In the West are the 'haves', while much of the rest of the world are the 'have-nots'. The extent of inequality today is unprecedented. Drawing on an extraordinary range of contemporary and historical examples, Why Nations Fail looks at the root of the problems facing some nations. Economists and scientists have offered useful insights into the reasons for certain aspects of poverty, such as Jeffrey Sachs (it's geography and the weather), and Jared Diamond (it's technology and species). But most theories ignore the incentives and institutions that populations need to invest and prosper: they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep it - and the key to ensuring these incentives is sound institutions. Incentives and institutions are what separate the have and have-nots. Based on fifteen years of research, and stepping boldly into the territory of Ian Morris's Why the West Rules - For Now, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson blend economics, politics, history and current affairs to provide a new, persuasive way of understanding wealth and poverty. And, perhaps most importantly, they provide a pragmatic basis for the hope that those mired in poverty can be placed on the path to prosperity.

/pdf/why-nations-fail-the-origins-of-power-prosperity-and-poverty-3of8sxla0d.pdf

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Among countries colonized by European powers during the past 500 years, those that were relatively rich in 1500 are now relatively poor. We document this reversal using data on urbanization patterns and population density, which, we argue, proxy for economic prosperity. This reversal weighs against a view that links economic development to geographic factors. Instead, we argue that the reversal ree ects changes in the institutions resulting from European colonialism. The European intervention appears to have created an “ institutional reversal” among these societies, meaning that Europeans were more likely to introduce institutions encouraging investment in regions that were previously poor. This institutional reversal accounts for the reversal in relative incomes. We provide further support for this view by documenting that the reversal in relative incomes took place during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and resulted from societies with good institutions taking advantage of the opportunity to industrialize.

/pdf/reversal-of-fortune-geography-and-institutions-in-the-making-3p9wy5nyeq.pdf

Reversal of fortune: geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution*

In 2000, when atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and limnologist Eugene F. Stoermer proposed to introduce a new geological era, the Anthropocene, they could not have foreseen the remarkable career of the new term. Within a few years, the geological community began to investigate the scientific evidence for the concept and established the Anthropocene Working Group. While the Working Group has started to examine possible markers and periodizations of the new epoch, scholars from numerous other disciplines have taken up the Anthropocene as a cultural concept. In addition, the media have developed a deep interest in the Anthropocene's broader societal ramifications. The article sheds light on the controversial debate about the Anthropocene and discusses its inextricably linked dual careers, first as a geological term and second as a cultural term. Third, it argues that the debate about the "Age of Humans" is a timely opportunity both to rethink the nature-culture relation and to re-assess the narratives that historians of science, technology, and the environment have written until now. Specifically, it examines both the heuristic and analytical power of the concept. It discusses new histories, new ideas to understand historical change, and new temporalities shaped by scholars who have taken up the challenge of the Anthropocene as a cultural concept that has the ability to question established stories and narratives. Fourth, it ends by stressing the potential of the Anthropocene concept to blur established epistemological boundaries and to stimulate cross-disciplinary collaborations between the sciences and the humanities.

/pdf/the-anthropocene-a-challenge-for-the-history-of-science-2vq01khbfu.pdf

The Anthropocene : A Challenge for the History of Science, Technology, and the Environment.

It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. They also fail to explain why institutions are influenced by the past, why it is that they can sometimes change, why they differ so much from society to society, and why it is hard to study them empirically and devise a policy aimed at altering them. This 2006 book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration. It presents a multi-disciplinary perspective to study endogenous institutions and their dynamics.

/pdf/institutions-and-the-path-to-the-modern-economy-4dlla029fs.pdf

Institutions and the path to the modern economy

Time is divided by geologists according to marked shifts in Earth's state. Recent global environmental changes suggest that Earth may have entered a new human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Here we review the historical genesis of the idea and assess anthropogenic signatures in the geological record against the formal requirements for the recognition of a new epoch. The evidence suggests that of the various proposed dates two do appear to conform to the criteria to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene: 1610 and 1964. The formal establishment of an Anthropocene Epoch would mark a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and the Earth system.

https://bertaux.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/3-12-15-lewis-maslin-defining-the-anthropocene-nature14258.pdf

Defining the Anthropocene

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables Preface Acknowledgments Part One: Overview 1. Introduction: World History and Environmental History Kenneth Pomeranz 2. The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment Edmund Burke III 3. Toward a Global System of Property Rights in Land John F. Richards Part Two: Rivers, Regions, and Developmentalism 4. The Transformation of the Middle Eastern Environment, 1500 B.C.E.-2 C.E. Edmund Burke III 5. The Transformation of China's Environment, 1500-2 Kenneth Pomeranz 6. The Rhine as a World River Mark Cioc 7. Continuity and Transformation: Colonial Rice Frontiers and Their Environmental Impact on the Great River Deltas of Mainland Southeast Asia Michael Adas Part Three: Landscapes, Conquests, Communities, and the Politics of Knowledge 8. Beyond the Colonial Paradigm: African History and Environmental History in Large-Scale Perspective William Beinart 9. Environmental Histories of India: Of States, Landscapes, and Ecologies Mahesh Rangarajan 10. Latin American Environmental History: A Shifting Old/New Field Lise Sedrez 11. The Predatory Tribute-Taking State: A Framework for Understanding Russian Environmental History Douglas R. Weiner Select Bibliography List of Contributors Index

