Avner Greif et al., "Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000" (Princeton UP, 2025)

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**Nicholas Gordon** (1:16)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast and partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and non-fiction authors working in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region. It's one of the biggest questions of economic history. How did a richer, more advanced China fall behind Europe? Why was Europe the home of the Industrial Revolution and not China? What does that journey tell us about politics and culture? In Two Paths to Prosperity, Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000 to 2000, Guido Tabellini, alongside his co-authors, argued that the answer comes from how European and Chinese organized cooperation, through corporations in Europe and through clans in China, and how that shaped each one society. Guido Tabellini is the Intesa Sanpaolo Chair in Political Economics and Vice President at Bocconi University. So, Guido, thank you so much for coming on the show today. You know, I want to start by talking about the puzzle your book is trying to explain, which is kind of the great divergence. You know, what is this idea, and what are some of the normal explanations as to what caused it?

**Guido Tabellini** (2:28)
So, by great divergence, or maybe would be better to call it great reversal, as we do in parts of the book.
We mean the fact that about a thousand years ago, China was well ahead of Europe in economic terms and in cultural terms. It was a well-established civilization, which had achieved the technological improvements. It was functioning well, was getting urbanized. Whereas Europe was really in a very primitive state. The collapse of the Roman Empire had brought population decreases and distractions of all sorts. So it was very, very, very much behind. But then over the course of history, China did not improve much. It stagnated. In some sense, it declined. Whereas Europe eventually took off, and it became much, much richer. So great divergence is the history, the puzzle as to why do we see this increasing divergence or reversal between the European path and the Chinese path. In the book, we emphasize that it's not just an economic divergence. There are many ways in which, over the course of the centuries, these two civilizations became further and further apart in their political institutions, in their social structures, in their family patterns, in their cultural environments. And of course, historians have devoted a lot of attention and time to discussing why this took place. And I don't think there is a single explanation of it. There are many explanations and certainly, plurality of causes must be behind this great divergence. The existing explanation that we find more compelling, to which we add, we build on that, but is already in the literature, is that China was able to achieve unification very early on.
At the time of, or even before the time of the Roman Empire in Europe, and it maintained a unified state structure over time.
And that enabled it to build strong state institutions during the first millennium after the price. Whereas Europe, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, was totally fragmented. It was fragmented between a plurality of entities, and states emerged later on. But also internally, within these entities, it was fragmented in many political ways. And so this contrast between a strong unitary state that developed early on, and a plurality of fragmented entities in Europe, is seen as an important cause of this divergence, because it allowed Europe to develop more inclusive, democratic institutions. And it also facilitated the escaping, the control of the state over the accumulation of knowledge. And eventually, this facilitated the advent of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, rather than in China. So we build on this theme, and we emphasize the importance of the theme. But the literature has many other causes that we discuss in the book. Some pointing to geography as being a cause of this greater fragmentation in Europe, but also a cause of the fact that the Industrial Revolution took place in Europe and not in China. We discount instead the role of geography, and we point to the importance of culture as a more important feature of the causes that led to the great divergence.