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.
Cosmological foundations for the promotion of embryo science technologies and products and process technologies.
That's in reference to Johal in pre-industrial Europe and late imperial China.
And I want to thank Chris, Rowena,
Jeremy and Andrew for the pleasure of being here and the pleasure of being on a panel with some old and very good friends.
And to seeing so many of my old friends here today who've been with me for some years is in an evangelical way.
Pros Enticing for the development of global history Most of us here have been participants in
a if not the most famous debate in comparative economic history that aspires to become global,
floated long ago as 1981 was, Jeremy said by Erik Jones in the European Miracle.
The current debate is now 22 years old. I mean, it's a thought, isn't it?
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.
One. David Land is going to Frank and, above all, Ken Pomeranz.
I intend to deploy the 20 minutes at my disposal to addressing as briefly as I
can with just one theme in the debate that has endeavoured to explain when,
how and why. A cluster of national economies at the western end of Eurasia attained levels of
labour productivity and income per capita that left the great empires of the west,
south and East Asia for some centuries in a state of stasis or relative backwardness and geopolitical vulnerability.
That's the pomerantz question.
We should all be grateful to the California school and also to the World Systems School of Immanuel Wallerstein, who's just died recently,
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.
This has been an exciting debate and we've all really enjoyed being in it,
and they've published a range of questions and theses that have reflected back on our own work as we worked on Europe.
The great divergence by Can is especially memorable because it's replete with assertions,
hypotheses and fruitful areas enough to become a classic in the field.
It is truly global in scope and scale, and as I said, it's done a great deal for our subject.
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.
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
and GDP because it's very important to have a chronology because it's part of our explanatory framework.
And the Pomeranz book would not stand up without a peculiar and particular technology.
I mean, he says, the gap emerges very late goal and I firmly believe together.
I hope I'm not misquoting you, Joe, that it started much earlier. David Landis thought it started a thousand years before that.
It started in the early Middle Ages, and mediaeval estate will no doubt agree with that sentiment.
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,
the content in World Economics,
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.
The further east you go, it was always very difficult to do anything about the Roman of Empire.
But when you get to the Ottoman Empire or the mogul empire, let alone the Ming Chen period,
it is extremely difficult to find the kind of numbers that Simon Kuznets himself would have said.
Those numbers will actually do. They are plausible conjectures at the moment.
I don't think we even have plausible conjectures. That was the thrust of the three papers that I wrote.
My view is that given the absence of secure and plausible macro statistical data for the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman and other empires that.
First to these airports as a whole, which is what we're trying to do,
that all we can do is to compare a familiar range of institutions recognised by economists,
sociologists, anthropologists and historians as obstructive or promotional for economic growth.
I mean, movie discussing this theory since Doug Norths famous book, so we know quite a lot now.
And he thought quite hard and long about the nature of the institutional preconditions for economic growth.
And we can see whether they were absent or present in these great empires.
And to what degree at the end of a long career in economic history, which goes way back to 1960,
allow me to assert that there is or never will be a generally accepted theory amongst us for economic growth.
We've been working along these lines for years.
Nevertheless, amongst the multiplicity of factors and inputs that are promotional for that desirable process.
And this has been virtually ignored by the California school and delegated by recent postmodern scholarship,
is the view of the luminous and complex literature of cultures as if the cultures of Christendom.
Let's, let's use the right word. It's a contentious word as permeated by modern science.
I mean, that's that's what I'm going to be talking about. That permeation was present in the Middle Ages was gradual.
Cyclical. Subject to repression and confined to a tiny bit increasing segment of European societies.
John Hughes's vital few, which Joel was talking about.
But he had a different view to few from the few that I have in mind,
and my view is a little bit bigger than his when he gave a very good lecture at the academy this week.
This statement has become Eurocentric and contentious.
Cultural permeation almost certainly accelerated between the times of Copernicus died in fifteen forty three and Newton, who died in 1727.
The so-called scientific revolution, which I think was the label given to that particular period by Butterfield.
He happens to be at Cambridge, but never mind.
None of us are perfect and and his followers insist on designating that period as the Scientific Revolution,
which has occupied a great deal of time in the history of science because there are those who say it was a non-event.
There were those who say it was socially constructed and there were those who like myself
and the present professor at this university who should be drawn into this meeting.
Actually, I'm sorry he's not here. Rob Olive, who does believe that science in some sense, was an autonomous variable,
an input into the process of technological change, and I hope Joel actually agrees with that particular position.
