François Gipouloux is a geographer who, in the wake of new approaches in this field, integrates other disciplines, such as history and management. Compared to other researchers, he has a major supplementary skill: he knows Chinese. His book is therefore dense, complex, and rich in information. It is divided into two major parts: the first part traces the historical dynamics of the Chinese port cities between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries; the second part is devoted to the modern integration of these towns into the world economy.

The title provocatively seeks to transfer Braudel's well-known book on the Mediterranean to the China Sea. Like Braudel, Gipoloux wishes to transform a purely geographical definition into a far more complex notion: the “Mediterranean” was an open integrated economic space, a world-economy which was itself part of a wider global economy; it was the hub of civilizations and a source of innovation. The town was the leading driving force in the Mediterranean and the “West” in general. Gipouloux wishes to show that the China Sea constitutes a kind of Asiatic Mediterranean. In order to prove this argument, the first part of the book summarizes the main features of the port cities in Europe since the Middle Ages. In particular, it evokes the important role of commercial networks and economic-institutional unities such as the Italian city-states and the Hanseatic League. These units drew their strength from the crucial political and economic role of the town, the importance of international commercial networks and the protection of legal rights. In this perspective, the legal protection of property rights and, thus, of innovation was fundamental to European growth. Were these features lacking in Asia and China in particular?

Gipouloux argues that if one considers economic mentalities and merchant networks, then the China Sea was not different or inferior to the Mediterranean. Trade and growth were fully expressed during the Medieval and Early Modern periods. How then can one explain Chinese difficulties in developing long-distance trade and capitalism?

The author's answer relies on a mainstream neo-institutionalist approach. Following Douglass North (among others), Gipouloux argues that the Chinese predatory state exploited trade to finance bureaucracy and to nourish the state budget. This was the opposite of Europe where the state protected trade and guaranteed legal rights to merchants. In short, between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, Chinese institutions weakened rather than enhanced trade and capitalism. In the following centuries, China's destabilized institutions and economy were hardly able to come to terms with European expansion, which in turn ultimately slowed down Chinese and Asian growth.

This vicious cycle of interaction between local institutions and Western expansionism further intensified over time, from the political instability of the first half of the twentieth century, to the Communist revolution that came later. According to this perspective, the contemporary resurgence of the Chinese port cities is the result of the end of the Cold War and the decline of Communist regimes. Some Asiatic port cities have since acquired special status and the entrepreneurial capacities of local actors have been able to develop fully. The second part of the book studies in detail the modern-day resurgence of the Asiatic Mediterranean. The author introduces an extremely interesting picture of the various paths of development of Shanghai, Canton, and Hong Kong. Differences between port cities are explained by regional policies, the weight of foreign capital, relations between services and manufactures, and, last but not least, different interactions between towns, state and supranational networks and institutions. Territorial powers seem to decline in the face of supranational and trans-national economic agents.

The methodological assumptions and main theses advanced by this book are quite clear: economic dynamics are powerful insofar as commercial networks, and then financial networks, are free to self-organize out of any institutional constraints. Institutional powers are required only to protect property rights, not to manage the economy. Economic mentalities were quite similar in Asia and Europe since the Middle Ages, and the economic backwardness of the former was therefore due to institutional constraints. Many of these issues deserve a full discussion. First, the comparison between Europe and China does not escape Eurocentrism. One single path of development is assumed to be advanced; it relies upon the protection of property rights, urban power, and commercial networks. The performance of non-European countries is evaluated according to these parameters. This approach is necessary in order to conclude that, if China failed at some times and did better in other periods, this was so because of, respectively, the lack or presence of these selfsame driving forces. An alternative approach would start from the economic and social performance outside Europe in order to re-investigate historical dynamics of the latter as well. In fact, the equation between the protection of property rights and economic growth is much less a matter of historical evidence than an assumption based upon an idealized West. Capitalist spheres in Europe are supposed to have rid themselves of institutional constraints early on, but actually, in Europe, there were complementarities rather than opposition between territorial institutions and commercial rules. Lex mercatoria was progressively integrated into state rules not because of state pressure but at the request of commercial elites. Most importantly, until the end of the nineteenth century, property rights were far from being fully protected in the West, as the limitations imposed on patents, companies, and stock exchanges confirm. Market self-regulation was not such a widespread practice in Europe. Yet, those attitudes and politics did not prevent the agrarian, commercial, and first Industrial Revolution from occurring. This implies that the standard neo-institutionalist model barely explains even European growth. Historians are therefore obliged to interrogate sources according to alternative paradigms. Here the importance of non-European historical paths comes in. Rather than looking for the “missing factors” (as identified on the basis of an ideal West) in Asia or in Africa, it would be much more meaningful to investigate the specific dynamics of those areas. The interrelation of institutions and markets, local and trans-national economic networks as described in the second part of Gipouloux's book raises a puzzling issue for understanding not only East Asian development, but also for re-analyzing European economic history. For example, the different weight of manufacturing and services contributes, together with the different relations to local and national powers, to an assessment of the economic performances of Shanghai and Canton on the international market. We may wonder whether a similar picture may be drawn when comparing, for example, Venice and Hamburg, Caffa and Alexandria in medieval and modern times. Rather than looking for an ideal protection of property rights, we will then be confronted with the dynamic interaction between multiple institutions and rules, commercial networks and product and service specification. In turn this will lead to comparing Asia and Europe much less within a pre-determined (and deterministic) historical approach than to re-open historical bifurcations and alternative possibilities and choices. In this attempt, Gipouloux's book, in particular its second part, will be an unavoidable reference.