THEORIES OF CHANGE AND EARLY MODERNITY ACROSS EURASIA
This essay compares and contrasts the approaches taken by Victor Lieberman and Jack Goldstone in their cited books toward explaining early modern (c. 1000-c.1830) historical processes of change across Eurasia with particular reference to processes of political/state integration. It also discusses how their respective perspectives might be harmonized.
For the most part, the perspectives of these authors are similar or complimentary and, therefore, are reconcilable. Both authors reject the notion that Asian cultures were static and only European cultures dynamic during early modernity.
They both discovered common features in the makeup of the nationstates they studied, which overlapped only partially in time and space. However, their basic purposes were very different, in Lieberman's case to ascertain what long term political, economic, social and cultural changes took place in Eurasia and why and in Goldstone's case to explain why different cultures faced state breakdowns and how they coped with the resulting crises. They were looking at two facets of the same coin, Lieberman at political integration, Goldstone at state breakdown or political disintegration. Each recognizes that their subjects are only part of the whole picture.
Important differences exist in their approaches to the causation of the phenomena they observe, some of which are more readily reconcilable than others. There is no way to reconcile Goldstone's view that population increases were a, if not the, principal driving force behind state breakdowns and Lieberman's finding that political integration and state centralization were facilitated more by population decreases than increases. They accord different weights and emphases to various factors, such as economic considerations and cultural barriers to change but they both come together in their recognition that exceptions to their respective theses...