The author describes East Asia and North Atlantic development paths and how both paths were shaped from a particular history. He lays emphasis on a set of drastic changes in the accessibility of critical physical resources in the late18th and early 19th centuries, which significantly stretched the differences in both institutions between highly developed regions in different parts of the world that had formerly been comparable in economic terms. In18th century China had rough comparability with Europe and as a result of this, the author suggests that we can not only use Europe as a standard against which to assess Chinese growth, but also to use China to raise questions about Europe, and its 19th century advance to continuous per capita growth.
The author emphasizes regions instead of individual countries as units of study. This is due to the fact that continents have different units with regularly arbitrary borders. Second, the sizes of some Asian political units are similar to European ones. He argues that China strongly looks a lot more like all of Europe in its range of environments and levels of economic growth than it does any nation within Europe. The fact that at some point the author assumed that the consumption of nonessential commodities by common Chinese rose between about 1500 and 1750 in much similar way as in Western Europe is quite unreasonable. The author highlights what caused the differences in China’s economy in comparison with that of Western Europe. He terms the difference as an ecological one as European and Chinese cores were hitched to very diverse margins.
My first question after reading the article is why the East Asian is path having broader applicability to poor countries today than the North Atlantic path? Second, do those development paths actually exist? Lastly, why china was the most preferred country over the others in the East Asian region?