Public goods provision in the early modern economy : comparative perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe

Abstract

Many of our expectations regarding patterns of historical change in global history continue to be based upon understandings of the significance of what William McNeill called “The Rise of the West” in the title of a seminal work he first published in 1963. Marx and Weber are the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectual ancestors of this basic approach to human history. For many social scientists who provide us contemporary approaches to economic development and state building, the readings of history that inform their approaches to contemporary political priorities and economic possibilities continue to be based on a tradition of grand social theories. The metrics they employ for evaluating times and places beyond early modern Europe and the modern West remain anchored in European history and its connections to modern historical transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however irrelevant those intellectual foundations appear to them.