Not so much research I'm doing now, but based on research I've done in the past. I gave a presentation about my area to an undergrad class about ancient civilizations a few weeks ago. The professor for that class sent me an email about it this morning.

Dear Mictlantecuhtli, I want to thank you very much for your presentation to my Ancient American Civilizations class on the Teuchitlán Culture of West Mexico earlier this semester. Although I knew a little about the W. Mexico research through work carried out when Shina Duvall was a student in your program, your presentation made the known and unknown aspects of this culture much clearer to me. I solicited comments from students following the talk and they were unanimously positive. Some were as follows: "Really seemed to know his stuff"; "I like the hats and noses on the pots'; "I really liked the way he showed us how he got his map data and how it was [sic.] interpreted"; "I'd like to take a course from him"; "For the first time, I really saw what an archaeological research project was from the start". These are strong comments, and gratifying to me as a teacher of undergraduates. I personally thought you had a firm grasp on the archaeology of the region and understood the place of your research in the larger Mesoamerican area very well. I think that all that bodes well for your future as a professional and reflects well on the UCD Anthro. Department. I wish you all the best and hope you will feel free to call on me if I can reciprocate in any way.

Jon

I feel so warm and fuzzy inside

I should point out, though, I failed with the person who said "I like the hats and noses on the pots". They were figures, not vessels.

I picked up a copy of Acemoglu's Why Nations Fail without knowing much about it because it was cheap and developmental economics is important. I haven't finished yet but I wanted to give some early impressions. I thought the book was going to be about a careful examination of the role of institutions in the history of economic development, but it seems like it is instead one of those Big Theory^TM books that tries to explain wealth and poverty using a unidimensional independent variable. Fully acknowledging that I've always had a major personal bias against Big Theories^TM , I still find the book rather wanting.

It seems like the author extrapolated findings from his earlier paper about post-colonial Africa The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation into a full length book about world history. The gist of the original paper was that the growth trajectories of post-colonial African countries are highly correlated with their geographical latitude. The authors hypothesized that different climates led to different settler mortality rates led to different institutions led to different growth outcomes. 'Institutions' here is simply a unidimensional variable that goes from 'inclusive' to 'extractive' in the author's parlance. From the book:

We will refer to political institutions that are sufficiently centralized and pluralistic as inclusive political institutions. When either of these conditions fails, we will refer to the institutions as extractive political institutions.

I'm not incredibly familiar with Africa, and the few other things I've read about the economy of modern Africa seem to largely corroborate the paper's thesis. But the book imo falls flat trying to generalize those findings to the entire world.

For example, the book devotes only a handful of pages to the biggest story in developmental economics in modern history: China's grand reform and opening experiment. Here the book bases its discussion on a handful of sources limited to the PRC period and simply concludes that pre-1978 PRC institutions were more 'extractive' and post-1978 PRC institutions were more 'inclusive' and that explains the success of Chinese development.

The problem is that economic historians who actually study China usually never constrain themselves to the PRC period. The key question is why China experienced weak growth during the late Qing-Republican period, why China experienced mediocre and uneven growth during the pre-reform PRC period, and why China experienced explosive growth in the post-reform PRC period. It's very difficult to fit all of modern China's various institutional frameworks into Acemoglu's schema of 'extractive' vs 'inclusive'.

Institutional arguments for explaining China's unique growth trajectory aren't new. But to take an example of a much more sophisticated argument, see From Divergence to Convergence: Re-evaluating the History Behind China’s Economic Boom by Brandt, Ma, Rawski. Like most China specialists, these authors identify continuities between China's past and present, but also identify discontinuities that explain what happened after 1978. Without endorsing one particular conclusion or another I just want to briefly review the history of economic institutions in modern China.

During the 19th century, China's institutions were rather paradoxical. On the one hand, the emperor theoretically ruled the nation as an absolute ruler working through a centralized bureaucracy. On the other hand, the institutions of government had little real presence in the day to day lives of citizens. Central government revenues likely accounted for under 5% of national output, and total government revenues likely accounted for well under 10%. Most revenue was in the form of a land tax. Commerce was left alone for the most part, and government monopolies (like salt) were often operated by giving certain local merchants license to deal in the monopoly good.

The lowest level of official government was the county magistrate, who could oversee hundreds of thousands of citizens at once. Magistrates were rotated every few years and were stationed away from their home provinces to deter corruption and the development of independent power bases. They were overseen by institutions like the imperial censorate which would report on possible wrongdoing. The magistrate, working with a small, largely unpaid staff, had little ability to influence events in his district.

The actual economic activity of China was largely left to households, mostly unmolested by officialdom. A household could be a single nuclear family where the husband works the fields and the wife spins and weaves at home (which is about all she can do given the prevalence of footbinding). Or it could be a large wealthy lineage organization (extended family) that might be engaged in long distance trade, have dealings with local merchant guilds who have the blessing of imperial monopoly brokers. In some regions the lineage organization could develop into what might be recognized now as a corporation, where shares (gu), were held by individuals with shared interests and not shared ancestry. What made them different from modern public corporations though is the lack of official legal sanction and the lack of mature financial markets to trade equity.

