfect and and his followers insist on designating that period as the Scientific Revolution, 65 00:07:37,480 --> 00:07:45,130 which has occupied a great deal of time in the history of science because there are those who say it was a non-event. 66 00:07:45,130 --> 00:07:49,990 There were those who say it was socially constructed and there were those who like myself 67 00:07:49,990 --> 00:07:55,030 and the present professor at this university who should be drawn into this meeting. 68 00:07:55,030 --> 00:08:03,130 Actually, I'm sorry he's not here. Rob Olive, who does believe that science in some sense, was an autonomous variable, 69 00:08:03,130 --> 00:08:11,200 an input into the process of technological change, and I hope Joel actually agrees with that particular position. 70 00:08:11,200 --> 00:08:17,770 The cultural permeation that mattered for modern economic growth characterised by structural change 71 00:08:17,770 --> 00:08:25,060 and a discernible rise both in labour and total factor productivity to use the conciliation, 72 00:08:25,060 --> 00:08:35,770 language based upon process and product innovation occurred amongst the wealthy political and educated elites of Western societies, 73 00:08:35,770 --> 00:08:39,130 supplemented as Joel would tell you, 74 00:08:39,130 --> 00:08:48,070 by an artisanal class which was particularly strong in Great Britain that were particularly important in the British case. 75 00:08:48,070 --> 00:08:57,670 It emanated from a Cosmo Griffin, which I will define as a set of beliefs about the natural world and prospects for its manipulation, 76 00:08:57,670 --> 00:09:06,250 which I've put in that last quote there. So what I'm doing in this lecture is moving from Mary Wright's famous quote. 77 00:09:06,250 --> 00:09:08,980 Dagmar Talking probably knows that quote very well. 78 00:09:08,980 --> 00:09:16,840 She's a very famous with her husband, two very famous sinologists who I very much like to, to Jeffrey Lloyd, 79 00:09:16,840 --> 00:09:26,040 who's a classical scholar at Cambridge and also to Mason City in another very distinguished sinologists who wants to talk about what I'm about. 80 00:09:26,040 --> 00:09:30,640 Say some words about just a few was I'm not going to say very much, 81 00:09:30,640 --> 00:09:37,880 because the ratio of assertion to evidence in this paper is because I'm given just 20 minutes. 82 00:09:37,880 --> 00:09:42,340 Very, very, very, very low. Very, very low. 83 00:09:42,340 --> 00:09:48,940 But if you want to know more, I do have a number of working papers that I can refer you to and the number of published 84 00:09:48,940 --> 00:09:55,630 papers which will substantiate things that I'm simply going to assert in the loud voice, 85 00:09:55,630 --> 00:10:00,700 which I trust. James, you can hear me at the back. Is that okay? Right? 86 00:10:00,700 --> 00:10:05,080 Given us some analysts who unmeasurable degree, 87 00:10:05,080 --> 00:10:14,380 which worries all economic historians when you can't measure a thing, it's not a fact or it's probably a fake. 88 00:10:14,380 --> 00:10:23,860 The social evolution of an optimistic cosmology that could only have been promotional for productivity growth in agriculture, 89 00:10:23,860 --> 00:10:32,350 industry and services has become essential for historians who aspire to write and analyse divergence in 90 00:10:32,350 --> 00:10:39,700 order to ascertain if the evidence at their disposal like this support the traditional euro centred, 91 00:10:39,700 --> 00:10:50,290 not Eurocentric view. Because that's why I put those first two quotes and I stand on those quotes that long-run growth is inherently cyclical. 92 00:10:50,290 --> 00:10:58,210 It passes from location to location and has passed, as Needham pointed out, from east to west. 93 00:10:58,210 --> 00:11:06,120 And the question is when did that actually happen? 94 00:11:06,120 --> 00:11:14,590 And that supported the Eurocentric view that the Cosmos Griffey embraced by European statesmen, entrepreneurs, 95 00:11:14,590 --> 00:11:25,060 educated elites and I will add Joe artisans became distinctive enough to be represented as differentially significant. 96 00:11:25,060 --> 00:11:36,650 So the divergence rates of material progress achieved by this cluster of western European economies, which Joel insists was led by the British. 97 00:11:36,650 --> 00:11:45,970 And we're all very grateful to our American cousins for keeping us alive in this time of need with strong praise of that kind. 98 00:11:45,970 --> 00:11:56,680 We fall back on the past because the present is so dreadful to come from it, so it's all that great on the other side. 99 00:11:56,680 --> 00:12:05,260 So, I mean, the story is that Europe's western national economy economies actually embraced this 100 00:12:05,260 --> 00:12:13,120 optimistic cosmology before the great empires of Asia and before the accession of the Ming and 101 00:12:13,120 --> 00:12:20,050 thirteen sixty eight and the period during the period up to and including the Industrial 102 00:12:20,050 --> 00:12:26,440 Revolution to respond what is possibly an announcer or question they would have to read. 103 00:12:26,440 --> 00:12:28,510 If you're a historian with this view. 104 00:12:28,510 --> 00:12:38,320 You have to read and absorb what may be a whole impossibly long library of literature in many branches of history, 105 00:12:38,320 --> 00:12:44,020 particularly the histories of science published about the cosmological beliefs and 106 00:12:44,020 --> 00:12:50,560 dispositions present in the cultures and institutions of the Great Eastern Empires, 107 00:12:50,560 --> 00:12:56,290 the Ming Ching Empire, the mogul Ottoman the Safavid and the wrote Roman of Empire. 