1 00:00:06,210 --> 00:00:13,380 So this is what is what originally was a two hour lecture I gave earlier this summer in Singapore. 2 00:00:13,380 --> 00:00:20,880 So I have had to condense into little bits. It's work based on a joint book that I'm writing with two other economist, 3 00:00:20,880 --> 00:00:27,450 Gil Notability, and have no grief and no book will eventually emerge, one hopes. 4 00:00:27,450 --> 00:00:34,260 And so, like many of people, I'm starting here with Pomerantz his book, which is now almost 20 years out. 5 00:00:34,260 --> 00:00:39,930 And you know, you all know you've already got, you know, when it's all about and so on. 6 00:00:39,930 --> 00:00:45,870 And it's been incredibly influential, and it's sort of led to a great deal of work, 7 00:00:45,870 --> 00:00:49,950 which is the definition of influential and much of the work that that you know, 8 00:00:49,950 --> 00:00:54,840 that you're from Landrum, Bishnu and many other people like young Lightnin, Bob Allen and on and on. 9 00:00:54,840 --> 00:00:59,590 You've been trying to sort of look at at and Cairns argument. 10 00:00:59,590 --> 00:01:02,430 My I don't want to in any way detract from it. 11 00:01:02,430 --> 00:01:12,650 Although I, like Patrick, have disagreements with the book, but it's it's mostly about economic divergence. 12 00:01:12,650 --> 00:01:17,400 So it's based on whether it's wages or income per capita that either one of those. 13 00:01:17,400 --> 00:01:25,560 It's basically when do living standards or a GDP per capita or wages in China start to diverge? 14 00:01:25,560 --> 00:01:30,330 And as you all know, the California school of which Ken, when he was living in California, 15 00:01:30,330 --> 00:01:37,560 it was it was a member and basically argued that that the industrial revolution is where all the action was. 16 00:01:37,560 --> 00:01:45,630 And until 1750 or so, Europe and China were moving on fairly similar tracks as far as living standards are concerned. 17 00:01:45,630 --> 00:01:53,100 And it's only then that the two broke apart. Now that's I think, and him reproducing like others before me, 18 00:01:53,100 --> 00:02:02,070 the calculations that's that Steve Robbins team of creative dishes and graphs that I think that I've made it from from from their 2018 J. 19 00:02:02,070 --> 00:02:09,990 H paper. And you know, I mean, it does. You can you can interpret it as a great divergence or a big divergence or a small divergence. 20 00:02:09,990 --> 00:02:16,710 And for me, actually, what this shows more than anything else is perhaps the notion that sort of these grand 21 00:02:16,710 --> 00:02:21,420 fundamentalist Malthusian interpretations that Greg Clark and others below have been 22 00:02:21,420 --> 00:02:27,510 proposing probably don't don't survive the confrontation with this kind of data because 23 00:02:27,510 --> 00:02:32,850 we do see growth and we see very different levels of of of of income per capita. 24 00:02:32,850 --> 00:02:41,760 You know, one striking thing is that Italy, already in the Middle Ages, has is in an income per capita is much higher than almost anybody else, 25 00:02:41,760 --> 00:02:48,430 meaning that there must have been above subsistence now China from this story, at least if you go for it. 26 00:02:48,430 --> 00:02:57,930 And clearly is very early on way above European nations, but eventually falls behind. 27 00:02:57,930 --> 00:03:03,030 My argument is that this is an interesting story, but it may be not the most interesting story. 28 00:03:03,030 --> 00:03:08,970 And if you ever want to get into the reasons why which were raised here, I think so. 29 00:03:08,970 --> 00:03:13,050 You would have to look at other divergences. So I'm going to try to get them a little time I have. 30 00:03:13,050 --> 00:03:17,190 So at least five divergences, I have more if you push me on it. 31 00:03:17,190 --> 00:03:26,580 But the let's let's see if I get get through to these five. And now I won't say that the word divergence actually only borrowed because Ken used it. 32 00:03:26,580 --> 00:03:31,290 Many of these divergences are divergences. They are reversals. 33 00:03:31,290 --> 00:03:37,770 And I think that's something to to keep in mind. So the first one and could it be culture? 