The coming of age of global history as a research field has been nurtured by numerous efforts to transform the ways in which students are trained in historical studies. This has proven an enduring challenge since the linguistic skills we routinely expect in order to achieve expertise in one world region become all the more numerous and difficult as we add archives in other world regions. As a result, some of the most ambitious and innovative works we immediately identify as contributions to global history are produced in several different ways. They include those by scholars who have followed a long-standing interest beyond their original geographical focus and those works combining the talents and efforts of several scholars to study a common problem or process. Examples of each of these two kinds of work are among those considered in this review article. Other works that do not directly claim a global history framing suggest a new understanding of their subject matter and we as readers can discover how their findings propose revised perspectives on larger problems and processes; three such books are part of the material central to this article. And finally there are books that enter into historiographical debates core to one or another global history problem with the intent of judging the work of various authors. An example of this last kind of book is included in this article – in fact it is the book which the Journal of Global History originally asked me to review. After reading that work I realized it would be more useful to contextualize its claims and contributions amid those of other recent works, all of which make explicit connections between early modern historical problems and processes to modern history. Together these three kinds of work suggest how our understanding of long-term historical patterns of economic and political change includes far more than issues once thought to be particular to Europe or to relations that Europeans forged with peoples in other places.

Geoffrey Parker’s Global crisis: war, climate change and catastrophe in the seventeenth century provides a suitable starting point to consider the ways in which some of the major contributions to global history have grown out of a subject originally anchored in the historiography of a particular world region. The concept of a seventeenth-century crisis was given visibility forty years ago in a collection of essays edited by Trevor Aston composed of articles originally published in Past & Present. Eric Hobsbawm initiated the discussion with his assessment of a European social and economic crisis in the decades either side of 1600, defining a key moment from which European people not only recovered but their budding capitalists also went on to create an energetic commercial capitalism. Aston himself and several other authors in the edited volume deemed the European crisis to be less one of the economy and far more one of relations between states and the societies they ruled. Parker, especially well known for his work on the role of the early modern military revolution in launching north-west Europe into global prominence, co-edited a volume on the general crisis in seventeenth-century Europe first appearing in 1978, with a second edition in 1997 that added chapters on Asia. In the nearly two decades between those two editions, the sociologist Jack Goldstone’s Rebellion and revolution in the early modern world (1991) had already taken the state–society axis of the European crisis eastward to include both Ottoman and Chinese empires’ experiences with state breakdown.

Parker’s Global crisis reinforces some of Goldstone’s suggestions of a seventeenth-century crisis as a global theme and goes well beyond the earlier work by stressing the environmental crisis triggered by falling temperatures that wreaked havoc on agriculture, provoking economic hardships, sparking social unrest, and eliciting different political responses. Usefully, Parker contextualizes the vast crisis-affected area in spatial terms by noting two kinds of exceptions to this pervasive pattern – unscathed places including European colonies in America, South and Southeast Asia, and Japan; and places where the impact of the little ice age was ambiguous, such as the Great Plains of North America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia. Parker, as he himself notes, is not the first historian to stress the importance of climate change. The great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published an essay on history and climate in 1959 and went on to produce Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil; Le Roy Ladurie extended his study of climate history to the present in 2009 with the publication of the third volume of Histoire humaine et comparée du climat. Parker reaches the present by a far shorter route. He posits the importance of his study for contemporary times in his epilogue because the problems of climate change that his subjects confronted prefigure our shared plight of ameliorating environmental degradation, thus suggesting a contemporary relevance to the seventeenth-century crisis previously absent in the literature.

