Description:

Buffett Center Faculty & Fellows Colloquium

The Needham Question Revisited: China, Europe and the onset of Modern Economic Growth

Joel Mokyr, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, holds a joint appointment in economics as well as a Sackler Professorial Fellow at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. He is particularly interested in the economic history of technology and population, but considers himself a general-purpose economic historian. A former editor of the Journal of Economic History, he served as the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (5 vols., 2004), and continues to be editor in a chief of a book series published by Princeton University Press, The Princeton University Press Economic History of the Western World. A former chair of the Economics Department and President of the Economic History Association, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a number of comparable institutions in Europe. Among his publications are The Lever of Riches (1990) and The British Industrial Revolution (1993, second, revised edition, 1998), and the Gifts of Athena (2002). He has previously worked on the Irish Famine, nineteenth-century industrialization on the European Continent, and the economic effects of the Napoleonic Wars. He is currently working on two books: The Enlightened Economy: an Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850, and Neither Fluke nor Destiny: Evolutionary Models in Economic History.