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However, it does seem to me that one of the things that I would say is true of policy, the policy world, and Washington in general is that it has a very short historical horizon. In fact, one of the reasons I've enjoyed being out at Stanford is that there's actually a lot of historians that can tell you about what happened in the Han Dynasty in China. And I couldn't find any of those people here in D.C. and I do think that that's important because I don't think that we appreciate how historically rooted many contemporary institutions are, and particularly in the case of India versus China. So obviously China is an authoritarian dictatorship, India is a democracy. And I think a lot of people tend to see that difference as rooted in something that happened either in the last century or at most going back to the 19th century. So democracy somehow came from British practices under the Raj, and in the case of China, it was due to maoism or some 20th century development. And I think that if you look at the, not the last hundred years, but the last 2,000 years of the development or the 3,000 years of the development of these countries, you will see that the fact that one is authoritarian and one is democratic has much, much deeper roots than that. So that's what I'm going to try to explain. And again, those of you who are from India or of Indian background, if I get things wrong, please correct me because I will. You know, I really need that kind of feedback. Oh, I guess one, just another just introductory point. I've also been fairly unhappy with the kind of discussion of institutions that's taken place in the development world. We now recognize that institutions are important for development, but the actual dynamic process by which institutions come into being, it still seems to me, is a big hole in the theory. There isn't a good theory about that. And I think that you can't really approach the subject without being more historical and contextual. So. So that's what I'm trying to do. All right, so let me just begin with a little bit of a theoretical overview. In terms of political institutions, I think that there are three important categories that we have to consider that are separate from one another. So the first category is the state. And the state, I use Max Weber's definition of the state is a legitimate monopoly of force over a defined territory. So all of those words are important. Legitimate, monopoly, territory, enforced. The state is about the ability to concentrate and use power to enforce its will over a certain territory. And that makes it different from a corporation, from an ngo, from a labor union, from all Sorts of other, from a tribe, from a lot of other different kinds of social organizations. Rule of law is actually subject to a number of competing definitions. But the one that I would use is that it is a set of rules reflecting common ideas of justice in a community. But it's truly not the rule of law unless it's binding on the most powerful people in the society. Meaning if the king, the Rajah, the president, the prime minister does not feel bound by those rules, then you have rule by law. I mean, law becomes a command of the executive, but you don't have rule of law. Rule of law has to be binding on the people with the coercive power in the society. Then finally you have accountability. I use the term accountability in preference to democracy, even though they overlap to a great degree, because accountability is a broader term. You can be accountable to a minority of the people in the society. The way England was accountable. The English king was accountable to the English parliament in the glorious Revolution, which represented less than 10% of the English public. But you still establish this principle of no taxation without representation, which was then could be expanded as England democratized in the 1930s century. So the state is all about the use and concentration of power. The rule of law and democratic accountability are constraints on power. And in my view, what a modern political order is, is all of these institutions together in some kind of a balance where the state is strong enough to be able to do things when it needs to do things, but it operates according to rules set down in law and is constrained by the need to meet the needs of the whole population rather than just the rulers themselves. All right, so that's a. And by the way, one of the problems, you know, in the Ajumoglou Robinson book on why nations fail. I mean, I think one of the big problems with that framework is that they put everything into this one basket of what they call inclusive institutions. And so it's state, it's rule of law, it's democracy. And I think actually one of the things we need to think about is how these different sets of institutions actually differ from one another. How you can have one and not the other, and what the consequences of that kind of uneven development of institutions is. And India and China is a perfect case of this, because in my view, India. I'm sorry, let's begin with China. China, in my view, was the first world civilization to develop not just a state, but a modern state. By modern state, I mean an impersonal state that is not based on the patrimonial assigning of Offices to the friends and family of the ruler. Lots of early states are like that. Some warlord beats his rivals and then parcels out the whole government to his friends and relatives. A modern state needs to have a centralized administration that is recruited on the basis of merit, functionally organized. These are, again, Max Weber's definitions. And China had this, I would argue, in the third century B.C. what it never developed up to the present day were the institutions of constraint, the rule of law, or democracy. And so in the case of China, you had a state that could do things like build the Great Wall or in the 20th century, build the Three Gorges Dam. So it was very impressive in its ability to use power and enforce its will. But it had all the problems of an unconstrained dictatorship. It didn't take the interests of the Chinese people into account oftentimes in making those decisions. I mean, it's a little more complicated that compared to some dictatorships, they actually do operate, I think, more in a public interest. But there are certainly no formal constraints. I would say that India is at the other end of the scale, that India has always had a relatively weak central state, but it has had rule of law almost from the beginning in the sense of religious rules that constrain the ability of executives to do whatever they want. They did not have formal democracy until the rise of the Indian Republic after independence, but they did have many