Categories
Sunday Papers

The Sunday Paper – Millet, Rice, and Isolation: Origins and Persistence of the World’s Most Enduring Mega-State

The work highlighted today from James Kai-Sing Kung (et al.) from the University of Hong Kong is clever but I found it unsatisfying. In it, he and his collaborators attempt to explain why China has been a persistent mega-state for so long.

What gave rise to large, organized civilizations across the world was clearly agriculture, made possible by fertile conditions, as the map below shows.

The rise of civilizations, calorifically speaking

Why though is China the only mega-state to have emerged? There’s no similar entity in Europe (or Africa, or the Americas).

Geography has something to do with it and the researchers highlight the development of advanced civilizations on the periphery such as Vietnam and Korea that suggest there’s a limit to how far a state can extend before neighbors, who’ve developed their own advanced societies, push back.

The work does a good job of explaining how China developed from it’s earliest proto-state, Erlitou, to semi-formal unification under the Qin and onward to today.

However, I wasn’t convinced the research explained why China has ended up being, arguably, the world’s only enduring mega-state (to date, let’s see where the U.S. is in 500-years)?

Surely India had some of the same characteristics way back as did sub-Saharan Africa; and there’s no discussion of the Americas, both extremely fertile land masses. Why did nothing similar occur in any of these places??

As China-analysis the work has merit, but as an explainer for Chinese exceptionalism in mega-state formation, at the end of the read, I was still looking for the answer.

You can access the work in full via the following link Millet, Rice and Isolation.

Happy Sunday.

print