There is a book club here in Shanghai which met to discuss Why Europe Was First. Very exciting. This is a report from their proceedings:
We had 11 people come to discuss your book yesterday, and most of them got through the whole thing.
I have to say, however, that our three-hour discussion was a bit disappointing to me, and so I was probably wrong that it suits a wider audience.
Although you emphasize repeatedly that your explanation is an institutional one (and therefore you are against cultural explanation and associated Eurocentricism), I don’t think they really grasped the importance of your first theoretical chapters. The idea that individuals are powerless in the absence of institutions, and that therefore technology was additive in Europe once the institutions were ready, and that innovations such as steam engine technology where lost in China — this point was completely lost on them. I suppose this I shouldn’t have taken for granted that this sociological way of looking at things would be easy to grasp, even though you do spend a lot of time explaining it carefully. It reminds me of what how I used to explain things culturally by habit before my graduate training.
I suppose, also, that our group was expecting more of a historical narrative, and didn’t realize that your innovation was the theoretical model you proposed, and that the historical details were a filling in of this framework. Perhaps for this reason, I don’t think various more “useful nuggets” of information stuck with them. Why did pluralism develop in England? Because political entrepreneurship led to power struggles that required an institutional solution. Why did European exploration succeed where Chinese exploration never got off the ground. Because Europe had developed the institutional structure to finance these endeavors. How did the “Robinsonian” individualists end up becoming the slaves to fashion and the market? Because social change had loosened the bonds between individuals and prior social relations, paradoxically leading to a new conformity (as in Tocqueville’s account of the U.S.). Above all, they didn’t really grasp (or remember?) your explanation for why China didn’t modernize, the core of which I took to be:
People in China expressed a deep suspicion of formal institutions. As far as political entrepreneurship was concerned, it proposed the virtuous action of good men rather than good laws. And as far as economic entrepreneurship was concerned, it relied heavily on personal connections and informal networks. Instead of trusting universal commitments [to groups], people tended to trust only the people they knew personally. (244)
I would have drawn from your discussion of Chinese religion that Chinese had little concept of strict, exclusive membership in groups. Without institutions based on equal membership among relative strangers, and a system of duties and privileges flowing from the group (as opposed to those from patronage networks), the leverage of institutions was limited by scale of membership, and institutions were therefore unable to do things like raise money in capital markets, or act as unified actors the way corporations do. This was the way I tried to explain it to them, influenced by my reading of Fei Xiaotong. I tried to explain how much more powerful an individual is if he is speaking for an corporation, but for that corporation to be an effective actor, that individual and other members of the corporation have to take seriously the contract that binds them to the corporation. The organization has to be integral for members to effectively leverage its power, but integral, non-corrupt organizations have always been the victim of patronage networks in Chinese history.
May I ask if you agree with this thumbnail sketch? This was the easiest way I could find to explain your main point to them.
Aside from some common criticisms about how your China section didn’t seem as tight or well-organized as your Europe section, I at least thoroughly enjoyed your book. But then, I’ve probably already “drunk the punch” and see how it reinforces my methodological word-view, whether that is the usefulness of social science as opposed to history, or that of institutions in social explanation.