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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

This article examines James Watson’s influential work on orthopraxy and cultural unification in late imperial China through a study of the cult of the goddess of Taishan. In this case the state (a crucial promoter of standardization for Watson) was internally divided, local elites took a hard line against popular practices, and ritual became increasingly disunified across classes, regions, and genders. Eventually, popular lore about the goddess changed to reflect an awareness of elite rejection and to celebrate the goddess’s ability to pursue her own goals despite often hostile male authorities. What “cultural unity” one can find here is paradoxical and based not on rituals but beliefs: a shared sense that Taishan was sacred territory worth contesting, popular awareness that elites did not welcome their claims on it, and other signs that groups marked their disagreements with each other, rather than either ignoring differences of ideas or disguising them behind shared ritual.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0097700406294702

Orthopraxy, Orthodoxy, and the Goddess(es) of Taishan

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Histories for a Less National Age

On September 22, 1867, Wan Qingli, the President of the Board of Rites, reported the completion of an unusual errand. In the midst of a severe drought, during which repeated prayers at Imperial shrines had been unavailing, Wan was dispatched to a well at Shengjinggang (Ridge of the Sacred Well) in Handan xian, 350 miles from Beijing. First, he performed sacrifices at a temple built over the well. Second, he ordered the removal of one of several iron tablets lying at the bottom of the well; he then escorted this tablet to Beijing, where it was placed on an altar in the Forbidden City. When rain fell within three days, the tablet was gratefully returned, along with a gold-plated one conferred by the emperor.1 For the next sixty years, officiais regularly \"borrowed\" tablets from this well when other rites had failed to end severe droughts, and always obtained rain shortly thereafter; they then returned both the borrowed tablet and an additional tablet. By the 1920s, the well was filled with scores, perhaps even hundreds, of tablets. Wan's pilgrimage marked the first time that any officiai higher than a county magistrate had ever paid attention to this shrine, though local people had been praying there for at least 700 years. Similar incorporations of long-standing popular cults into the system of state ritual occurred frequently throughout imperial history. Inevitably the move to state sponsorship changed the structure and context of local practices. When this transition was negotiated successfully, it strengthened the integration of state and society. The story of Handan is unusual because Shengjinggang was added to the imperially-sponsored canon so late. This allows us to use the accounts of newspapers and foreigners to supplement official records, enhancing our understanding of a long-lived pattern of state-society interaction. As an example

Water to Iron, Widows to Warlords: The Handan Rain Shrine in Modern Chinese History

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3451072.pdf

The Great Divergence. China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern

Written for high school or beginning undergraduate students, this four-volume reference valiantly attempts to provide a historical framework for the perhaps overly broad concept of world trade. Entry topics were selected on trade organizations, influential people, commodities, events that affected trade, trade routes, navigation, religion, communic

Kenneth Pomeranz

Papers

Orthopraxy, Orthodoxy, and the Goddess(es) of Taishan

Histories for a Less National Age

Water to Iron, Widows to Warlords: The Handan Rain Shrine in Modern Chinese History

The Great Divergence. China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern

Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present : From Ancient Times to the Present