The Diffusion of Prosperity

今日は第10章を読みました。

第10章 The Diffusion of Prosperity

How some parts of the world took different paths to prosperity from that of Britain.

アメリカ型の制度移行を遂げたオーストラリア、フランス革命に至ったフランスや、収奪の江戸時代から急速な転換を図れた日本について。

Australia, like the United States, experienced a different path to inclusive institutions than the one taken by England. The same revolutions that shook England during the Civil War and then the Glorious Revolution were not needed in the United States or Australia because of the very different circumstances in which those countries were founded - though this of course does not mean that inclusive institutions were established without any conflict, and, in the process, the United States had to throw off British colonialism. In England there was a long history of absolutist rule that was deeply entrenched and required a revolution to remove it. In the United States and Australia, there was no such thing. Though Lord Baltimore in Maryland and John Macarthur in New South Wales might have aspired to such a role, they could not establish a strong enough grip on society for their plans to bear fruit. The inclusive institutions established in the United States and Australia meant that the Industrial Revolution spread quickly to these lands and they began to get rich. The path these countries took was followed by colonies such as Canada and New Zealand.
There were still other paths to inclusive institutions. Large parts of Western Europe took yet a third path to inclusive institutions under the impetus of the French Revolution, which overthrew absolutism in France and then generated a series of interstate conflicts that spread institutional reform across much of Western Europe. The economic consequence of these reforms was the emergence of inclusive economic in most of Western Europe, the Industrial Revolution, and economic growth.

...in one swoop, the French Revolution abolished the feudal system and all the obligations and dues that it entailed, and it entirely removed the tax exemptions of the nobility and the clergy. But perhaps what was most radical, even unthinkable at the time, was the eleventh article, which stated:

All citizens, without distinction of birth, are eligible to any office or dignity, whether ecclesiastical, civil, or military; and no profession shall imply any derogation.

So there was now equality before the law for all, not only in daily life and business, but also in politics.

The forces unleashed by the revolution of 1789 ended French absolutism and would inevitably, even if slowly, lead to the emergence of inclusive institutions. France, and those parts of Europe where the revolutionary reforms had been exported, would thus take part in the industrialization process already under way in the nineteenth century.

The French Revolution thus prepared not only France but much of the rest of Europe for inclusive institutions and the economic growth that these would spur.

...the domination of the shogun was not complete. Even as the Tokugawa family took over the country in 1600, they could not control everyone. In the south of the country, the Satsuma domain remained quite autonomous and was even allowed to trade independently with the outside world through the Ryukyu Islands. It was in the Satsuma capital of Kagoshima where Okubo Toshimichi was born in 1830.

In the mid-nineteenth century both China and Japan were poor nations, languishing under absolutist regimes. The absolutist regime in China had been suspicious of change for centuries. Though there were many similarities between China and Japan - the Tokugawa shogunate had also banned overseas trade in the seventeenth century, as Chinese emperors had done earlier, and were opposed to economic and political change - there were also notable political differences.

The structure of Japanese political institutions was different. The shogunate had sidelined the emperor, but as we have seen, the Tokugawa power was not absolute, and domains such as that of the Satsumas maintained independence, even the ability to conduct foreign trade on their own behalf.

To exact reforms, the shogun had to be overthrown, and he was. The situation was similar in China, but the different initial political institutions made it much harder to overthrow the emperor, something that happened only in 1911. Instead of reforming institutions, the Chinese tried to match the British militarily by importing modern weapons. The Japanese built their own armaments industry.