Environment, state and economic development in the history of Europe and Asia

Abstract

This paper considers why Europe was the first continent to achieve sustained economic growth. Society's responses were more important than environmental endowments. Culture was not fixed but responsive to exogenous economic change, though capable of reinforcing it. Technological change was less fundamental than the emergence of societies that did not discourage it. Objections that, without technological advance, market growth would have remained 'Smithian'(allocative) are countered by noting that such growth still had ample scope in the eighteenth century. As to politics, the bonding of Europe's political units in a stable way, offering competition and a single market, was highly important. Nevertheless, two modern groups converge on the view that Europe's growth came late and did not depend on internal European circumstances. The 'world historians' see the advance as accidental. The 'quantifiers' see change before 1820 as insignificant. The present paper urges that early Europe's institutions were vital for generating and sustaining growth. Europe's political and legal institutions, although originally intended to promote elite interests, were particularly 'open' and generalisable to other social groups as well as, eventually, to non-Europeans.