Global crisis is a work of twenty-two chapters organized into five parts taking up some 700 pages. Part I, composed of three chapters, introduces the Little Ice Age, the impact of falling temperatures on harvests, and the ensuing famines and their demographic consequences. Part II, the longest section of the book with eight chapters, includes two chapters on the British experience, individual chapters on the Qing and Ottoman empires, and on France and the Iberian Peninsula, and a chapter each on Russia (along with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth) and Germany (with its Scandinavian, Dutch, and Swiss neighbours). Part III extends the analysis of seventeenth-century political, social, and economic difficulties into places often less affected by the Little Ice Age than those already covered. There are individual chapters on South Asia, Italy, and Japan, with a fourth chapter covering the Americas, Africa, and Australia. Part IV considers the dynamics of social protest and political confrontation mounted by common people and social elites. One chapter stresses the dire economic conditions of common people owing to a combination of poor harvests and state fiscal demands; a second considers how social elites formulated arguments to create political changes intended to address the bad times shared by so many; and a third shows how elite beliefs attracted common people anxious that their governments reduce their extractions and in some places actually try to improve the people’s precarious positions. The fifteen chapters of Parts II, III, and IV together offer a well-integrated account of how the political traumas of mid seventeenth-century states across Eurasia shook the foundations of nearly half the states in the northern hemisphere, resulting in many of them being either toppled or reconfigured in new ways. It is some of these changes that are considered in the three chapters of Part V, which address countries particularly successful in escaping the global crisis. The changes highlighted are those where states turned from warfare to the welfare of their subjects, and the expansion of education and the development of new kinds of learning which prompted some states to exercise severe censorship.

These intellectual similarities and the political responses to new ideas parallel the kinds of economic similarities of advanced parts of early modern Asia and Europe suggested by a group of scholars sometimes called the ‘California School’ (because of their location in that part of the United States). Parker’s last chapter preceding his conclusion suggests that it is in fact the intellectual differences, and their associated social and political contexts, which explain the ‘Great Divergence’, the term that the California School historian Kenneth Pomeranz famously used to characterize economic changes taking place in Britain not taking place in a broadly comparable wealthy and commercial region of China. Parker places great stress on the Scientific Revolution and later technological innovations preceding the British development of factory-based and machine-produced cotton textiles. This grand narrative of global crisis, which begins by relocating an older historiography of mid seventeenth-century European political crisis and social unrest in an environmental history context and then takes the reader through an impressive series of accounts of crisis in most of the world, ends with the issue of north-west Europe’s subsequent economic divergence from the rest of the world. This issue was, albeit in a very different historiographical context, the departure point for Eric Hobsbawm in the mid 1950s when he wrote his seminal essay on Europe’s seventeenth-century crisis. More than a half century later, historians continue to ponder issues of economic change, though now with the benefit of much more empirical knowledge about other world regions and armed with more sophisticated understanding of many features of the past, perhaps especially in relation to environmental history, which is so important to Parker’s argument in Global crisis. While breaking new ground thematically and affirming the historian’s craft of recreating the experiences of people in earlier times, Parker’s work reminds us that some of the questions we pose about the economic transition from early modern to modern times have been with us for quite a long time.

The second book to be considered takes as its basic purpose just such a historiographical assessment of where we are in understanding the initial moments of modern economic growth. Escaping poverty by the Dutch historian Peer Vries uses a critical assessment of Kenneth Pomeranz’s ‘Great Divergence’ and the work of others considered members of the California School as a foil for his tale of European exceptionalism. At a minimum, one can say that Vries writes spirited prose. Some may find his style polemical. The author has been a frequent participant in the meetings of the Global Economic History Network (GEHN) organized by Patrick K. O’Brien, one of the people to whom this book is dedicated. Pomeranz and the two editors of a book to be reviewed below were also early members of GEHN (as was I). Unlike many of the early members of the group, who had at least some training in economics, Peer Vries does not appear to have any formal background in the subject. His first book, Verhaal en betoog: geschiedbeoefening tussen postmoderne vertelling en sociaal-wetenschappelijke analyse (1995) was on historiography, discussing diverse types of narrative and interpretation on the one hand and efforts at social science history on the other. In that book, as Vries himself explains, he analyses the positions in the debate between postmodern approaches and social science approaches, and indicates his own stance. It is thus a book of commentary on other people’s scholarship. Knowing this background helps the reader make sense of Escaping poverty, since it appears to be engaged in a very similar exercise for economic history.