The Environment and World History

Much literature normalizes a North Atlantic pattern of development, and sees a regionally specific "East Asian" path in the 20th century. However, development patterns in core regions of Europe and East Asia were surprisingly similar until almost 1800, and Europe's divergence thereafter was shaped by exceptional resource bonanzas. East Asian growth has been less-resource-intensive, and based on different social ideas. Recently, "East Asian" growth has spread to coastal China, but China's interior poses greater challenges; current interest in more resource-intensive, state-centered development strategies for those regions (which resemble those predicted by Gerschenkron) is thus unsurprising, but environmentally and socially risky. La plus grande partie de la litterature sur l'Asie de l'Est prend comme modele le developpement economique et social du Nord-Atlantique, insistant egalement sur un chemin specifiquement "Est-Asiatique" qui a ete suivi par la region dans le 20e siecle. Neanmoins, l'histoire du developpement economique dans les regions centrales de l'Europe est semblable a celle de L'Asie de l'Est, jusqu'au debut du 19e siecle. La divergence de l'Europe apres 1800 se determinait comme resultat d'un acces exceptionnel aux ressources naturelles permettant une sur-croissance economique ininterrompue. La croissance en Asie de l'Est etait nettement moins dependante sur l'acces aux ressources, et fut basee sur un systeme d'idees sociales tres different. Plus recemment, le modele "Est-Asiatique" de croissance economique est apparu en Chine littorale, mais non a l'interieur du pays. L'interet actuel des strategies du developpement (tres semblables, d'ailleurs, a celles prevues par Gerschenkron) basees sur l'acces aux ressources, et organisees autour de l'intervention centralisee de l'etat dans ces regions n'a rien de surprenant, mais pose en meme temps des risques tres graves pour l'environnement et pour la societe dans les regions de l'interieur.

Is There An East Asian Development Path? Long-Term Comparisons, Constraints, And Continuities

Daedalus Spring 2005 Imperialism’ is a frustratingly vague term, but a useful one–and not only for outside observers and protesting subjects.1 Historically, rulers have often sought to make their empires visible as such by following regional–and in recent centuries, global–standards for acting imperially. Even the past century, in which empires often shunned that designation, is only a partial exception. Imperialism is also topical. While some compare the contemporary United States to imperial Rome, more analysts see it as the latest of a series of militarymercantile hegemons that set the rules for their eras’ global political economies. Depending on where they locate the start of the world economy, some stretch that series back many centuries, while most identify only an Anglo-American succession spanning two centuries of liberal industrial capitalism. Others mark out the last two hundred years for a different, though complementary, reason: as an era in which Western empires, influenced by the Enlightenment, cast themselves as agents of progress. In this essay I will also emphasize the self-assigned ‘civilizing’ mission of modern empires, but will argue that the twohundred-year, Atlantic-centered framework is both too narrow and too broad. On the one hand, civilizing empires have emerged outside the Enlightenment West; an East/West dichotomy often proves less useful than one between contiguous and overseas empires. On the other hand, since the 1970s the American government’s approach to ‘development’ and ‘nation building’–the twentieth-century version of ‘civilizing’–has broken with basic ideas about how empire could confer bene1⁄2ts on subject peoples that had evolved over the previous two centuries. This makes today’s American empire different both in word and deed.