consensual mechanisms in Indian society, particularly at a village level, that did allow political authority to be exercised in accountable manner. So if you think about these three baskets, you know, you get very, very different parts of those three institutions being developed in these two civilizations. So let me just go through some of the history here, and if some of this seems too obvious to some people, I apologize. But I think just a lot of people just are not familiar with some of this anthropological stuff. So China and India, if you take the clock back to about 1000 B.C. actually looked fairly similar to each other. Both of them were tribal societies. They were based on what anthropologists call agnatic lineages, in which you trace your loyalties and property as inherited via the male line exclusively. So a woman is born in a family, she really doesn't have any status until she marries into another lineage and then bears a male heir and then becomes, you know, acquires status by virtue of her position in that family. In India, in the south, and in certain, you know, places like among the Nayar, you actually had matrilineal societies. This is different from a matriarchy, because such a thing has never existed. As far as I know, in human history. But that's a society in which inheritance is traced through the female side. But by and large, 90% of Indian lineage organization was agnatic. Exactly the same thing in China. So both of these countries didn't have a state where they weren't countries, they were societies. They didn't have a state. And in the period from about 1000 B.C. to about 500 B.C. you see the first crystallization of state level institutions which were that Weberian definition of a hierarchical, centralized, legitimate body that's able to exercise power. By the way, there's this very interesting intellectual history. You have a number of distinguished European early anthropologists like Henry Main, the legal scholar, and Fustel de Coulange, the French anthropological historian, both of whom noted that there were great similarities between Greco Roman family organization and an Indian family organization. Henry Maine actually spent eight years in the British colonial administration in the mid 19th century. And he actually, I think, wanted to show that the Indo Aryan peoples were actually, you know, we now understand that this was actually true, that they came out of Central Asia, part of them went to the Mediterranean world where they became the Greeks and Romans, and then part of them went into the North Indian plain where they became the Indo Aryans. And a lot of linguists and anthropologists and so forth have shown that in fact a lot of the kinship structures, language, many other characteristics are actually shared between these two wings of this civilization. So you have the first class structure appearing. Transition from a tribal society to a state level society brings about things like slavery, like tyranny and oppression. And in the case of India, you have the first crystallization of what are called varnas. There's four varnas, but in the early stages there's really two. There's just the masters who were the Indo Aryans, who at this point were pastoral cattle raisers who ate cows. And then they conquered the Gangetic Plain. They ran into the Dravidian people who were there already, who became a subordinate class, kind of a slave class or a peasant class as the society developed. So same thing is going on in China in this period. The next thing that happens around 600 to 500 BC is what I call the Indian Detour. And this is really, in my view, what makes these civilizations very different. In China, you have the consolidation between the year 600 and the year 221 BC of a single centralized state in the northern part of China, the state of Chin, that then becomes the Qin dynasty, that becomes the first national dynasty in China. And the mechanism by which this happens is pretty straightforward. It is 6, 700 years of continuous warfare. So at the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty, the Western Zhou Dynasty, you had maybe 1200 of these large tribal federations across the territory of China. By the time of the Spring and Autumn period or the Warring States period, they all fight each other. They consolidate down to 16 states, and then at the beginning of the Warring States period, down to seven. And at the end of the Warring States, one of those states ends up the victor, just like Prussia unifying Germany. That's the state of Chin. The word China comes from that. And that's the first national Chinese dynasty or empire. In India, you have this big detour because you do not get the evolution of that kind of a powerful centralized state. And by the way, the Chinese, this early Chinese state, it was modern in the sense that they had impersonal recruitment of personnel. The civil service examination is really invented. During the succeeding Han Dynasty, it was enormously powerful. They could dispossess elites of their land, they could move vast populations. They could exercise, way back in the third century B.C. a kind of totalitarian penetration and control of Chinese society that simply never existed in, let's say, sub Saharan Africa anywhere or in most other societies in the world. So that was China. India goes through a very different evolution. First of all, warfare happens in the Gangetic plane, but never to the extent and at the level of Chinese warfare. And so you have some consolidation, state consolidation and the appearance of states, but that process is considerably attenuated from what's going on at the same time. You know, in the same centuries as in China, you have the creation of the Mauryan Dynasty right around the time of the Qin Dynasty, but it only lasts for about 130 years. And even so, it does not unify the whole subcontinent. Important parts are left out. A lot of India actually remains tribally organized in what's called a Ghana Sangh, which actually persists to this present day. So you still have parts of, you know, the forested parts of India where the state couldn't penetrate and people still remain tribally organized. The tribes, you know, the last tribe disappeared from China, you know, 2500, 2500 years ago. So the question then is, why did this happen? And I would say this is one case where ideas actually matter in human history. It really has to do with the rise of a Brahmanic religion that is completely different from anything going on in China. So China is an unusual world civilization insofar as it never had a transcendental religion. The state religion in China was basically ancestor worship. Ancestor worship is not a unifying religion in the way that Judaism or Islam or Christianity are, because you only worship your ancestors. And