You have to love the fact that all four of China’s main private-sector express-delivery companies–the guys shuttling all those Taobao packages around the…

Entre monde et nation: les régions braudéliennes en Asie
R. Bin Wong, trans. Pierre-Étienne Will
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales
56e Année, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 2001), pp. 5-41

His site with links to other work, CV etc - This paper shows that the Malthusian mechanism alone cannot explain the pre-industrial stagnation of living standards. Improvement in luxury technology, if faster than improvement in subsistence technology, would have kept living standards growing. The Malthusian trap is essentially a puzzle of balanced growth between the luxury sector and the subsistence sector. The author argues that balanced growth is caused by group selection in the form of biased migration. It is proven that a tiny bit of bias in migration can suppress a strong growth tendency. The theory re-explains the Malthusian trap and the prosperity of ancient market economies such as Rome and Sung. It also suggests a new set of factors triggering modern economic growth. - work up of his dissertation at Berkeley -- downloaded via Air, attached to Evernote

Tourists watch floodwaters gushing out of the Xiaolangdi dam during a sand-washing operation of the Yellow river in Jiyuan, China, 2010.Photograph: Miao… Useless review the only thing mentioned is "thorough" - since the reviewer was only interested in China's history of millenia dominated by water politics, one assumes that if Ball had made a hash of it, the faults would have been mentioned - and since Ball is an excellent writer of non-fiction, the assumption is the book must be pretty good

When Technocrats Are Pushed Aside Nearly 56 years ago, with the beginning of the second Five-Year Plan, Chairman Mao called for a “Great Leap Forward”. The…

This fall, Harvard University Press will publish a new history, “Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China,” by Julian Gewirtz, a doctoral student at Oxford. The book tells the little-known story of how Chinese intellectuals and leaders, facing a ruined economy at the end of the Cultural Revolution, sought the help of foreign economists to rebuild. Between 1976 and 1993, in a series of exchanges, conferences, and collaborations, Western intellectuals sought not to change China but to help it change itself, and they made indispensible contributions to China’s rise as a global economic power. “China’s rulers were in charge of this process—they sought out Western ideas and did not copy them indiscriminately. But they were open to Western influence and were profoundly influenced,” Gewirtz told me. “This history should not be forgotten. And, at a moment when China’s economy and society may be teetering, a return to this openness and partnership with the West—rather than the turn toward intellectual isolation and international distrustfulness that seems to be under way—is the best means of avoiding disaster.”

36 lectures - list price $320
- the video version is a must in order to follow the names of groups, locations and movements
A few bothered by mispronunciation and a lot of ahs - but most reviewers very enthusiastic - and replaying lectures to get all the info. Counters a few complaints that it's too superficial, or that it pays too much attention to the sedentary civilizations that were affected - the last complaint seems to miss the very purpose of the course.

Must-Read: Alan Beattie (FT.com): Despotic Rulers Who Display Their Muscle to Turn Back Time: "Adopting inconvenient time zones for symbolic reasons begins to look like insecurity... Great pull quote -- not only Mao and India but Chavez and Franco, who adopted Berlin time!

Barry Allen's new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue that's as much of a pleasure to read as it will be to teach with. Taking on the work of Confucians, Daoists, military theorists, Chan Buddhists, Neo-Confucian philosophers, and others, Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks at the common threads and important differences in the ways that scholars have attempted to conceptualize and articulate what it is to be a knowing being in the world. Some of the major themes that recur throughout the work include the nature of non-action and emptiness, the relationship between knowledge and scholarship, the possibility of Chinese epistemologies and empiricisms, and the importance of artifice. Allen pays special attention to the ways that these scholars relate knowledge to a fluid conception of "things" that can be "completed" or "vanished into" by the knower, and to their understanding of things as parts of a collective economy of human and non-human relationships. The book does an excellent job of maintaining its focus on Chinese texts and contexts while making use of comparative cases from Anglophone and European-language philosophy that brings Chinese scholars into conversation with Nietzsche, Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and beyond - 1 hour interview

Jack Goody, Le Vol de l’histoire. Comment l’Europe a imposé le récit de son passé au reste du monde, traduit de l’anglais par Fabienne Durand-Bogaert. Paris, Gallimard, coll. « NRF Essais », 2010, 488 p. (édition originale : The Theft of History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006). -- Mots-clés : historiographie | Europe | histoire globale | Asie -- Partant d’une comparaison entre l’Asie et l’Europe, l’anthropologue Jack Goody dénonce ce qu’il appelle le « vol de l’histoire ». Il reproche à Elias, Braudel ou Needham d’avoir conforté le grand récit qui fait de l’expérience historique de l’Europe à la fois une exception et la mesure de l’histoire du reste du monde. Cette critique est utile et légitime, selon Jacques Revel, mais repose sur des jugements parfois tout aussi globalisants que ceux qu’elle entend contredire. -- downloaded pdf to Note

