Research Seminar by Professor Peter Nolan (University of Cambridge, UK)

Abstract:
Human civilisation stands at a crossroads. There are urgent global challenges that need to be confronted, including destruction of the natural environment; climate change; inequality of income, wealth and life chances; industrial concentration and regulation of the financial system. Looming above all of these is the issue of how to avoid a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ and a New Peloponnesian War. Only by looking deep into the past can one better understand the direction that the long-term evolution of world civilisation might take. The relationship between China and the West will play a central role in the path that humanity follows in the decades and centuries ahead. In the Ancient World for around 2,000 years the evolution of civilisation in China and West followed convergent paths. From the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD until the early nineteenth century their paths diverged radically. In this era China continued to build in an evolutionary fashion on the foundations laid in the Ancient world while Europe followed a fundamentally different course from that which had been established in the Ancient world. The long era of the ‘first divergence’ left a deep imprint on the culture of both East and West. The Industrial Revolution in Britain signalled the start of a second era of radical divergence, which lasted up until the late twentieth century. In the long sweep of world history this era is of short duration, a mere 200 years, compared with more than 4,000 years of complex civilisation that preceded it.  Since the 1980s the world has entered an era of renewed economic convergence between China and the West. However, there are still deep differences in the respective civilisations, which are inherited from the long sweep of history. These differences have the potential to result in conflict, producing global instability and violence, but they also have the potential to combine in a virtuous fashion that helps to construct a sustainable and peaceful global future for the whole of humanity.

Short Bio:
Peter Nolan holds the Chong Hua Chair in Chinese Development and is Director of the University’s Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. He has researched, written and taught on a wide range of issues in economic development, globalisation and the transition of former planned economies. He has researched on comparative development in China and India; on Chinese agriculture; system change in China and the former USSR; poverty, famine, inequality and migration; restructuring large global firms in the era of the Global Business Revolution; the transformation of large Chinese firms since the 1980s; the evolution of China’s political economy; the inter-action between Chinese and the global firms in the era of the Global Business Revolution; and the contradictory character of capitalist globalisation.

Organized by: Department of International Economics, Government and Business
Date, time and place: 12 June 2019, 13:00-14:00, Råvarebygningen, Porcelænshaven 22, Auditorium Rs20