So for China specifically, probably the best place to start is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. I don’t agree with all the conclusions of that monograph but it’s a great first foray into the questions and concerns of this kind of longue durée history. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi makes this argument I’ve identified above, that the Chinese state was strong enough to stop capital from taking over and that the way capitalism formed in the West is actually rather odd; this is a wonderful book but it requires quite a bit of context, and you might even be better off starting with his more broad account of the rise of capitalism called The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, which (despite its name) covers around 500 years from the formation of capitalism in Renaissance Italy up to the modern era. Fernand Braudel’s three part Capitalism and Civilisation, from which Arrighi draws a lot of his ideas, is phenomenal but very long and again requires even more familiarity with the historical period.
If you just want a quick summary of all the above, distilled into something quite short but still well done, I’d recommend The Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’ by Eric Mielants. It’s not specifically focused on China, but it does cover the “capitalism requires the state” bit and why capitalism happens in Western Europe and not anywhere else.
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So for China specifically, probably the best place to start is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. I don’t agree with all the conclusions of that monograph but it’s a great first foray into the questions and concerns of this kind of longue durée history. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi makes this argument I’ve identified above, that the Chinese state was strong enough to stop capital from taking over and that the way capitalism formed in the West is actually rather odd; this is a wonderful book but it requires quite a bit of context, and you might even be better off starting with his more broad account of the rise of capitalism called The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, which (despite its name) covers around 500 years from the formation of capitalism in Renaissance Italy up to the modern era. Fernand Braudel’s three part Capitalism and Civilisation, from which Arrighi draws a lot of his ideas, is phenomenal but very long and again requires even more familiarity with the historical period.
If you just want a quick summary of all the above, distilled into something quite short but still well done, I’d recommend The Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’ by Eric Mielants. It’s not specifically focused on China, but it does cover the “capitalism requires the state” bit and why capitalism happens in Western Europe and not anywhere else.