Escaping poverty, with over 400 pages of text, lacks a chapter structure. An introduction and concluding comments, each with numbered sections, bookend two parts, ‘Economists and theories of economic growth’ and ‘Actual explanations of the Great Divergence’, the former including ten sections and the latter twenty-nine, each ranging from three to eighteen pages. There are also two free-standing statements, an eight-page ‘Why not China?’ and a two-page ‘A coda on Great Britain and China’. To complete the book there is a four-section epilogue totalling some fifteen pages, ‘A rise of the East?’ Many big subjects get a brief commentary: in part one, for example, there are treatments of consumption (one page), capital and capital accumulation (five pages), and specialization and exchange (three pages); examples from part two include consumption (three pages), intercontinental trade (nine pages), and innovation, technology, and science (ten pages). Vries indicates his approval or rejection of what he summarizes of portions of many other people’s scholarship to support the view that the West created modern economic growth and that the rise of the rest has been achieved through application of the same basic mechanisms of investment, innovation, human capital, and trade expansion (pp. 12–13). In his ‘Concluding comments’, he counsels,

To support his view of what he calls ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’, Vries provides summary and commentary on a wide range of scholarship. Because the discrete sections are short and both subjects and authors repeatedly appear in different places without connections between them being clearly drawn, it is not easy to see how the author builds his argument. Even when his assessment of scholars is positive in certain places, in other places he can criticize them or issue chastening qualifications to his approval. He bases all his own evaluations of economic change on the research of others, letting readers know when he agrees with an author and when he disagrees. Knowing what an author used as a source by Vries intended in a particular piece of research can be confusing because his argument and evidence can appear in widely separated parts of the text. For example, in a passage arguing for the importance of institutions in explaining the ‘Great Divergence’, Vries says that the economist Jeffrey Williamson does not refer to institutions but instead ‘tries to provide an explanation of the Great Divergence in which he only refers to proximate causes’ (pp. 122–3). Some 250 pages later, he uses work by the same author as the principal material for more than six pages of text and tables, acknowledging him as ‘my primary source for my description of the connection between global trade and global divergence’, with two tables of trade data from Williamson’s Trade and poverty. Vries summarizes and judges the work in a somewhat different manner from that of his earlier comment because here he wants to discount the importance of international trade to the ‘Great Divergence’:

Vries’ view, as his footnote indicates, is based on reviews of Williamson’s book by the economic historians Nicholas Crafts and Tirthankar Roy (pp. 272–8). His treatment of Williamson’s work represents a kind of assessment found throughout the book in which he basically accepts the research of others in some regards and notes the reservations or criticisms of yet others regarding that same work. Such exercises are the basis of his own interventions on the subject of early modern economic change.

When Vries turns to work that he does not like, he does more than chide. He makes claims that he fails to substantiate. I am, alas, one of his frequent targets. Vries writes, for example, ‘Bin Wong thinks Qing China can be called a “capitalist” market economy, or as he prefers to call it, an economy with “Smithian” dynamics for the same reasons as Pomeranz’ (p. 329). He fails to cite where I call China a capitalist economy, though he does cite China transformed, in which I spend an entire chapter contrasting the European political economy of commercial capitalism with the Chinese political economy of agrarian empire, offering an extended discussion of differences between the two with respect to ideologies and institutions, arguing that they both had Smithian dynamics of growth, not that they both had capitalism.Footnote ¹ It would be unseemly to document many other examples of unsubstantiated claims made against me or others. I will simply note that Escaping poverty aims to reject much of the scholarship by scholars whom Vries collectively assigns to the California School. While his summaries of those whom he approves may contain fewer errors than those of scholars he dislikes, it is unclear whether he has added any fresh evidence or distinctive insights on the subject of economic development. Fortunately, there continues to appear new scholarship that advances our empirical understanding of historical change in a global history context, thereby improving our grasp of the early modern past’s relationship to more recent times.

In Labour-intensive industrialization in global history, Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara have assembled essays that explore further the phenomenon first formulated by Sugihara as a distinctive feature of Japanese economic growth. The book includes two essays on Japan (M. Tanimoto, O. Saito) and individual essays on other parts of Asia, including the Yangzi delta of China (K. Pomeranz), India (T. Roy), Indonesia (P. van der Eng), and East Asia (Sugihara). Two essays ponder the utility of the concept of labour-intensive industrialization in other world regions, specifically West Africa (Austin) and Latin America (C. Lewis), while another two essays consider the concept’s relevance to the West, focused on western Europe (J. de Vries) and Alsace (M. Hau and N. Stoskopf). The editors are two economic historians who were among the original group assembled by Patrick K. O’Brien in GEHN, and this book owes much to both O’Brien and GEHN.