The cultural permeation that mattered for modern economic growth characterised by structural change
and a discernible rise both in labour and total factor productivity to use the conciliation,
language based upon process and product innovation occurred amongst the wealthy political and educated elites of Western societies,
supplemented as Joel would tell you,
by an artisanal class which was particularly strong in Great Britain that were particularly important in the British case.
It emanated from a Cosmo Griffin, which I will define as a set of beliefs about the natural world and prospects for its manipulation,
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.
Dagmar Talking probably knows that quote very well.
She's a very famous with her husband, two very famous sinologists who I very much like to, to Jeffrey Lloyd,
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.
Say some words about just a few was I'm not going to say very much,
because the ratio of assertion to evidence in this paper is because I'm given just 20 minutes.
Very, very, very, very low. Very, very low.
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
papers which will substantiate things that I'm simply going to assert in the loud voice,
which I trust. James, you can hear me at the back. Is that okay? Right?
Given us some analysts who unmeasurable degree,
which worries all economic historians when you can't measure a thing, it's not a fact or it's probably a fake.
The social evolution of an optimistic cosmology that could only have been promotional for productivity growth in agriculture,
industry and services has become essential for historians who aspire to write and analyse divergence in
order to ascertain if the evidence at their disposal like this support the traditional euro centred,
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.
It passes from location to location and has passed, as Needham pointed out, from east to west.
And the question is when did that actually happen?
And that supported the Eurocentric view that the Cosmos Griffey embraced by European statesmen, entrepreneurs,
educated elites and I will add Joe artisans became distinctive enough to be represented as differentially significant.
So the divergence rates of material progress achieved by this cluster of western European economies, which Joel insists was led by the British.
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.
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.
So, I mean, the story is that Europe's western national economy economies actually embraced this
optimistic cosmology before the great empires of Asia and before the accession of the Ming and
thirteen sixty eight and the period during the period up to and including the Industrial
Revolution to respond what is possibly an announcer or question they would have to read.
If you're a historian with this view.
You have to read and absorb what may be a whole impossibly long library of literature in many branches of history,
particularly the histories of science published about the cosmological beliefs and
dispositions present in the cultures and institutions of the Great Eastern Empires,
the Ming Ching Empire, the mogul Ottoman the Safavid and the wrote Roman of Empire.
And to see how they contrasted,
where they contrasted and with what significance they contrasted with Western Europe and its settlements overseas, as Simon Kuznets called them.
So the major question for such an awesome programme of reading research is what kind of what I call regimes for the discovery,
development and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge.
The phrase used by Simon Kuznets was operating and evolving across Eurasia before Western science and science is engendered.
A dominant and universal cosmos Buffy the hunt for the comprehension and manipulation of the natural world.
When how and why did the Western way of investigating nature actually achieve hegemony?
I mean, that's what we economic historians have been trying to answer.
So I'm going to stop now because I've just got this conclusion.
After reading nothing more than a fraction of that vast literature on the histories of evasion of science, technology, religion,
cultures and supervising persons who happen to have the linguistic credentials required to engage with major narratives that included India,
Japan, China and the Islamic world and compared them and tried to compare them with the regimes to Europe.
I remain a euro centred and possibly Eurocentric scholar and believe that namely for some three centuries preceding a serious national
breakthroughs into the accelerated growth of total factor and labour productivity and standards of living was accompanied by structural change,
was prima facie established by Western Europe and gradually consolidated into regimes that modern regimes
that we now recognise with scientific disciplines and techno science for the development of economies.
I've published circulated two working papers, which in essence had little to what I've just said.
The brevity of this thesis. And I had very little to what Joseph Needham told us many decades ago.
I'm a confirmed neophyte. This is the classical seminal study that this paper or my papers really rest upon.
Furthermore, none of the postdocs that I work with for three years at the London School of Economics on this make
it question came up with evidence or views that the regime's comparable to the regime in Europe,
operating and evolving above all in China. But more clearly in Islam,
Dong is the most I've forgotten his name now called it India or Japan could be
convincingly represented as anything other than very different and potentially
less productive for the formation of a cosmos mcguffey or set of metaphysical
beliefs that was promotional for the formation of useful and reliable knowledge.
Although in this hour time of climate change, the cosmos of Imperial China, dogma is beginning to look much more prescient.
Although you have described it in your great book,
which I've read recently as a scattered landscape of individual reactions rather than a linear, unified and corpus of knowledge in the making.
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.
So this is these are my assertions. They can be read in working papers and they can be read in published articles.
And I'm now going to finish not on time, but I hope very much on time.
Thank you so much. Thank you.