34 00:03:37,770 --> 00:03:46,140 So people? David Landers was made a very big deal out of culture and in his wealth and prosperity of nations book and somehow argued 35 00:03:46,140 --> 00:03:52,260 quite with a straight face that Chinese culture was incompatible with economic development and technological progress, 36 00:03:52,260 --> 00:03:58,830 which every sinologist that I know and many other people basically have found unacceptable. 37 00:03:58,830 --> 00:04:06,450 And what's more, a lot of people are reluctant about culture, largely because some version of historical materialism and not just Marxism, 38 00:04:06,450 --> 00:04:10,380 but also people like Ian Morris essentially say, Look, culture is endogenous. 39 00:04:10,380 --> 00:04:14,130 It's the result of a lot of things. Every nation gets the culture that it needs us. 40 00:04:14,130 --> 00:04:21,020 Ian Morris's wealth. And so we shouldn't be wasting our time on culture. 41 00:04:21,020 --> 00:04:29,250 And I think there's a consensus growing that this sort of culture free approach of the California school has been misplaced. 42 00:04:29,250 --> 00:04:34,110 And I'm going to focus first on the Needham puzzle, which Patrick already mentioned. 43 00:04:34,110 --> 00:04:40,890 And of course, as a public headed is a wonderful paper published a decade ago in which he speaks of cosmology. 44 00:04:40,890 --> 00:04:45,120 She doesn't like that culture, but I don't know what the difference is between culture and cosmology. So we can. 45 00:04:45,120 --> 00:04:51,930 We can, we can agree on that. And but the great, but it isn't really the need him puzzle. 46 00:04:51,930 --> 00:05:00,330 Is it more than a diversity? It really is a reversal because in Tang and Song Times, you know it, 47 00:05:00,330 --> 00:05:06,030 China was by any count, a technologically sophisticated, literate, commercialised, 48 00:05:06,030 --> 00:05:10,500 developed economy at a time when buying on an old in Europe with a famished, 49 00:05:10,500 --> 00:05:16,470 violent and ignorant backwater in China was governed by a meritocratic bureaucracy. 50 00:05:16,470 --> 00:05:24,720 It was very heavily invested in human capital and yet and yet the progress of China. 51 00:05:24,720 --> 00:05:32,190 It started to slow down during meantime, and nobody has quite how fast, and it's probably uneven regionally and centrally. 52 00:05:32,190 --> 00:05:39,870 But clearly it's not quite what it was before. And you know, of all the great technological and say. 53 00:05:39,870 --> 00:05:43,200 Advances that are listed in the many need him volumes. 54 00:05:43,200 --> 00:05:48,690 It turns out, and Simon Winchester actually in his book, The Man Who Left China has a little table of those, 55 00:05:48,690 --> 00:05:53,940 and very few of them were made after 100 and known as the 4500. 56 00:05:53,940 --> 00:06:01,920 And that's actually probably as striking a phenomenon as all the GDP statistics than anybody can, can and amass. 57 00:06:01,920 --> 00:06:09,660 And so as a result, it's fair to say that whether you believe in a scientific revolution in Europe or not, China didn't have one. 58 00:06:09,660 --> 00:06:13,890 OK. And and and the same is true about an industrial revolution now. 59 00:06:13,890 --> 00:06:18,780 It is very important to keep those data different and separate questions. And are often mixed up. 60 00:06:18,780 --> 00:06:25,020 But I've done a lot of it, made a lot of effort to try to keep that to keep them apart. 61 00:06:25,020 --> 00:06:32,700 So why? And so let me give you one solution of a paper that isn't all that well known, but I've always thought was totally brilliant. 62 00:06:32,700 --> 00:06:37,620 That's Justin Lin's 1995 economic development of Cultural Change paper. 63 00:06:37,620 --> 00:06:43,470 And in that paper, Justin Lin points out that the sort of technological change can happen in two ways. 64 00:06:43,470 --> 00:06:50,130 One of them is of experience based in which the radical change happens through trial and error, 65 00:06:50,130 --> 00:06:54,690 killing cumulative learning by doing and experimentation. 66 00:06:54,690 --> 00:07:01,110 And therefore, basically the bigger you are, you know, the more chances you have to make progress. 