This article offers a critical review of recent literature on Chinese legal tradition and argues that some subtle but fundamental differences between the Western and Chinese legal traditions are highly relevant to our explanation of the economic divergence in the modern era. By elucidating the...

This paper revisits Bairoch’s hypothesis that in the late 19th century tariffs were positively associated with growth, as recently confirmed by a new generation of quantitative studies (see O`Rourke (2000), Jacks (2006) and Clemens-Williamson (2002, 2004)). This paper highlights the importance...

This paper considers the 1990s in the context of long run economic growth performance. Growth in the context of this paper should be understood to comprise the growth of real living standards as well as real GDP per person. There were a number of new experiences during the decade that were...

Since the 1980s the debate about economic convergence hasdominated empirical work about the dynamics of growth. Economichistorians have been attracted, in particular, by stories of clubconvergence. However, the analytical foundations of most of the work inthis area have rested on linear, or more...

Economic convergence has emerged as one of the key debates in the theoretical andhistorical literature over the last decade. Galor identified three forms of long run percapita income convergence: absolute convergence, whereby convergence occursindependently of the initial conditions facing each...

Although industrial production and growth in Greece during the interwar periodhas attracted considerable attention, there has not been any serious challengeeither in qualitative or quantitative terms to the orthodoxy established in theperiod itself. The literature usually sees the 1920s as a...

In early modern north-western Europe, real wages declined while GDP per capita was on the increase. In contrast, wage growth in Tokugawa Japan went hand in hand with output growth. Based on this finding, the paper revisits Thomas Smith’s thesis on ‘Pre-modern Economic Growth: Japan and the...

The nature of the seventeenth-century Mughal state and its land revenue taxation system has become a matter of controversy in recent years. Irfan Habib and his followers dominated thinking on this subject from the sixties onwards. They saw the regime as highly centralized and essentially...

The period of 1840 (when the Opium War broken out) till now is commonly regarded as China’s modern era, ‘modern’ in terms of China’s departure from its original growth and developmental path. In this context, the term modern has been intimately associated with something alien to the...