Joel Mokyr: evaluation

Transcript context

…How does historic India fit into your schema? Well, if I may admit it, my knowledge of India and Indian history is probably not up to par. I’m a Europeanist who spent the last five or six years familiarizing myself with Chinese history, but in the last chapter, there is some discussion of India. My sense is that India is a different version of the Chinese clan system. It’s organized differently because you have this combination of clans and caste in India. Basically, they too are unable to create the kind of unique system that you see in Europe, in which you see these nuclear families living in a society which is organized mostly by corporations. In that sense, I would say, if I may add to that, all of the three great Asian civilizations—Middle Eastern Muslim civilization, Indian Hindu and Muslim civilizations, and China—share something, which in Europe that is the “weirdos.” It’s Europe that are the exceptions. That’s essentially the tenor of Joe Henrich’s book called The WEIRDest People, in which he points this out. That book, I think, has a big influence on us because it really shows, in great detail, how organizing people by nuclear family creates not only a different set of social organization but the culture that goes with it. Now, I don’t want to draw the analogy between India and China too far, but it’s kind of striking that many of those European corporations are woefully missing in India as well until the Brits show up and, in a way, show them how to do it. Even there, I think it is fairly rare, certainly until 1948, and India becomes independent. The truth is, I did not really want to get too deeply into India because it’s pretentious enough for me to spend a couple of years reading Chinese history without people spending their entire lives on one village or one county. It’s just a huge ocean. I can’t really say that I did more than dipping my toes in it. We wanted to take a step back and look at these two big civilizations and try to see why they differed. I want to stress again, we don’t make the argument that India or China failed. They were doing what their preferences and their institutions, in some sense, dictated. I find it always telling that the British established an East India Company that trades with India in London, but that, in Delhi, you don’t see a Western European Company or an England Company that does to the Europeans what the Europeans did to them. That asymmetry is already there in 1600. Why was there no Industrial Revolution in the Roman Empire?…

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