Spring 2007, Volume 17, No. 1

"Civilization and Economy: Is Synthesis Possible in the Age of Micro History?"

Brett Sheehan

Conference Report on: "The Economic Performance of Civilizations: Roles of Culture, Religion, and the Law," organized by the Institute of Economic Research on Civilizations, University of Southern California, February 23-24, 2007.

In February 2007 the University of Southern California hosted a major international conference aimed at bringing interregional and interdisciplinary perspectives to the question of economic development. The conference was notable for its attempt to place economic activities in their broad cultural context with special emphasis on religion and law. Although many of the papers concerned the Ottoman Empire, other regions of interest ranged from Britain to China. Most participants came from the disciplines of economics, law, history, and sociology.

There is no need to summarize the papers here because most of them are available at the conference website, http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/ierc/papers/ . Readers of Chinese Business History would perhaps be most interested in the only paper on China, Madelein Zelin's "Informal Law and the Firm in Early Modern China," but unfortunately it is not currently posted on the website. For the purposes of this report, I will focus on the conceptual framework of the conference and its usefulness to Chinese business and economic history.

At the start of the conference, Timur Kuran, the primary conference organizer, used his work on Islamic development (or underdevelopment as he would put it) to hypothesize a systemic approach to "explaining the economic trajectories of civilizations." He begins with rejection of materialist and cultural approaches. Materialist arguments assert that economics either shape religion or that religion is a phenomenon separate from economics, whereas culturalists see religion governing economic behavior. In contrast, Kuran argues for a middle ground, a systemic approach, which connects variable causally and incorporates feedback effects and secondary consequences. Kuran is fighting weaknesses in the current literature which he sees when, "grand lessons are then drawn from an analysis limited in scope to a short period, or one sector, or one particular transformation. Moreover, distinctions among local and global optimality, and between static and dynamic efficiency are blurred, leading to exaggerated evaluations."¹

Kuran's suggested approach hinges on using comparison to identify the core traits of civilizations, which have mechanisms "common to huge populations and in play for long periods."² The existence of core traits derives from his definition of civilization which is not tied to political boundaries and may not necessarily be tied to a region. Thus Great Britain and New Zealand, in his example, might share civilizational traits in spite of the distance between them. In his view, civilization is also broader than culture because it includes not only the beliefs, preferences and behaviors of a community but also interlocking mechanisms. A civilization is identified though clusters of complementary institutions.

Kuran's case in point is "Islamic Civilization," but many of the conference participants took issue with his formulation. Discussant, Naomi Lamoreaux argued that Kuran's systemic approach was, in the end, too "culturalist," and in many ways she is right. The emphasis on civilizational traits could easily lead to under emphasis on historical contingency, and lead to theories of "civilizational determinism."

As a Chinese historian, it is hard to know where China would fit within Kuran's framework. How do eclectic religious practices such as those found in China fit with "civilizational traits"? Perhaps Confucianism constituted a civilization, though it lacked the kinds of legal structures Kuran finds so important in Islam. Most of the conference presentations did not specify a particular "civilization" of interest, but careful listening could result in the following list of possible civilizations under discussion: Islamic, Hindu, Hindu India, China, Europe, Christianity, the Ottoman Empire, Japan, Roman law, customary law, law-giving religions, non law-giving religions, and wet rice agriculture. All of these are problematic, and most do not fit under Kuran's definition. It is not just that "Islamic civilization" has different clusters of institutions than "Chinese civilization" (or Confucian civilization), but that these different institutions define different kinds of civilizations.

In the end, the conference participants could not reach consensus on a methodological basis for comparative study. Nonetheless, the issues raised at the conference can help provide at least four insights for Chinese historians of Chinese business and economy. First, comparison is important. Although Kuran's definition of "civilization" relies too heavily on his own

understanding of Islam as a type, comparison forces us to consider distinctions between the universal and the particular. Second, interdisciplinary approaches can help identify factors we might not otherwise consider. Third, despite the importance of state actors, economies do not necessarily work within state boundaries. (Cochran's Chinese Medicine Men provides a good example.³) Fourth, although much fine work has been done at the micro level in the last couple of decades, the approaches of sociologists and economists reminds us that we could do more to link historical case studies to macro-level processes such as economic performance, political environment, or culture. Perhaps it is time for a new synthesis in our field. Rawski's Economic Growth in Prewar China is almost twenty years old and its abrupt end in 1937 seems more and more problematic.⁴ The lessons of this conference teach us, however, that synthesis is difficult, comparison requires great care. Perhaps most importantly, states are important, but the nation state may not be the appropriate unit of analysis for a new synthesis.

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1. Timur Kuran, "Explaining the Economic Trajectories of Civilizations: Musings on the Systemic Approach," 15, presented at "The Economic Performance of Civilizations: Roles of Culture, Religion, and the Law," organized by the Institute of Economic Research on Civilizations, University of Southern California, February 23-24, 2007.
2. Ibid., 16.
3. Sherman Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia (Cambridge, Mass and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2006).
4. Thomas G. Rawski, Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

 Last Updated On: 5/25/07