Empire & 'civilizing' missions, past & present

grateful to the participants for their thoughtful comments and pleased that The Great Divergence is still considered worth discussing a decade after publication. I suspect that the reason why the book still attracts attention is also a reason why many readers are not fully satisfied with it: its topic remains the sort of important, enduring puzzle on which no author should expect to have the last word. Still, I think that it has moved discussion in productive directions, both by showing that some old answers were inadequate and by providing some ideas that have stood up well enough to merit inclusion in whatever new answers we are moving toward. I completely agree with Peter Coclanis’s observation that The Great Divergence does not provide an adequate resolution to the issues at hand, and with his further point that different perspectives on such a huge topic can prove useful, even when one seems profoundly distorted in light of the other. I am, however, a bit surprised that Coclanis picks out agricultural productivity as an area in which the empirical results of The Great Divergence have been questioned. There has been questioning, to be sure, but so far, at least, this seems to me to be one of the places where the best subsequent research has largely reinforced my hypotheses.1 Robert Allen, for instance, estimates agricultural labor productivity in the Yangzi Delta at 90% of English levels as late as 1820—a point well past the Delta’s best economic years, and several decades into the period in which modern industries and urban service jobs had begun to pull underemployed people out of the English countryside, presumably raising labor productivity among those who remained.2 Jan Luiten van Zanden and Li Bozhong have also looked at the early 19th century and estimate that agricultural labor productivity in the part of the Delta they studied was only slightly below that in the Netherlands; since Allen’s figures put the Netherlands’ productivity per worker almost exactly equal to England’s, these two studies are mutually reinforcing.3 Moreover, since nobody disputes that land productivity was much higher in the Yangzi Delta than anywhere in Europe—eight times as high as in the English midlands, by Allen’s estimate4—it is clear that total factor productivity in Delta agriculture compared quite well with that in European agriculture. Indeed, the only way out of such a conclusion would be if Delta agriculture were far more capital-intensive than either English or Dutch agriculture, which seems very unlikely. One of the most widely shared conclusions to come out of debates related to the great divergence concerns the idea that national differences in industrialization can be explained by differences in agricultural productivity, what Allen once called “agrarian fundamentalism.”5 Already a less popular view than it once was, but still quite influential in many circles, this perspective has been considerably weakened by adding East Asian societies to the set of comparators. Coclanis also notes that nothing like the military-fiscal states that developed in much of early modern Europe existed in China: a point that Hoffman also makes, and that I suspect Wong and de Vries would agree with as well. Indeed, I also agree that this was an important difference. There is no question that large-scale military spending made all sorts of differences in Europe. It led in some cases to technological innovation and markets for mass production of certain items. It played a huge role in the creation of European capital markets, which in turn changed the relationship between wealth holders and the state in various polities, solidifying property rights in some cases but also often leading to tax farming and inefficient but fiscally useful monopolies. More immediately, though, war destroyed people and capital and diverted energies from other, probably more productive activities. One way one might get around this is to argue that the encouragement given by war and the military-fiscal state to industrialization rests on the projection of force outside of Europe, with the result that important resources accrued to those who wound up industrializing—in this case, England. (Note that in this story mercantilist warfare might still be a net loss to Europe as a whole, at least in the short term.) This is the point that Coclanis makes, and it is broadly consistent with Hoffman’s case as well. This argument works quite well with the arguments that I make in The Great Divergence. As Coclanis and de Vries suggest, one could conceivably imagine a world in which sparsely populated parts of Southeast Asia provided China with something like the benefits that the Americas did for Europe. But consider how many things made this unlikely. Southeast Asia did not produce goods utterly unavailable in China (sugar, for instance, was grown on a large scale in Guangdong and Fujian) and which thus would have been relatively easy to tax at high rates (helping to pay for military expansion). The Chinese did not carry diseases to which Southeast Asians had no resistance, as the Europeans did in the Americas, which, of course, made a huge difference there. (Consider that European colonialism actually began in North Africa, but made very little headway there until centuries later, despite an edge in armaments and the absence of the tropical diseases that helped stymie Europeans south of the Sahara.) And the Chinese state had no urgent need to partner with its merchants in seeking overseas trade and revenues, precisely because it did not face nearly constant military-fiscal competition with neighboring states of roughly equal size. So there was no mercantilist colonialism there, not because of lack of enterprise, seafaring skills, or “animal spirits,” but because such activities quite reasonably did not seem worth it. Only because Europeans locked themselves into what was, for quite some time, a negative-sum game did it make sense for them to project this competition overseas, where, even given their advantages in weaponry, it took both epidemiological luck and considerable time to make this activity pay off.6 Some suggest that warfare might have had a decisive though unintended influence on technology by causing a particular breakthrough (e.g., precision boring and metal-cutting techniques developed for making weapons proving important in designing pistons for steam engines). Bin Wong and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal argue that European military-fiscal states encouraged industrialization by unintentionally imparting a capital-intensive bias to European technoHistorically Speaking • September 2011 20

Ten Years After: Responses and Reconsiderations

This article asks how questions from social history can be more closely integrated into world history and vice versa. It highlights cases in which this has already happened and suggests avenues for further development. It divides social history into three different types: history of daily life, history of social organization, and history of social movements and deliberate attempts to induce social change, whether from the top down or from the bottom up. The last kind of social history is particularly difficult to frame as world history, partly because we lack terms for collective agents that are agreed to be useful across cultural lines. But developing such a vocabulary remains necessary. The last section of the article examines how social histories of empire offer some approaches that are promising for this purpose.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20079411.pdf

Kenneth Pomeranz

Papers

The Environment and World History

Is There An East Asian Development Path? Long-Term Comparisons, Constraints, And Continuities

Empire & 'civilizing' missions, past & present

Ten Years After: Responses and Reconsiderations

Social History and World History: From Daily Life to Patterns of Change