Hilton L. Root: Network Origins of the Global Economy: East vs. West in a Complex Systems Perspective
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Hilton L. Root: Network Origins of the Global Economy: East vs. West in a Complex Systems Perspective Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2020, xxxi + 306 pp, USD 39.99 (hardback) Mark Koyama1 Accepted: 3 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
The causes of the Great Divergence between East and West is one of the abiding questions in history and in the social sciences. With China’s economic and political rise in recent decades, it has become revigorated. But despite an abundance of recent research, many puzzles remain. Hilton Root draws on network theory to explore the different ways social and political power came to be distributed in Europe and in China. Network theory has become increasingly mainstream in economics, but it has yet to be seriously applied to the study of institutional change. Root contrasts a network-based approach with the more established equilibrium-based approach to economics and to political economy. In this endeavor Root draws on a rich vein of thought that runs from F.A. Hayek to Brian Arthur and the study of complex systems. What is both novel and exciting about Network Origins is that Root is able to deploy these concepts to the study of global history and international political economy. To understand institutional change at the network or macro-level, Root argues we have to move beyond the conventional viewed of institutions as equilibria (p. 17). This approach is suitable for analyzing an institution in isolation, such as how Parliament or Congress operates, but it is less suited to studying system-wide change (and hence, the differences between East and West). Here many empirical puzzles remain. Why are political institutions sometimes sticky and other times fragile? For example, why do changes in political institutions occur in waves (such as the fall of European monarchies after 1918 or the wave of democratization after 1990)? Root’s contention is that focusing on the internal characteristics of any one society means missing the dynamics that occur at the level of the network. For instance, network analysis can shed light on the phenomenon of cascades—such as the collapse of an empire or the diffusion of a new technological innovation. One abiding difference between Europe and China is the persistence of political fragmentation in the former and political centralization in the latter (Ko et al. 2018; Fernández-Villaverde et al. 2020). Root observes that these different configurations of political power reflects differences in network structure. Specifically, we should view political regimes as hypernetworks—that is, they combine multiple networks and have * Mark Koyama [email protected] 1
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA
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their own systems-level dynamics. In China power was organized vertically and this gave rise to a hub-and-spoke network structure with the Emperor and central government at the center. Local nodes were directly connected with the central government
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