67 00:07:01,110 --> 00:07:07,860 And that's what China is leading because its population in particular, it's going to advance sectors are so much larger than Europe. 68 00:07:07,860 --> 00:07:10,710 At some point in early modern Europe, 69 00:07:10,710 --> 00:07:17,970 there is a slow transition when invention starts to depend more and more on what I've called useful knowledge that a reliable, 70 00:07:17,970 --> 00:07:19,530 non-partisan washing machine debate. 71 00:07:19,530 --> 00:07:29,130 Later, bridges gather for observation, experimentation and computation, scientific or not scientific by a small minority of specialists. 72 00:07:29,130 --> 00:07:37,440 OK, and that knowledge is then converted through various channels into technology, and that is essentially what we call the upper scale human capital. 73 00:07:37,440 --> 00:07:47,730 Are you THC at hypothesis? And so by Len's logic, as I said, China would remain a leader as long as technological progress is not the first time, 74 00:07:47,730 --> 00:07:54,930 but it starts to lose its advantage in the knowledge based type of innovation driven by UTC. 75 00:07:54,930 --> 00:08:00,210 And that's, I think, is one of the reasons why we see a divergence in knowledge formation, 76 00:08:00,210 --> 00:08:09,450 not just technological knowledge and use of machinery, but all kinds of other things medicine, its navigation and so on and so forth. 77 00:08:09,450 --> 00:08:16,290 But that Lynn's argument is missing a critical component because it doesn't tell you why China did not have 78 00:08:16,290 --> 00:08:22,410 the innovative elite of scientists and so on that eventually drove the industrial revolution in Europe. 79 00:08:22,410 --> 00:08:29,400 And so we need to dig a little bit deeper into what drove the intellectual and technological innovation in the past. 80 00:08:29,400 --> 00:08:32,930 And so was there an intellectual divergence? 81 00:08:32,930 --> 00:08:42,090 And so what I'm submitting to you is an intellectual divergence has institutional roots, which we can identify. 82 00:08:42,090 --> 00:08:48,330 And in Europe and somewhere between Columbus and the deaths of Isaac Newton, 83 00:08:48,330 --> 00:08:57,360 a unique set of circumstances created a set of institutions that encouraged and incentivised intellectual innovations by an educated elite. 84 00:08:57,360 --> 00:09:02,910 And these institutions underlay a highly competitive market for ideas that was much more functional, 85 00:09:02,910 --> 00:09:06,990 creating, amongst other things, technological and scientific progress than elsewhere. 86 00:09:06,990 --> 00:09:13,540 Because many other things that are not technological, scientific, philosophical, mathematical insoles, of course. 87 00:09:13,540 --> 00:09:21,000 And but what emerges in Europe after 1900 is a competitive market for ideas. 88 00:09:21,000 --> 00:09:29,850 And the reason is that in Europe, technological progress always had been and remained for many until deep into the 20th century. 89 00:09:29,850 --> 00:09:39,480 The responsibility of the private sector and the way it works is to engineers and doctors and natural philosophers basically working on their own, 90 00:09:39,480 --> 00:09:42,960 but are seeking patronage from rulers and wealthy patrons, of course. 91 00:09:42,960 --> 00:09:52,200 But they're rarely government bureaucrats, unlike China, where Chinese mandarins were often the drivers of technological progress. 92 00:09:52,200 --> 00:10:01,840 And so these people have far more freedom to think outside the box and contest conventional wisdom. 93 00:10:01,840 --> 00:10:05,520 And as it turned out, to be much more creative and innovative. 94 00:10:05,520 --> 00:10:08,520 This is a competitive market, ladies and gentlemen, 95 00:10:08,520 --> 00:10:17,940 and in a competitive market in ideas ensures intellectual pluralism and eventually, I strongly believe progress in China. 96 00:10:17,940 --> 00:10:24,870 On the other hand, much of the useful knowledge was created when it was created and it was by the state and disseminated by the states. 