Judith Teichman has written a nuanced comparative-historical account of the evolution of poverty and inequality in Korea, Chile, and Mexico. Following other cross-regional studies comparing East Asia and Latin America, the stylized facts are well-known. Korea sustained rapid growth that reduced poverty while maintaining a relatively egalitarian distribution of income. Chile and Mexico have historically been much more unequal, establishing one axis of comparison between the Asian and Latin American cases. But despite high levels of inequality, poverty is much less pronounced in Chile than in Mexico, the second key comparative puzzle in the book.

Teichman is not alone in pursuing this particular puzzle, nor in the choice of a comparative historical approach for tackling it; other entrants in this genre include sociologist Diane Davis's Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (2004); Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman's Development, Democracy and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia and Eastern Europe (2008); Nita Rudra's Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in Developing Countries: Who Really Gets Hurt? (2008) and Jim McGuire's Wealth, Health, and Democracy in East Asia and Latin America (2010), with its laser-like focus on infant mortality.

Yet three analytic features of the book—at least in combination—distinguish it from these other accounts: a direct focus on social outcomes rather than on social policy; a sustained focus on “social forces,” or underlying class dynamics rather than on institutions, and particularly democracy; and analysis of how historical sequences condition the causal effect of key variables. The last point is of particular methodological importance to the larger historical-comparative exercise, which is at pains to note the highly conditional nature of causal effects. For example, land reform may prove equalizing in one context, but generate what Teichman calls “reactive sequences” in others.

As with all long-historical accounts, the inherent selection and endogeneity problems and the difficulty of comparing a small number of cases on multiple dimensions make for a complicated and variegated argument. Yet like most other studies in this vein—including my own—Teichman puts substantial weight on critical junctures or what she calls “critical conjunctures.” Unlike critical junctures, these “conjunctures” involve separately determined sequences that merge by coincidence and have particular reinforcing or simply distinctive effects.

Yet the causal mechanisms at work for Teichman are not simply those of chance encounters; rather, her contribution centers on what she calls “social forces.” In explicit contrast to institutional arguments (for example, p. 3), Teichman starts from the sociological premise that “social structures give rise to social forces,” and that these social forces not only constitute and constrain institutions but appear to independently account for the social outcomes being explained.

This is a tricky argument. To the extent that the analytic focus is on poverty and particularly inequality, the outcome to be explained is very close to the key causal forces purportedly at work; for any sociological perspective, inequality is not simply a function of the distribution of income across otherwise similarly-situated individuals or households but a function precisely of the class structure. As a result, the work of social forces is mediated in part by institutional and broader coalitional arrangements—intervening factors that must be analyzed if we are to avoid tautology.

Teichman focuses not only on the shifts wrought immediately by critical conjunctures, but on other, more endogenous developments such as revolution. She also notes that the outcome of these conjunctures may either be path-dependent or reactive. As always with historical arguments, the logic is made more clear through examples than more parsimonious “if … then” statements; Teichman includes an appendix (pp. 192–93) summarizing her argument that consists of three columns of text over two pages that outline the sequences for each country.

The argument is conceived in two parts: an explanation for the long-run differences between the East Asian and Latin American cases through roughly 1980 (three country chapters—2 through 4—followed by a synthesis on “Social Forces, States and Distributive Outcomes”) and two further chapters (6 and 7) that look at the post-1980 period. In both sections, but particularly in the first half, the duration of different social formations emerges as a key causal factor.

The significance of duration can be seen in the causal consequences of colonialism. The state of nature for all three countries—the starting point that justifies the comparison—is colonial rule and its unequalizing effects. However, the much longer duration of colonial rule in Latin America generated more enduring “social compartmentalization” than in Korea, no doubt assisted in Mexico—although not in Chile—by ethnic heterogeneity. The sheer duration of colonial rule placed greater hurdles in the way of equity and poverty reduction in Latin America than in Korea.

The crucial distinguishing feature across the cases, however, is the well-known effect of land reform. Not only did land reform have immediate effect in Korea, but it cleared the way for a more independent state unencumbered by rural elites and more capable of extending its political and economic reach to the countryside. A second argument about developmental sequences concerns the duration of import-substituting industrialization (ISI) in Chile and Mexico, and of industrialization more generally. Longer ISI sequences created middle- and working-class social forces that found little common ground with the rural poor. Put differently, sequences of social change not only constituted distinct class relations that affected the distribution of income, but also forged political coalitions that were either amenable to greater equity or opposed to it.

The second part of the book takes up more recent developments. Here, Teichman makes an interesting theoretical contribution by noting the differential effect of democracy given existing political coalitions and social structures, an argument I make in somewhat different form with Robert Kaufman in Development, Democracy and Welfare States. Teichman, however, focuses on broader coalitions and gives less weight to the policy particulars than the underlying social constraints. In Korea, she argues, coalitions spanning the middle- and working classes contributed to an expansion of the welfare state. In Mexico and Chile, historical legacies constrained equalizing policies, but gave rise to differential experiences with respect to poverty. Chile's transition to a more open-economy model under the Pinochet dictatorship was sustained in important ways by subsequent democratic governments—even on the Left—contributing to a decline in poverty. In Mexico, by contrast, the transition to democratic rule did not have an equally significant effect because of the swing of the middle class toward a right party that eschewed a social policy agenda.

This short summary cannot do justice to all of the nuances of Teichman's argument, which must also reference a host of other distinctive differences such as mineral wealth and variation in the resilience to financial crises. An interesting subtheme in the last part of the book that is worthy of greater development is the role of industrial structure in income distribution and poverty and the relentless convergence toward much more flexible and weakly-protected labor markets.

The strength of Teichman's contribution is in its broad historical and sociological reach. The challenges are those posed to all of us with an interest in comparative historical research: how best to link “large” historical forces with outcomes that are more amenable to sharp measurement and causal specification. The discipline is voting with its feet, turning relentlessly towards microfoundations. But this micro-analytic work faces mirror-image problems: how to locate the well-specified, randomized controlled trial or experiment in its broader historical context. Historical context matters. And because it does, books such as Teichman's represent an important contribution.