Vol. 20 No. 19 · 1 October 1998
pages 20-21 | 5237 words
Hayek and His Overcoat
Geoffrey Hawthorn
- The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes
Little, Brown, 650 pp, £20.00, April 1998, ISBN 0 316 90867 3
- The Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw
Simon and Schuster, 457 pp, £18.99, February 1998, ISBN 0 684 82975 4
There was an occasion on which the ruler of Balkh, in Central Asia, went to make war. Nomads, taking advantage of his absence, seized the city. The inhabitants put up a good fight, for themselves and their ruler, but lost. The ruler returned, despatched the invaders, and upbraided his subjects. War, he told them, was his business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 20 No. 21 · 29 October 1998
From Tom Lansburg
Geoffrey Hawthorn (LRB, 1 October) misunderstands both the series of voyages undertaken between 1405 and 1433 for the Ming dynasty by the Muslim court eunuch Zhenghe and Confucianism’s role in economic development. The cost associated with building a magnificent new capital at Beijing, overcoming the always restive Mongol hordes and the effort to incorporate Vietnam within the Empire, overburdened the Emperor’s coffers and militated against further voyages. Confucian blandishments played only a minor role. Trade was not the main reason for the voyages anyway. The Chinese did not need to trade with India, the Middle East, Africa or Europe. The voyages had been undertaken to show the flag, to chastise pirates operating in ‘Chinese’ water, to extract obeisance from peoples outside China’s immediate cultural orbit, to gain interesting and useful information about worlds beyond China, but primarily ‘to carry to distant barbarians’ the benefits of the Emperor’s ‘auspicious example’.
When Hawthorn echoes Landes’s dismissive remarks about Confucians he also distorts what the West termed the Meiji miracle. The entrepreneurs whose efforts spurred the development of commerce in bakumatsu Japan had rules rooted in the Confucian tradition which sound very Weberian.
Tom Lansburg
Bellingham, Washington