97 00:10:24,870 --> 00:10:31,560 Here are some examples that can give you more if you wanted, but you all noticed that China has actually the official Bureau of Astronomy. 98 00:10:31,560 --> 00:10:39,350 It's established this early research 13th third century BCE and much of the Great Race Revolution by introducing Campa. 99 00:10:39,350 --> 00:10:49,070 Varieties were introduced by imperial officials and the Great Encyclopaedia on Agriculture Handbook like Rankings and Xiaogang, 100 00:10:49,070 --> 00:10:53,090 she's all written by government bureaucrat now. 101 00:10:53,090 --> 00:10:58,730 S state capacity in China declined, and the imperial government becomes more conserved. 102 00:10:58,730 --> 00:11:07,070 I would say reactionary and inward looking under technological dynamism in China withers away. 103 00:11:07,070 --> 00:11:16,010 And so there's some consequences then, and I move to the next one. One consequence which actually some people in Washington may want to think about a 104 00:11:16,010 --> 00:11:22,130 little bit more is that China just never involved intellectual property rights. 105 00:11:22,130 --> 00:11:32,090 A lovely little book by a man called Alford in 1995 for something called just to steal a book is a gentlemen's act or something along those lines. 106 00:11:32,090 --> 00:11:39,590 But it's very clever, and it makes the point that actually we're all new, which is, Europe developed intellectual property in early modern times, 107 00:11:39,590 --> 00:11:47,780 and China really doesn't have them until the last 20 or 30 years, really, which is something worth thinking about. 108 00:11:47,780 --> 00:11:52,890 Another. Control, which is more obvious, perhaps, is that in Europe, 109 00:11:52,890 --> 00:11:58,590 the attempts by reactionary elements and God knows daywear everywhere, not just in the Catholic world, 110 00:11:58,590 --> 00:12:08,430 just as much in the Protestant world, but reactionary elements with a secular or religious and tight end which try to fight new ideas as heresy. 111 00:12:08,430 --> 00:12:17,460 In the end, failed, and they failed because the absence of a central government and the consequent coordination failures that came with it. 112 00:12:17,460 --> 00:12:25,860 All right. Now I want to talk about a different, a different divergence, and this is really what the book I'm doing with Avner and Angelo is about. 113 00:12:25,860 --> 00:12:31,620 And so a number of recent scholars has recently pointed to a remarkable gap that's 114 00:12:31,620 --> 00:12:36,450 opened between Europe and the rest of the world at some point in the Middle Ages. 115 00:12:36,450 --> 00:12:45,330 And that is Jack goodies and many other scholars discovering that mediaeval Europe start to organise increasingly 116 00:12:45,330 --> 00:12:52,440 by nuclear families and quantitatively inclined social scientists have recently put a lot of stress on this. 117 00:12:52,440 --> 00:12:57,660 This is a book that is coming out by a friend of mine, Joe Henry at Harvard. 118 00:12:57,660 --> 00:13:00,360 Jose, yeah, a quantitative anthropologist. 119 00:13:00,360 --> 00:13:08,640 And this and of course, this is a very nice catch phrase that if the rise of weird people now we had what's weird mean we we're in western educated, 120 00:13:08,640 --> 00:13:09,300 industrialised, 121 00:13:09,300 --> 00:13:19,780 rich and democratic and basically and the subtitle says it all how westerners became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. 122 00:13:19,780 --> 00:13:24,840 And so that is has many dimensions. 123 00:13:24,840 --> 00:13:35,100 The two of most important one, the first that Europe is abandoning the extended family or the clan and and and part the consequences of 124 00:13:35,100 --> 00:13:40,770 what we see this the final demographic pattern by which Europeans married later and therefore curbed, 125 00:13:40,770 --> 00:13:47,340 at least to some extent, their fertility rates. Now many scholars, including Jack Goody, but also an aggressive Jonathan Schultz, 126 00:13:47,340 --> 00:13:54,960 the young scholar has just finished his degree, and many have pointed to the role of the Latin Church in bringing this about. 