There is a book club here in Shanghai which met to discuss Why Europe Was First. Very exciting. This is a report from their proceedings:
We had 11 people come to discuss your book yesterday, and most of them got through the whole thing.
This is the original version of the book as published by Routledge. Have you ever seen a more boring cover? This is a book it took me five years to write, and this is how the result is presented. And, yes, you can buy it online for 322 dollars and 99 cents. How horrific! (Why the 99 cents, I wonder, why not sell it for 323 dollars???) No wonder I wanted a new title, new cover, and a new price when the book was republished by Anthem Press.
For most of its history Europe was a thoroughly average part of the world: poor, uncouth, technologically and culturally backward. By contrast, China was always far richer, more sophisticated and advanced. Yet it was Europe that first became modern, and by the nineteenth century China was struggling to catch up. This book explains why. Why did Europe succeed and why was China left behind? The answer, as we will see, does not only solve a long-standing historical puzzle, it also provides an explanation of the contemporary success of East Asia, and it shows what is wrong with current theories of development and modernization.
Deirdre McCloskey, distinguished professor of economics at the University of Illinois uses my Why Europe Was First for a course she teaching at the University of Gothenburg this summer. Yes, I knew someone would discover this book in the end! Professor McCloskey is a very interesting person with some considerable cult following. Lets hope this means more people will actually read it.
I corresponded a bit with Deirdre -- as I like to call her -- and she said lots of nice things about my book. I was particularly thrilled by this since she is the author of Economical Writing, a book on how social scientists can learn to write better ;-)
Jamie FlorCruz is CNN's leading man in China, and in his "Jamie's China" column he is quoting my Mechanics of Modernity:
Within its Great Wall, China has exerted strong control over its people. From the era of feudal warlords to modern China, rulers have been obsessed with avoiding bottom-up peasant revolts. The perpetual question in the minds of all Chinese was how chaos could best be avoided," writes Erik Ringmar in "The Mechanics of Modernity in Europe and East Asia. "Political thought as it developed from the earliest times onward, including Daoism, Legalism and Confucianism, was more than anything attempts to answer this question."
My appreciation for CNN achor persons just went up by 500%. It turns out they are even reading fat and, lets face it, not very appealing-looking academic books. If you don't mind a pdf of my original manuscript, you can download it here.
Routledge has finally decided to bring out The Mechanics of Modernity in a paperback edition. Yippie! The hardback was just far, far too expensive (180 dollars US). The paperback is expensive too, but at least it's a price -- 45 dollars -- someone but a library conceivably could be imagined to pay.
Btw, Ulrike Schuerkens at Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris has written a review of the book in Anthropos. She says "Ringmars approach is historical, the book is a pleasant and exciting reading for those interested in modernization and development." Apparently she's using the book in her classes. How nice of her! The whole review is here.
March 25 update: I just got hold of a copy. The cover still looks really, really boring, but the text is nicely presented and it all looks very solid and scholarly. All my books can't have dragons on them, I guess. I need to be taken serious as a scholar. Ha, ha, ha.