In their introduction, Austin and Sugihara locate the concept of a labour-intensive path of industrial development in relation to other recent work on economic history. Labour-intensive industrialization is a type of industrialization found in East Asia and is due in the first instance to the different factor endowments present in East Asia, Europe, and the United States. The phenomenon that they note is part of the global spread of industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century, which involved a shift, so the argument goes, from capital-intensive and resource-intensive technologies to the adaptation of these technologies to labour-intensive production, especially in East Asia. The reasons for the possibility of this nineteenth-century pattern of industrialization is that East Asia did not have a European-style transition from feudalism to capitalism with deracinated rural industry workers becoming the urban proletariat. Instead, the workers of East Asian industry came to their industrial work from rural households where they had developed multiple skills associated with households that combined paddy agriculture with other crops and/or craft production.

Broadly, the essays in this volume offer arguments and evidence for how the concept of labour-intensive industrialization applies quite well to the Yangzi delta region around Shanghai and to Japan, and at least partially to both South and Southeast Asia. The essays on West Africa and Latin America indicate that early industries in both these parts of the world were initially labour-intensive, but neither followed a labour-intensive path of industrialization. West Africa had a land-extensive path of agricultural exports which did not connect to manufacturing for a long time. Latin America also had scarce labour, and its industrialization depended on migrations of capital and labour from Europe, developing along a path that was neither as capital-intensive as the US nor as labour-intensive as East Asia.

The chapter on Alsace shows that labour-intensive industrialization initiated by poor peasants doing craft production at home became early twentieth-century small-factory production in precision mechanics, automobile parts, electrical and electric devices, tools, and agricultural machinery. This pattern bears far more resemblance to Sugihara’s path of labour-intensive industrialization in Asia than to European industrialization more generally. In the context of European history, it recalls a far more general argument, made first in 1972 by Franklin Mendels, that proto-industry in the countryside preceded the stage of modern factory industry, an argument that has had several rounds of evaluation, including a comparison I made of the European case with Chinese rural industry in a chapter of China transformed.

Labour-intensive industrialization is also related by Jan de Vries to his concept of ‘industrious revolution’ in his essay on ‘East and West’ in this volume, the term being one which he adapted from the work of the demographic and economic historian of Japan, Akira Hayami. For Jan de Vries, the industrious revolution may have some family resemblances across East and West. But he sees it as more important to establish what he considers the major and consequential differences to do with the ‘degree of freedom’ that individuals in a household have according to the extent of markets and what he considers to be a much greater role for consumer demand in the European case than in the East Asian ones. That consumer demand is in turn crucial for his argument about a consumer revolution paving the way for the industrial revolution (because consumers were already primed as an eager source of demand for new products made possible by industrialization). The comparative dimension of the argument can only depend on the available evidence and on the willingness of a scholar to infer from an absence of scholarship on a subject the absence of the phenomenon itself. One of the main goals of the California School has been to delineate similarities in order to look for what are consequential differences, and in this de Vries’s exposition in this essay is similar to the ways in which both Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence and my China transformed were laid out. Rosenthal and Wong in Before and beyond divergence (2011) go on to stress as well the dangers of making comparisons in which the uneven development of historiographies makes it difficult to find adequate data.

On the subject of consumption, Zheng Yangwen’s China on the sea: how the maritime world shaped modern China includes considerable new material on the growth of Chinese taste for European goods in the early modern era, which may qualify de Vries’s belief that the European consumer revolution was so very different from changes in taste and market consumption in East Asia. China on the sea is Zheng’s second research monograph. Her The social life of opium presented a multifaceted account of how opium smoking became a major form of consumption in China through reconstructing changes in the kinds of people, social contexts, and cultural meanings of opium consumption from the sixteenth century through to the twentieth. China on the sea offers additional research regarding the Western commodities that stimulated curiosity and desire among Chinese. Though not presented as a Chinese consumer revolution, one can easily appreciate Zheng’s discoveries regarding Chinese consumption of fragrances, foodstuffs, clocks, European classical music, and European palace architecture as features of the country’s early modern engagement with Europe, related, of course, to the better-known connections forged by Jesuits and traders coming to China to purchase tea, silk, and porcelain.

