Herewith a brief response to two of Brad DeLong's thoughtful, quizzical comments.(posted 8762 days ago)(1) "[As] Alan Taylor eloquently pointed out, to reduce the European Miracle from a ten-century to a two-century affair makes understanding and accounting for it much, much harder..."
I don't think that anyone, and certainly not Gunder Frank, is arguing that you don't have to look for pre-18th-century csauses for 18th- century effects. The problem is: how far back do you have to go? Frank and I argue that you don't have to go back before the 16tth century, because the rise of Europe relative to other civilizations was kicked off initially by the inflow of silver (etc.) from the Americas after 1492.
Landes, Jones, & Co. of course argue otherwise. They find saome unique European genius (mentality, culture) in Europe 1000 years ago (Landes, Lynn White, MacFarlane, Weber, et al.) or 5000 years ago (Jones, Mann, Hall, Wittfogel, et al.), something, or some things, that propelled Europe and only Europe forward toward later modernization. This, of course, is the conventional position. I think it has in it a large dose of Eurocentric folklore. For every trait in ancient or medieval Europe that seems to be part of the explanation for Europe's later rise (relative to other civilizations), I think you find either that (1) the trait was also present in non-Europe, or (2) the trait was not really all that progressive, or all that pregnant with implications for later progress, or (3) the trait could be balanced off against some trait of non-Europe which was equally pregnant with implications for later development. The problem here is what I call "tunnel history." You know that Europe in later times had some undeniable superiority or priority. You search for the causes of that superior or prior fact *only* in prior European facts, neglecting the rest of the world.
(2) "Where are the self-governing cities of Asia?"
There were self-governing cities, city-states or small kingdoms dominated by a single city, along all the coasts of the Indian Ocean from Sofala and Kilwa around to Malacca and beyond. There were man y port cities lying within large empires but enjoying essenmtially complete autonomy in matters relating to the economy. I think the Weberian idea that European cities were somehow uniquely "free" is folklore: everything European was endowed with freedom, everything Asian was unfree, oppressed by Oriental despotism.
A similar argument applies to the now-conventional idea that the political fragmentation of medieval Europe allowed for economic development in ways not possible ("blocked") elsewhere by "empire." Note first that the older conventional view held quite the opposite to be the case: the fragmentation of feudal societies was altogether bad, and had to be replaced by central governments before modernization was possible. The newer pro-fragmentation theory seems to me to be more of the Oriental despotism mythology. Empires like China did not fundamentally suppress economic activity in local regions and cities (see Bob Marks' post on his work on South China). Indian Ocean port cities under the Mughals were allowed, even in some ways encouraged, to operate as autonomous economic entities. Centralized polities indeed had specific advantages: a large area serving as labor shed and market (this argument anticipates the modern theory of the "national economy"), a potential for the diffusion of technology uninhibited by political and migration barriers. Etcetera. There is the view that smaller polities somehow mean more individualism. I think this is romantic nonsense. Was a baron more democratic than a king in Magna Carta times? What about all thosemedieval tolls between markets? My guess is that markets were freer under empires, ceteris paribus, than under fragmented feudal semi-polities.