The EIF was one of the most powerful and enduring organizations in history. "Between Monopoly and Free Trade" locates the source of that success in the innovative policy by which the Court of Directors granted employees the right to pursue their own commercial interests while in the firm’s employ. Exploring trade network dynamics, decision-making processes, and ports and organizational context, Emily Erikson demonstrates why the EIC was a dominant force in the expansion of trade between Europe and Asia, and she sheds light on the related problems of why England experienced rapid economic development and how the relationship between Europe and Asia shifted in the 18thC and 19thC.(..) Building on the organizational infrastructure of the Company and the sophisticated commercial institutions of the markets of the East, employees constructed a cohesive internal network of peer communications that directed English trading ships during their voyages. This network integrated Company operations, encouraged innovation, and increased the Company’s flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to local circumstance. -- assistant professor in the department of sociology and the school of management (by courtesy) at Yale University, as well as a member of the Council of South Asian Studies. -- excerpt Chapter 1 downloaded pdf to Note

Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. (...) this wide-ranging book, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the 17thC and 21stC. The book begins with a taboo topic. Ó Gráda argues that cannibalism, while by no means a universal feature of famines and never responsible for more than a tiny proportion of famine deaths, has probably been more common during very severe famines than previously thought. (...) new interpretations of two of the 20thC’s most notorious and controversial famines, the Great Bengal Famine and the Chinese Great Leap Forward Famine. Ó Gráda questions the standard view of the Bengal Famine as a perfect example of market failure, ...primary cause was the unwillingness of colonial rulers to divert food from their war effort. (...) the role played by traders and speculators during famines more generally, invoking evidence from famines in France, Ireland, Finland, Malawi, Niger, and Somalia since the 1600s, and overturning Adam Smith’s claim that government attempts to solve food shortages always cause famines. Cormac Ó Gráda is professor emeritus of economics at University College Dublin. His books include Famine: A Short History and Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (both Princeton). -- introduction downloaded as pdf to Note

This post is a condensed version of a keynote delivered at a conference "The Axial Age and its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present" sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation in cooperation with Robert Bellah and Hans Joas. -- After discussing Habermas' theory of a legitimation crisis in the axial civilizations and the critique - political, moral and religious - of the key axial age figures whom he calls "the renouncers" -- The great utopias served for the renouncers as stark contrasts to the actual world, and their vision of that other world could be called “theory” in Plato’s sense. But the very distance they felt from the world to which they returned made possible another kind of “theory,” another kind of seeing—that is, a distant, critical view of the actual world in which they lived. The renouncer sees the world with new eyes: as Plato says of the ones who have returned to the cave, they see the shadows for what they are, not naively as do those who have never left. One could say that the ideological illusion is gone. Once disengaged vision becomes possible then theory can take another turn: it can abandon any moral stance at all and look simply at what will be useful, what can make the powerful and exploitative even more so. -- The axial age gave us “theory” in two senses, and neither of them has been unproblematic ever since. The great utopian visions have motivated some of the noblest achievements of mankind; they have also motivated some of the worst actions of human beings. Theory in the sense of disengaged knowing, inquiry for the sake of understanding, with or without moral evaluation, has brought its own kind of astounding achievements but also given humans the power to destroy their environment and themselves. Both kinds of theoria have criticized but also justified the class society that first came into conscious view in the axial age. They have provided the intellectual tools for efforts to reform and efforts to repress. It is a great heritage. ... It has given us the great tool of criticism. How will we use it? -- downloaded page as pdf to Note

Undergraduate Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 -- posted on History of the Ancient World website -- Abstract: Throughout the course of human history, the interaction and conflict between civilization and barbarism, whether real or perceived, has existed in historical memory. The conflict, which spans continents and centuries, can be found in the historical writings of many sedentary civilizations, who felt a need to differentiate between “Us” and “Them.” In fact, many early civilizations defined themselves in the presence of groups which they considered barbarous.The project looks at two civilizations which had such interactions. Late Republican Rome and Han China are well known for their conflicts with peripheral groups. This thesis compares how these two empires conquered and assimilated these barbarian groups, namely the Roman conquest of Gaul and the Chinese conquest of the Xiongnu, a nomadic people that inhabited modern day Mongolia. Despite these two empires separation by time and geography, their methods of conquest were very similar. Where they differed was in their assimilation of conquered peoples, a difference which stems from the way the two civilizations defined themselves.By comparing these events in history, we can gain an insight into the topic which can not be achieved by studying each civilization individually. The interface of disparate cultures is at the heart of many modern issues, from immigration to the war on terror. By studying these past events, it can be seen that this aspect of the human experience not only transcends East and West but also the centuries that separate us from the ancient world. -- downloaded pdf to Note