Before and beyond divergence: the politics of economic change in China and Europe

[Introduction] In the past three decades scholars have reconsidered what set Europe off from the rest of the world as the site of state formation and economic changes that led to modern nation-states and industrialized economies. The themes, of course, are far older. They recur in the inquiries of great social thinkers from Montesquieu and Adam Smith to Karl Marx and Max Weber. Europe’s, particularly England’s, success moved scholars to assess other societies from a European benchmark. Quite diverse social science scholarship presumed that there was a unique and European-defined path to modernization and prosperity. But in the 1980s doubts about...