108 00:12:56,290 --> 00:12:58,990 And to see how they contrasted, 109 00:12:58,990 --> 00:13:09,970 where they contrasted and with what significance they contrasted with Western Europe and its settlements overseas, as Simon Kuznets called them. 110 00:13:09,970 --> 00:13:20,140 So the major question for such an awesome programme of reading research is what kind of what I call regimes for the discovery, 111 00:13:20,140 --> 00:13:24,910 development and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge. 112 00:13:24,910 --> 00:13:35,740 The phrase used by Simon Kuznets was operating and evolving across Eurasia before Western science and science is engendered. 113 00:13:35,740 --> 00:13:45,520 A dominant and universal cosmos Buffy the hunt for the comprehension and manipulation of the natural world. 114 00:13:45,520 --> 00:13:54,130 When how and why did the Western way of investigating nature actually achieve hegemony? 115 00:13:54,130 --> 00:13:59,080 I mean, that's what we economic historians have been trying to answer. 116 00:13:59,080 --> 00:14:03,160 So I'm going to stop now because I've just got this conclusion. 117 00:14:03,160 --> 00:14:11,890 After reading nothing more than a fraction of that vast literature on the histories of evasion of science, technology, religion, 118 00:14:11,890 --> 00:14:23,380 cultures and supervising persons who happen to have the linguistic credentials required to engage with major narratives that included India, 119 00:14:23,380 --> 00:14:32,410 Japan, China and the Islamic world and compared them and tried to compare them with the regimes to Europe. 120 00:14:32,410 --> 00:14:44,200 I remain a euro centred and possibly Eurocentric scholar and believe that namely for some three centuries preceding a serious national 121 00:14:44,200 --> 00:14:56,500 breakthroughs into the accelerated growth of total factor and labour productivity and standards of living was accompanied by structural change, 122 00:14:56,500 --> 00:15:05,170 was prima facie established by Western Europe and gradually consolidated into regimes that modern regimes 123 00:15:05,170 --> 00:15:13,680 that we now recognise with scientific disciplines and techno science for the development of economies. 124 00:15:13,680 --> 00:15:20,020 I've published circulated two working papers, which in essence had little to what I've just said. 125 00:15:20,020 --> 00:15:27,580 The brevity of this thesis. And I had very little to what Joseph Needham told us many decades ago. 126 00:15:27,580 --> 00:15:38,290 I'm a confirmed neophyte. This is the classical seminal study that this paper or my papers really rest upon. 127 00:15:38,290 --> 00:15:44,260 Furthermore, none of the postdocs that I work with for three years at the London School of Economics on this make 128 00:15:44,260 --> 00:15:52,300 it question came up with evidence or views that the regime's comparable to the regime in Europe, 129 00:15:52,300 --> 00:15:58,720 operating and evolving above all in China. But more clearly in Islam, 130 00:15:58,720 --> 00:16:06,550 Dong is the most I've forgotten his name now called it India or Japan could be 131 00:16:06,550 --> 00:16:12,700 convincingly represented as anything other than very different and potentially 132 00:16:12,700 --> 00:16:18,010 less productive for the formation of a cosmos mcguffey or set of metaphysical 133 00:16:18,010 --> 00:16:24,700 beliefs that was promotional for the formation of useful and reliable knowledge. 134 00:16:24,700 --> 00:16:34,870 Although in this hour time of climate change, the cosmos of Imperial China, dogma is beginning to look much more prescient. 135 00:16:34,870 --> 00:16:37,480 Although you have described it in your great book, 136 00:16:37,480 --> 00:16:49,900 which I've read recently as a scattered landscape of individual reactions rather than a linear, unified and corpus of knowledge in the making. 137 00:16:49,900 --> 00:16:56,950 Now I think that's a wonderful quote, and I'm going to use it with your permission very often, and I hope you don't contradict what I've just said. 138 00:16:56,950 --> 00:17:04,060 So this is these are my assertions. They can be read in working papers and they can be read in published articles. 139 00:17:04,060 --> 00:17:08,500 And I'm now going to finish not on time, but I hope very much on time. 140 00:17:08,500 --> 00:17:13,520 Thank you so much. Thank you.