I will be writing occasional short essays on contemporary politics and the past, as well as additional material directly related to the book, which can be found here. This first essay concerns the rich literature on what some have called the “Rise of the West,” the “Great Divergence,” and most recently the “Great Reversal.” While enrollments in history classes have declined at many universities, interest in history has never been stronger. Consider, for example: controversies over public monuments and museum displays; war in the Ukraine; Gaza; Iran’s nuclear ambitions; the future of NATO; China; and the future (and past) of American hegemony. Each of these directly engages with historical debates.
A brief update and addendum to the Great Debate.
I am reading two new books that engage with and extend these debates, though from very different perspectives: Two Paths to Prosperity, by Greif, Mokyr (awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics) and Tabellini; and Capitalism, by Sven Beckert. Both are weighty tomes, and I won’t even attempt to summarize either of them.
Two Paths to Prosperity directly takes on the “Great Divergence” debate, though they prefer a different term—”The Great Reversal”—to explain the rise of the West and Chinese stagnation/decline. Their perspective is broadly “neo-institutionalist” and makes an especially strong case for culture. The argument here is that there are distinctive, identifiable elements in Western culture that established the conditions for an economic take-off and, ultimately, prosperity. China, on the other hand, was largely stagnant roughly from the end of the Song Dynasty that ended in the late 13th century and decline significantly around the beginning of the eighteenth century.
The authors tend to jump or leapfrog from one period to another, at times breathlessly moving from 1500 to the nineteenth century. I am also less convinced by the way they downplay the role of the Atlantic economies to the British take-off, but then I have a bone in this fight! Nonetheless, I am very sympathetic to the neo-institutionalist position they advocate.
Beckert’s book is almost a biography of capitalism; it is also massively long. In arguing that “capitalism was born global,” Beckert assails what he calls any and all Eurocentric approaches. I am of course sympathetic to his global approach. But where I fear Beckert goes astray is to then push back the dates for capitalism all the way to the middle of the twelfth century. One problem here—and I think it is very considerable—is that capitalism comes to mean just about anything that is expansive/global and in the end it comes to mean very little.
Again, I am invested in these arguments. As readers will discover in The Killing Age, capitalism was indeed born out of global connections/processes, but it also arose in specific places.
Addendum 12/15/25. Readers may find interesting an interview in Jacobin Magazine with the NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber, which you can find here: https://jacobin.com/2025/12/colonialism-transition-feudalism-capitalism-history-economy/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOsx2BleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR5K_6eSSJXjw68cGXNC6WPXwMF2TT8C6ojIOr7xfzCpwtzcKWpNskwVBQWx2Q_aem_uLHu_uefEI1BWQFbLvn7fQ
Chibber returns us to some of the classic debates on the origins of capitalism, especially taking issue with arguments that emphasize New World plunder (16th-17th centuries). Chibber brings us back to issues such as feudalism and the early generation of capital–and capitalism–in England. For an even deeper dive, readers may want to explore the so-called “Brenner debates.”
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