Dear All,(posted 8767 days ago)My, aren't we sensitive! A little critique from Landes of counting and noses are out of joint. I think the real message of McNeill's review is highly critical of Landes -- that he completely screwed up on his account of non-European economic history, and missed some key elements of the European story to boot. All this is massaged by praise for Landes' elegant prose (which has always been marvelous) and some vague plaudits for the volume of items discussed.
In a way I don't know whether to be glad to have such a masterful account that is so badly flawed by Eurocentrism that it makes a wonderful foil for future work, or to be dismayed that such a brilliant and well-read intellectual as David Landes could still think that the Chinese "maximized population" and suffered from a lack of dairy and draft animals. Either way, both Landes' book and McNeill's review tell me the same story: comparative economic history still has a lot of work to do.