Joel Mokyr: recommendation

Transcript context

…Now, there’s another problem in Chinese history, as you well know, for instance, Song China falls to Kublai Khan, even though Song China is relatively wealthy for its time. There were other cases of so-called barbarians coming down from the north, taking over parts of what we now call China. Why is that happening? Is that also because of the clan system? No, no, no, no, no. I think China is simply located in a very different kind of geographical and demographic neighborhood. Essentially, it remains for all practical purposes, unified since the rise of the Song in 960. There’s a splitting of the Southern and Northern Song for a little while, but it’s basically a unified society, which shares a language, particularly a written language, which is very important. What happens is there’s these wild people on their border that, every once in a while, invade China. That happened more than once. It happened during the Mongols, of course, in 1279. The Mongols actually established a dynasty, the Yuan dynasty that lasted about 80 years, if I recall correctly. What is interesting, Tyler, is that when these people from the steppe, and some of them were Mongols, some of them were Turkmen, some of them were actually partially Chinese, but if they are not full-blooded Han Chinese and they come in and invade, very often they become sinified. They start speaking Chinese, they start dressing like Chinese, they behave like Chinese, they adopt Confucianism, and they accept most of the Chinese institutions, such as the imperial examination, and they get absorbed into the clan system. There’s nothing like that in Europe. Europe really, since the early Middle Ages, is not invaded effectively by any other non-European power. The Ottomans try a couple of times and they get defeated. The Mongols try once in 1240, and then if they had taken over Europe, history would have been very different, but they turned around and go back for internal reasons. What that really means is that the Europeans are mostly confronting one another, whereas the Chinese, in most cases, are worried about people from the outside, which is they have this wall and they have this military that’s posted on the outer boundaries of China to keep the savages out. That creates a very different kind of world. Interestingly enough, again, one of your colleagues, at George Mason, Mark Koyama, has a bunch of papers that describe this in great detail and quite, I think, elegantly and ingeniously, how that geographical differences created the difference between the Chinese government, which remained a unified state, and Europe, which remains fragmented, basically, until the present day. How does historic India fit into your schema?…

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