127 00:13:54,960 --> 00:14:03,180 And this church worked very hard to promote nuclear families now as an unintended consequence of this. 128 00:14:03,180 --> 00:14:15,660 What do you see happening in Europe is that societies organised by groups of people who are united by a common interest and not by common ancestry. 129 00:14:15,660 --> 00:14:24,300 And so Abner calls these these units at corporations, and they include things we all know and love about mediaeval Europe, 130 00:14:24,300 --> 00:14:30,930 monasteries, guilds, universities, independent cities and commune cities, friendly societies, and so on and on. 131 00:14:30,930 --> 00:14:35,910 Any mention, of course, it leads to business corporations, which is still retains the name. 132 00:14:35,910 --> 00:14:43,680 But mediaeval Europe, really, these are all kind of voluntary organisations of people who are not related. 133 00:14:43,680 --> 00:14:51,530 Now, China, of course, moves in the opposite direction for a variety of reasons some have been having to may have to do 134 00:14:51,530 --> 00:15:00,000 do with the introducing of the quick ripening rice and other reasons may be quite ideological, 135 00:15:00,000 --> 00:15:06,120 and that had new confusion and a resurgence in and ended. 136 00:15:06,120 --> 00:15:13,680 The Song Dynasty emphasised loyalty to the clan, far more than, say, a few centuries before. 137 00:15:13,680 --> 00:15:15,790 So, you know, do cheese and mustard. 138 00:15:15,790 --> 00:15:23,880 Another box is, in fact family rituals book, which is a very good description of how clans should behave toward another. 139 00:15:23,880 --> 00:15:30,510 What is not fully realised until Joe Henry and Jonathan Schultz pointed this out in great detail, 140 00:15:30,510 --> 00:15:36,630 is that a great deal of contemporary evidence that people who grow up in large extended 141 00:15:36,630 --> 00:15:42,180 families and that these groups first are limited as opposed to the general trust, 142 00:15:42,180 --> 00:15:48,960 and that they enhance conformism, suppress original thinking and entrepreneurial behaviour? 143 00:15:48,960 --> 00:15:52,110 Now why that exactly is something we could debate. 144 00:15:52,110 --> 00:16:00,150 But here the data speak and the evidence that Joe Hendrick has amassed to show that in societies based on extended families, 145 00:16:00,150 --> 00:16:05,790 there is a great deal of difference in these many dimensions. There seems to be quite convincing. 146 00:16:05,790 --> 00:16:12,350 All right now, political divergence. Since two thousand seventy nine. 147 00:16:12,350 --> 00:16:25,010 When China was united by the Mongol armies of Kubelik, the it remained the single political entity in Europe as well. 148 00:16:25,010 --> 00:16:33,740 The shuttle has recently reminded us in first coming up, actually advertise to a few people here and and he and another paper, 149 00:16:33,740 --> 00:16:39,620 quite an ingenious paper by Coco Koyama Ensing published as you explain a little bit why 150 00:16:39,620 --> 00:16:46,670 we may think of China remaining unified in Europe splintering and so until about 500 ad. 151 00:16:46,670 --> 00:16:53,090 Walter Shiela points out China and Europe have followed very roughly converging political past and political diversions. 152 00:16:53,090 --> 00:17:00,860 We only start after the fall of Rome. Now, I think a lot of people would stress, 153 00:17:00,860 --> 00:17:07,730 and this goes back all the way to Edward Gibbon and Immanuel Kant and David Chu that you cannot understand 154 00:17:07,730 --> 00:17:14,960 European political and economic history without stressing the fragmentation in which not just nation states, 155 00:17:14,960 --> 00:17:18,260 but autonomous communes, cities, states, religious entities, 156 00:17:18,260 --> 00:17:26,600 all kind of groups constantly compete with one another for power, for resources and prestige. 157 00:17:26,600 --> 00:17:35,720 And this has all kind of important consequences. One of them is growing fiscal capacity of the states and of the cities and of the other units, 158 00:17:35,720 --> 00:17:40,640 and the ability of authorities to coordinate internal economic activity, 159 00:17:40,640 --> 00:17:48,050 enforce contracts and resolve disputes to serve as a third party enforcer of contracts. 