The religious origins of state capacity in Europe and China

Abstract

As conduits for the transmission of cultural values, networks of religion and state originating in premodern Europe and China contributed to the institutional roots of their respective development and continue to forge different economic trajectories. In Europe, a universalistic religious doctrine, ideologically and institutionally distinct from the state, led to important underlying differences in market structures and informal constraints. Legal protocols and innovations in social governance emerged whose origins lay in Church doctrine and Christian ethics. In China, Confucian teaching and an examination-based recruitment of officials strengthened centralized authority; but without a systemwide transmission of unifying prosocial bonds and values as a foundation for contract law, this cheap system of social control left the state encumbered with fiscally anemic finances. These differences preceded the Great Divergence and persisted long after it to produce in Europe greater civic and fiscal capacity, and in the end more state building.