The Chinese consumption of foreign goods underwent what Zheng calls a ‘complex process of localisation’ (p. 246). After three chapters introducing much new evidence about Chinese consumption of foreign goods, she addresses what she calls the ‘indigenization’ of these foreign goods: ‘The rising popularity and increasing availability of foreign goods beginning in the early Qing led in turn to commercial specialization, which can be seen from the emergence by the mid-Qing of businesses, shops and streets that were dedicated to the import, retail and marketing of foreign products’ (p. 246). Additional research will be needed to supplement Zheng’s ground-breaking set of observations and consider more closely how the transformation of Chinese consumption both parallels and connects to the more familiar changes in European consumption in the same era. Zheng herself points out the similarities in the final substantive chapter preceding her conclusion: ‘Just as foreign goods enriched and transformed the Chinese economy, culture and society from the late Ming onwards, silk, porcelain and tea re-shaped European, and particularly British, history and ways of life at roughly the same time. These “strange parallels” testify to common themes in global history which demand global analysis and synthesis’ (p. 318). In the spirit of the California School, we would now want to delve more closely into considerations of how these parallels fit within larger geometric patterns that include significant differences as well, for the line of development that Jan de Vries draws between Europe’s industrious revolution and its industrial revolution cannot, at least for the moment, be traced in Chinese materials.

Zheng’s larger purpose in the context of Chinese history is to argue for the importance of China’s foreign engagements along its maritime borders. Historians of China typically adopt a domestic focus. In so far as they consider Chinese dynasties that were open to outside influences and connections before the nineteenth century, they most commonly look to the north and west, across vast stretches of land, rather than to the seas into which Chinese merchants ventured and from which foreigners arrived onto Chinese shores. The first three chapters of China on the sea argue for the important ways in which Chinese society has often faced the seas, sometimes (as presented in chapter 2) subject to government restrictions, but at other times quite openly. In chapter 3 Zheng offers her account of the rice trade between Southeast Asia and China, a subject better known than the work in the other five chapters of the book, on the content and impact of consumption of foreign – especially European – goods on Chinese society. Zheng’s informative treatment of how European goods transformed early modern Chinese patterns of consumption also reminds us that Chinese emperors possessed great curiosity about European products and valued their cultural activities, including music and oil painting. The Kangxi emperor appreciated European classical music so much that some historians believe that he ordered three of his sons to study European music theory and to learn to play Western classical instruments under Jesuit tutelage (p. 138).

Zheng’s work on maritime China contrasts with much of the new Qing history, which stresses the importance of the Manchus as the rulers of the last dynasty. That work has encouraged comparisons with, and study of, the connections with other land empires. The final two books reviewed here are related efforts at this kind of history. Together with Zheng’s fine work, these books in which Central Asia figures prominently flesh out part of the landscape covered within the broad sweep of Parker’s Global crisis.

In Bâtisseurs d’empires, the French historian Alessandro Stanziani looks at the Russian, Chinese, and Indian empires between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. He aims to show us the connected situations and common features of these imperial formations that can be considered to represent different world regions. He also identifies variations among these three empires, but his principal purpose is to argue the ways in which they offer a set of historical traits different from those found among European experiences. He therefore takes repeated aim at scholarship which he believes relies too heavily on an understanding of European experiences to derive insights about other times and places. Along the way, he also criticizes the historiography of each of his cases, including studies that focus narrowly on economic matters, and he takes issue with a number of large-scale social science propositions about historical change more generally. The book draws critically upon scholarship in order to formulate an intriguing argument about major early modern empires. As Stanziani’s subtitle, Russie, Chine et Inde à la croisée des mondes, XVe–XIXe siècle, makes clear, the author is examining a ‘crossroads of worlds’. They are worlds that shared a common Central Asian connection. Russia and China were expanding into Central Asia, while the Indian leaders came out of Central Asia and, as Stanziani argues, sought to forge durable ties between Afghanistan and northern India (p. 139). He identifies a common military dynamic of building armies that depended crucially on effective cavalry, which, he argues, were vital to Asia and the world at large. He sees the 1690 defeat of the Mongol Galdan by the Qing emperor Kangxi to be a decisive turning point in the history of Central Asia and the major land empires reaching into this geographical space.

