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* The Invisible Hand? How Market Economies Have Emerged and Declined since A.D. 500By Bas Van BavelNew York: Oxford University Press, 2016.Pp. xi, 330. $60 cloth.Economic historian Bas Van Bavel [...]

We explore how macro and micro networks influence the diffusion of technological innovation and cultural/social behavior. Across the historical regimes in China and Europe, dynastic lordship's macro networks afforded different advantages in technological innovation. A network particular to Europe, the Roman Church, extended deep into local parishes with ethical norms prescribing fairness to strangers, and these cultural foundations helped guilds, trade associations, merchant courts, and universities operate cooperatively far beyond kinship. In contrast, Chinese emperors relied on ancient Confucian moral codes and system-spanning Confucian-educated officialdom; but fiscal limitations compelled officials to defer to local lineage orders, resulting in an enduring cultural pattern of guanxi and a polity whose institutional problem-solving capacity falter beyond the local level. Yet the civil service system has enabled China to outperform similar lineage-dependent regimes. Probing network topologies, we find that system-spanning networks can facilitate technological diffusion, but local networks influence cultural and behavioral change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the future of democracy in the East Asian regions. The author argues the social bargaining that reduced divisions between the people of East Asia and the government during the Cold War has lost its power, and if peace, liberty, and prosperity are to exist a new democratic bargaining must be constructed.

The EVENTS of September 111,2001 have led, among many other things, to the revival of an old debate about the relationship between poverty and political extremism. To get at the [...]

Local guilds in eighteenth-century France had difficulty getting started, but once begun they became indispensable to royal finance. Taxation of the guilds provided the government with revenues on luxury goods consumed by the nobility. Reliance on this income later prevented deregulation as the economy became locked into legal and illegal sectors. The guild structure became increasingly inefficient with guildmasters alternately exploiting and persecuting informal sources of production.