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THE DECONSTRUCTION OF EUROCENTRIC MYTHS AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF GLOBAL HISTORIES OF MATERIAL PROGRESS IN CHINA AND THE WEST FROM THE ACCESSION OF THE MING (1368) TO THE BRITISH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (1756-1846) Lecture to The History Department Tsinghua University Beijing, China By Patrick Karl O’Brien, FBA URKEW, Principal Investigator Centennial Professor of Economic History, London School of Economics Not to be cited without permission from: p.o’brien@lse.ac.uk Smith, Marx and Weber Along with histories of hegemony and power, histories of material life and economic growth are the most popular of metanarratives currently published in the growing field of global history. Indeed no surprise will be occasioned by the appearance in our times, marked by ‘globalization’, of histories seeking to encompass a ‘world economy’, dealing with chronologies going back millennia and written to expound upon the disparate levels of material progress achieved by groups, societies, communities, regional and national economies located on all continents. Such concerns continue to be a litmus test for the mission of global economic history to keep ‘humanity in view’. After all, most people, in most places for most of history have been preoccupied with obtaining food, shelter, clothing and other manufactured artefacts that they required to sustain either a basic, a comfortable and only latterly, an agreeable standard of living. Traditions of historical enquiry into the wealth and poverty of nations began with Herodotus but modern paradigms for investigation need be traced no further back than to the towering intellects of two cosmopolitan, but perhaps equally ‘Eurocentric’ Germans: Karl Marx and Max Weber. Both scholars maintained a serious interest (admittedly as a counterpoise to Europe) in the evolution of the Chinese, Indian, Islamic, American and Russian economies. Although Weber’s investigations into Oriental religions, philosophi