160 00:17:48,050 --> 00:17:51,500 It's also and this takes me back to what I said earlier. 161 00:17:51,500 --> 00:17:58,700 It's the absence of any kind of monopolies in the market for ideas actually goes back to the Middle Ages, 162 00:17:58,700 --> 00:18:05,060 but the middle aged still has the Latin, the church as at least one form of monopoly, and that's gone with the Reformation. 163 00:18:05,060 --> 00:18:09,860 So competition is everywhere, and as a result, 164 00:18:09,860 --> 00:18:20,990 heterodox use can flourish and innovation can happen everywhere because intellectual are mobile and footloose, and nobody can tell them what to do. 165 00:18:20,990 --> 00:18:30,170 Never forget that Hobbes Leviathan was written in Paris and John Locke's SFN toleration were written in Amsterdam. 166 00:18:30,170 --> 00:18:37,320 But the Dutch themselves, where this tolerant because the great Dutch who wrote uses every schoolboy knows. 167 00:18:37,320 --> 00:18:42,960 Was smuggled out in a bookcase from prison and spent the rest of his life in Paris, so, you know, 168 00:18:42,960 --> 00:18:51,570 people moved around and everybody knew that they could move around as a result, suppression of new ideas becomes ineffective. 169 00:18:51,570 --> 00:18:59,500 All right. Now state capacity another reversal of China. 170 00:18:59,500 --> 00:19:07,820 Was a despotic state, but to use a phrase I've just bought from the new book by Assemblyman Robinson, it was despotism on the cheap. 171 00:19:07,820 --> 00:19:18,490 And because as you'll see in a minute, the ability of the Chinese state to extract resources from the population is very, very poor. 172 00:19:18,490 --> 00:19:24,340 So, you know, 11th century China was ruled by the most formidable empire in the world. 173 00:19:24,340 --> 00:19:28,270 It had 100 million people. It had probably over a million soldiers. 174 00:19:28,270 --> 00:19:33,250 Nothing remotely like that existed in Europe, which once had been part of Rome. 175 00:19:33,250 --> 00:19:40,700 So this is an. And this is the revenues as a fraction of GDP. 176 00:19:40,700 --> 00:19:47,990 God knows how approximate they are. But look, here are the numbers are just orders of magnitude is China 1986. 177 00:19:47,990 --> 00:19:54,530 This is Iraq and the the Abbasid, and this is England and France in the sort of high middle age. 178 00:19:54,530 --> 00:20:01,260 I mean, this is now these obviously states that are very low fiscal capacity now. 179 00:20:01,260 --> 00:20:07,770 This is a few centuries later. Look at the difference so early, Meiji Japan still expects a lot. 180 00:20:07,770 --> 00:20:11,820 But he has England, France, the US, Ottoman Empire is king China. 181 00:20:11,820 --> 00:20:16,110 I mean, they go from the top of the pyramid to the very bottom. 182 00:20:16,110 --> 00:20:20,850 In 1990 18:00. It's an early beginning for me to witness. 183 00:20:20,850 --> 00:20:29,880 Excuse me. I know you don't need me. They tell you we're on the way it's served to circa 80000. 184 00:20:29,880 --> 00:20:37,830 Hazel. Hey, come on. 1868. Yeah, I'm actually done before before. 185 00:20:37,830 --> 00:20:49,590 So this is really a truly big reversal in which St. Patrick and I disagree exactly on the significance on state capacity. 186 00:20:49,590 --> 00:20:55,500 I go back and forth and, you know, on a good day, I will actually recognise that the state did lots of good things, 187 00:20:55,500 --> 00:21:01,380 including, of course, law and order protected against foreigners, you know, conflict resolution on a bad day. 188 00:21:01,380 --> 00:21:03,940 I think of the European state as a bunch of rent seekers, 189 00:21:03,940 --> 00:21:08,370 competitors and stole everybody's money that you could have young men killed in useless battles. 190 00:21:08,370 --> 00:21:14,670 So you know, this is I'm still not quite sure how to think of the state, but the data speak, you know, for good or for bad. 191 00:21:14,670 --> 00:21:16,690 You know, Larry Epstein thought it was a great thing. 192 00:21:16,690 --> 00:21:22,170 A lot of people think it was not such a great thing, but the old Charles Daley may well have been right. 193 00:21:22,170 --> 00:21:27,840 You know, maybe this is what made the state and maybe the state, after all, but it was not such a bad thing. 