For Stanziani, early modern China, India, and Russia were all governed by regimes that followed a common political dynamic of expanding their military strength: they built cavalry to form the core of armies and they relied upon complex bureaucracies and markets to mobilize and deploy the resources that they needed for their imperial expansions. Their political dynamics were quite different from those in Europe, and Stanziani criticizes scholars for focusing on Europe and comparisons with Europe, which he feels introduces questions and perspectives that neglect what matters in looking at the subject of his study. While he is certainly correct that a study of the geopolitical landscape of the early modern landed empires with connections to Central Asia is a subject distinct from the study of political and economic changes in Europe, this simple fact does not tell us about the utility of examining political and economic change in other parts of the world, mindful that the European experiences will include both similarities and differences from those we find elsewhere. In particular, if the questions we are posing concern the emergence of a modern world economy or the multiple paths of political change leading to twentieth-century states, it seems indeed necessary to consider European processes amid a more diverse set of cases from other world regions. Indeed, if Stanziani is correct that the Kangxi emperor’s 1690 defeat of Galdan was a turning point for Asia and the world more generally, we have to ask what the consequences of this event – and the building of empires in these different world regions – were that are observable today. Are the states governing China, India, and Russia today, for instance, similar because of these shared early modern political episodes?

Stanziani does not offer a concrete answer to this specific question or to broader issues of the modern consequences for countries that were once early modern empires. Alfred Rieber, a Russian history specialist retired from the University of Pennsylvania, does, however, provide some answers for China and Russia, along with several cases other than India. Like Stanziani, he is interested in the Central Asian connections that each of several early modern empires had, and he follows these polities forward into the nineteenth century and up to the end of the First World War.

At more than 600 pages, Rieber’s book, The struggle for the Eurasian borderlands: from the rise of the early modern empires to the end of the First World War, is a work of wide-ranging erudition that provides remarkably lucid narratives of political changes in central and eastern Europe that for the most part do not figure in the ‘Europe’ of concern to much global history. He presents numerous times and places when dynamics in these less well-known parts of Europe are connected directly or indirectly to political concerns in the Ottoman, Iranian, and Qing empires, as well as in Russia. He provides informative political narratives that connect the encounters among these polities across their frontiers with domestic political issues in each case. He substantiates his argument through a consideration of the cultural practices, imperial institutions, frontier encounters, political crises, and imperial legacies of the Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, Iranian, and Qing empires, as well as the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. As he puts it,

His focus overlaps both temporally and spatially with Parker’s, through inclusion, for instance, of an account of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a much-needed reminder of cases less commonly included in either European or global histories of early modern politics.

Rieber argues for a common set of early modern political challenges in these large, culturally diverse states, the meeting of which involved specific strategies of accommodation and coordination that helped these empires survive the nineteenth century. This stands in contrast to the political narratives typically used in global history, which highlight national states and their colonies. Rieber characterizes his approach as geocultural because it gives importance to place and symbol in considering political processes of expansion and strategies of response ranging from collaboration to resistance. He also examines the legitimating ideologies of imperial rule over diverse populations. Some of the elements addressed, such as armies and bureaucracies, are highly visible too in accounts of national state formation, including the studies in the conference volume The formation of national states in western Europe edited by Charles Tilly (1975) as well as Tilly’s own Coercion, capital, and European states, ad 990–1992 (1992).