19th century China did not have much in the way of a civil code governing contract obligations, for example. Civil litigation (which occupied the bulk of time in the magistrate's office) was a complex process based on extrapolating judicial logic from the criminal code and precedents from earlier cases. Litigators as a professional class were not supposed to exist by imperial decree since litigation itself was to be discouraged as much as possible. All of this is part of the idealogy of Confucian governance, which held up small government as the ultimate ideal to aspire to. This idealogy was then perpetuated by the examination system which was the main avenue of social advancement in China. Wealthy merchants would aspire to raise their children as jinshi degree holders, educating them in Confucian philosophy. These jinshi holders would then go on to become magistrates or influential members of wealthy lineage organizations.

What's notable about the early modern Chinese economy was that it was simultaneously heavily commercialized and heavily decentralized, in contrast to the industrial economies arising in, say, the UK or the Netherlands. Just about everyone participated in commercial activity. In fact by some estimates, the average rural household could not adequately feed themselves based on their farm output alone. Light manufacturing and commerce was needed to raise their income above subsistence levels. Thus light industry dominated manufacturing in China. Even at the high end (government owned manufactories or corporate lineage organizations), economic actors never concentrated enough capital to start developing the heavy industry we associate with the modern factory (think giant steel works and steam engines).

During the self-strengthening movement, Chinese reformers (who were often provincial rather than national bureaucrats) attempted to industrialize the nation within the existing institutional framework. They opened modern factories and schools, but staffed them with bureaucrats trained in the existing examination system. After 1895 and the Treaty of Shimonoseki, western factories began opening in earnest in the treaty ports. Chinese industrialists followed shortly thereafter. Instead of displacing the nationwide household economy, these pockets of industrialization actually augmented it. For example industrialization changed the structure of the textile industry. It made the spinning process tremendously efficient, but this actually stimulated the household weaving industry. Spinners became weavers and overall household weaving experienced an expansion in output. But still overall growth did not take off in the same way that it did after 1978. (The extent of growth in the early 20th century is a major point of contention.)

What happened starting in 1978 was actually remarkably similar to what was happening in the early 20th century, but with a few key institutional differences. In 1978 the government loosened rules on rural collectives, who had been directed during the Cultural Revolution to focus on a handful of products regardless of their local conditions. The collectives began operating for-profit town and village enterprises (TVE's) almost immediately. Farmers were allowed to private farm plots for personal gain and light industrial TVE's were formed at various scales (larger around Zhejiang, smaller around Fujian, etc.) to produce consumer products. The growth in this liberalized sector eventually overwhelmed the existing state sector of centrally planned state owned enterprises (SOE's).

So the Chinese economy of the 80's sounds remarkably like the Chinese economy of the late 19th, early 20th century. What changed? For one financial institutions now existed which could channel large amounts of capital towards various enterprises. Chinese government banks are not comparable to western banks, but the fact that they existed at all is a marked departure from 19th century China. A huge number of people now had access to significant amounts of capital. Second, the Confucian education system was dismantled completely. During the early decades of the PRC a modern technical education system was constructed in its place. All of this was enabled by a powerful central government which for the first time in Chinese history was able to marshall a significant proportion of national output. The GMD tried, but was never able to pull it off, and resorted to disastrous money printing.

So how does this story fit into the simplistic 'exclusive' vs 'inclusive' institutional narrative? I don't think it does. (Damn this is an abrupt ending but I'm out of room.)

I'm taking a course in the fall on Jewish philosophy from the 12th century through the 15th century. Over the summer, I'd like to do some reading on Jewish history and culture during this time. Any recommendations? [If there are any good documentaries or online lectures, I'm open to those suggestions as well.]

I'm still plowing through Maiolo's Cry Havoc. Economics is a weak area for me, so getting the economic perspective on 1930's rearmament is both valuable and fascinating. I wouldn't call it earth-shattering stuff, but all of it is allowing me to understand more depth on the topic.

I'm also typing up my notes from Preston's Spanish Holocaust. Good grief were there some awful people doing awful things during the Spanish Civil War. Thankfully there are a few good souls in the narrative to keep me from hitting the bottle, because the rough stuff is really depressing.

In the stage of charging forward into dissertation land where I have a long list of books I should look at even though 80% are guaranteed to be pop culture crap only tangentially related to my topic with no original research. But the risk of missing a hot lead on an archive or an under-researched story within my topic is too high! (This is the downside of choosing a topic about which the public is very much interested . . . )

I'm reading The Balkans by Mark Mazower, but I'm having a little trouble with it because I know next to nothing about the Eastern Roman Empire, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Ottoman Empire. Could anyone recommend some good introductions to these topics?

EDIT: I have Osman's Dream by Caroline Finkel, and Christianity: The First 3000 Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch on hold at the library, hoping those will help me out a bit.