194 00:21:27,840 --> 00:21:33,370 Finally, urbanisation. So there too, is a great divergence. 195 00:21:33,370 --> 00:21:37,560 It's very hard to actually measure the degree of urbanisation. 196 00:21:37,560 --> 00:21:46,020 As you know, probably lots of economists have used the proportion of people living in cities as a proxy for GDP or for 197 00:21:46,020 --> 00:21:53,820 other things because there are some rough correlation between urbanisation and economic development. 198 00:21:53,820 --> 00:22:03,330 And so the data really are hard to interpret because in European context, actually cities are fairly well-defined because almost every city is walled. 199 00:22:03,330 --> 00:22:05,760 And so you know who lives in the city and who doesn't? 200 00:22:05,760 --> 00:22:14,400 In China, most of the cities as as as liveable, Zhang is argued, amongst others, and tend to be much more spread out. 201 00:22:14,400 --> 00:22:22,320 And it's not clear what a city exactly ends and where the countryside begins. And so we may have been understating Chinese urbanisation. 202 00:22:22,320 --> 00:22:32,070 That said, here are some numbers for you. This is the percentage of population living in, in and inner city, and this is the left column. 203 00:22:32,070 --> 00:22:38,010 Columnist cities over 10000 people and invites people over 40000 people. 204 00:22:38,010 --> 00:22:49,440 And you can see that in in the year 1000. Basically, urbanisation in Europe is negligible and you can see it's going up over the next decade. 205 00:22:49,440 --> 00:22:56,340 And in China, so it doesn't fall. I mean, I believe that's probably the best you can say about these numbers, but it doesn't rise either. 206 00:22:56,340 --> 00:23:00,240 And so once more, you have a great reversal. 207 00:23:00,240 --> 00:23:06,780 Urbanisation now, urbanisation is a consequence of, to some extent of economic development commercialisation. 208 00:23:06,780 --> 00:23:10,590 And so I'm not sure industrialisation, but commercialisation for sure. 209 00:23:10,590 --> 00:23:18,940 And has consequences, of course, because within cities, it's where the intellectual, the technological, the scientific activity is taking place. 210 00:23:18,940 --> 00:23:27,800 So as more and more Europe live in cities, clearly these cities are producing the kind of useful knowledge that eventually, 211 00:23:27,800 --> 00:23:33,260 you know, erupts into the industrial revolution. So I'm basically done. 212 00:23:33,260 --> 00:23:43,200 And there are many great diversions on many dimensions, and they interacted and affected one another in many ways. 213 00:23:43,200 --> 00:23:51,330 And I think the task for the next generation of scholars is to try to start to disentangle these interactions. 214 00:23:51,330 --> 00:24:02,340 But the most important moral, I think and here I am sort of trying to to take a little bit of a step away from the film, from the details, OK? 215 00:24:02,340 --> 00:24:10,560 And that is that it's very important to remember and this is very much against people like David Landis, my friend and teacher. 216 00:24:10,560 --> 00:24:17,900 But I think about it. And that is that. 217 00:24:17,900 --> 00:24:23,540 There was nothing historically inevitable about everything, which I have shown you, 218 00:24:23,540 --> 00:24:28,800 and we shouldn't really think about the divergences in the reversal. 219 00:24:28,800 --> 00:24:37,550 A sort of deep and inexorable factors baked in European and Chinese geography and location inspired by monotheistic religion, 220 00:24:37,550 --> 00:24:45,380 whatever that exactly means. Harking back to ancient history and the classical legacy of Greece and Rome instead, 221 00:24:45,380 --> 00:24:51,290 I think much more fruitful to think about what happened as an age in which a number of contingents, 222 00:24:51,290 --> 00:24:54,260 if not quite accidental but contingent factors, 223 00:24:54,260 --> 00:25:05,510 came together in European cultural development and launched a unique and unlikely historical dynamic which was peculiar to Europe. 224 00:25:05,510 --> 00:25:12,200 And that didn't do so for anybody else. Thank you.