What makes nineteenth-century political challenges and crises across the Eurasian borderlands different from those of earlier centuries is the reaction of powers beyond this area to continued Russian expansion. France, Great Britain, and Prussia/Germany, among which there were both shared and competing interests, all exhibited more concern for the Eurasian borderlands than they had in previous centuries. They were joined towards the end of the nineteenth century by Japan, who surprised the rest of East Asia by their 1895 defeat of China in a war over each country’s influence in Korea and stunned the rest of the world when they emerged victorious over the Russians in 1905 over the issue of the two countries’ influence in Korea and Manchuria. The Eurasian borderlands were becoming increasingly enmeshed in a more global political competition, the best-known features of which are no doubt the conflicts between Great Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia, labelled by British historians as ‘the Great Game’. Those conflicts were only the latest in a series of wars, the outcomes of which often affected the content and speed of domestic political reforms. Rieber concludes that states governing the Eurasian borderlands made efforts early in the twentieth century to strengthen imperial rule with mechanized weaponry and massive armies, but abandoned their political defence of imperial rule by establishing new institutions, not least schools, that became the sites for spreading Western ideas about politics and society among elites who increasingly rejected imperial rule (p. 616).

This is a big book, covering a long period of history, that represents a breadth and depth of knowledge acquired over several decades of scholarly inquiry. From a global history vantage point, it seems to me that one of its most important contributions is to expand the set of empirical cases of modern state-building that may be combined with the more familiar western European and American cases to generate a broader understanding of the problems and possibilities of political change in early modern and modern times. When we turn to both Rieber’s and Stanziani’s works in light of Zheng Yangwen’s research on China in a maritime world, we are encouraged to consider the particular combinations of political challenges and opportunities that different empires faced. When we consider in particular the legacies of these empires on their successor states, Rieber stresses the role of nationalisms in breaking up what had become increasingly fragile empires. This process is one that is far more salient to the east of the western European cases of state-building, which, Stanziani complains, have been too influential in our approach to states.

As we begin to integrate these different paths of state-building into a more general framework, I hope that we will also continue to ponder variations among the imperial legacies, just as we are mindful of variations among western European and American states. To take the case of China, it seems to me worth pondering why it in large measure supplied the territories ruled by the People’s Republic of China today. China was not an empire (unlike the other cases discussed by Rieber) that yielded a number of different countries, each with its own ethnic mixes. I have suggested elsewhere that the transformation of this empire into a single sovereign state owes much to the early modern pattern of Chinese state-building, which in some ways developed traits emerging only later in the normative western European cases, above all its bureaucracy and some of its social, cultural, and economic policies. These early modern Chinese practices achieved a polity ruling people and territory on a scale that Europeans only began to approach during the late twentieth-century formation of the European Union.

At the same time, as we push forward a more capacious understanding of political transformations from early modern to modern times, I expect that global historians will continue to be interested in analysing more closely the combination of similarities and differences among the types of economic change occurring in the world since the Second World War, mindful that some of the reasons why some variations exist owe their origins to much earlier principles and practices. In the concluding essay of Labour-intensive industrialization in global history, Gareth Austin recalls the thesis that the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron articulated in 1962 regarding the increasingly important role of states in guiding economic development efforts (as part of his argument about the advantages of economic backwardness). While subsequent generations of economic historians have tended to reduce the importance of state policies and promote the importance of markets and other economic institutions, Austin notes that they have not done much to address issues of production. It is in this context that he thinks the labour-intensive industrialization thesis is most helpful because it focuses on the organization of agrarian production in early modern times and how the kinds of skill sets needed in these different settings influenced the ways in which industrialization composed of new production processes based on new power sources and technologies was organized in different parts of the world. For the Japanese case, which was the starting point for this approach, labour-intensive industrialization was conceived at least partially as an alternative to the stress placed on activist Japanese state policies in the Meiji Restoration, the twentieth-century formation of the Japanese colonial empire, and the country’s economic miracle following the Second World War.

We may now be at a point where we can consider more closely the ways in which top-down policy-making interacts with bottom-up efforts of more ordinary people in their economic pursuits. When these domestic economic relationships are then combined with relations to foreign economic and political actors, we could well do a better job of explaining the opportunities for, and obstacles against, economic development that both occurred before the ‘Great Divergence’ and persist well after that historical moment has passed. With one possible exception, the books I have considered in this article advance our knowledge of processes of early modern political and economic change leading into the modern world, one of global history’s signal concerns. As long as excellent new studies continue to be produced, we can anticipate that our grasp of such concerns will continue to improve into the future.