so the emperor worshiped his ancestors, but no one else that was not in his lineage had any obligation to worship them. Everybody just worshiped. So it's a very particularistic kind of religion. Although Buddhism entered into China from India during the Tang Dynasty, this was never a state religion. And so this is very important to the absence of the rule of law in China that there was never a religious hierarchy that made law that was superior to the law made by the political authorities. And therefore law and religion were completely fused in China. This is what Max Weber called a Csaro Papist system in which the political authorities completely controlled the religious authorities. It was totally different in China because. I'm sorry, totally different in India because beginning actually in the second millennium B.C. but then accelerating in about the middle of the first millennium B.C. you had the rise of this Brahmanic religion based on the Vedic text that legitimated this fourfold hierarchy of varnas in which the Brahmans were the top varna, this is the priestly class. The second were the Kshatriyas, who were the guys with the weapons. These were the warriors. The third were the Vaishyas, who were the merchants, and then the sutras were the lowest class, which was like 90% of Indian society. These were the peasants and so forth. The first three varnas are twice born in the Hindu cosmology. They've already had prior lives and so they're at a higher state of existence. But what's really important from, from a political standpoint is the Brahmins are without any question, higher than the Kshatriyas. That is to say, the priests have greater legitimacy than the warriors. So any Raja who hopes to come to power in India has to go to a Brahmin to get legitimation. There's nothing comparable to this in China. There simply isn't. There's no separate hierarchy, religious hierarchy, there's no separate religious law. Chinese have lots of laws. You know, they have a Qing code and a Tang code and a Ming code and so forth. But these are all simply administrative commands of the, of the emperor. Whereas in India you have a genuine rule of law that originates, you know, 2500 years ago, and that operates as a significant constraint on the ability of rulers to simply do whatever they want. Now there's this long standing argument between the sociologists and the economists about the role of ideas in shaping human history. So basically the economists all say, well, and, you know, I would go back to the authority of Karl Marx for this in saying that basically everybody is driven by material interest, that ideas are simply epiphenomenal. And so Marx essentially said, well, ideas are just this big fairy tale that the elites make up to legitimate themselves and cement their position. But they're not the primary drivers. Max Weber, the great sociologist, turned this on his head and said, no, you're completely wrong. Actually, the economic interests are shaped by ideas. So in something like the Protestant Reformation, you actually had a very different attitude towards savings and work that was legitimated through a purely religious innovation. And that's what actually made possible utility maximization, you know, rational utility maximization and all of the other things we associate with economics per se. Now, I don't want to argue as a systematic. I mean, I think, you know, you can see instances in which both of these interpretations are correct. There's a sense in which the economist's interpretation of Indian religion is pretty good because the Brahmins actually had a pretty good racket going, you know, because they were the interpreters of the Vedic text which had to be memorized, committed to memory, could not be written down. They created huge entry barriers into their own, you know, into their own status. And they had to be hired, you know, for every ritual connected with human life. And so they kind of guaranteed themselves a very powerful economic position. But the trouble is that an interpretation like that just doesn't take account of the subjectively experienced nature of religion in a given society. And I think that a lot of people, a lot of Westerners, appreciate that the cosmology and the metaphysical sophistication of Indian religion is just unlike any other religion almost in the rest of the world. And it's actually an extremely rational doctrine if you accept its starting premises. And so the premise of this Brahmanic religion is that the phenomenal world is a kind of sham, or it's not the real world. That there is a spiritual world, disembodied spiritual world that lies behind it. And actually everything that is connected with the body, including death, decay, body, waste, dirt, so forth, is, you know, a symbol of this false phenomenal world. And the point, through successive reincarnations, is to move yourself into a higher status so that you approach this, you know, this higher level of spirituality. And everything in then in the doctrine makes a whole lot of sense if you accept that metaphysical starting point. So, for example, the, you know, the concern with dirt and filth and dead animals and this sort of thing, corpses Is, you know, is a reflection of that doctrine. So why are, why are many Indians vegetarians? Well, if you eat meat, you're eating a corpse. You know, I guess we probably didn't have any meat at lunch today. But think about that the next time you eat a hamburger. You're basically eating a corpse. Right? So, you know, under that metaphysical system, it really, it becomes very problematic. Of course, the other big aspect of Indian civilization was the jatis, or the castes as the British called them, which is a very unusual institution and I would say pretty unique in the history of other civilizations in that it's a sacralization of the occupational order or the division of labor. And so what a caste is, it's basically an occupation like being a shoemaker or a tanner or a baker or, you know, something of the sort. But it defines the limits of what the anthropologists call clan exogamy, meaning that your daughter cannot marry outside of that particular caste. And it makes the, it reduces labor mobility big time. And I was sort of thinking that, you know, given that economists think that you need labor mobility, you know, for modern economy, you can't think of a system that is more antithetical to a modern division of labor than the caste system because it basically says that you have to continue in the occupation of your, of your ancestors. And it's always meant that under this system there is actually social mobility, but it is not individual mobility. It is mobility by caste. And so you get all these Gujarati traits. So, you know, East Africa is just completely populated by Indian merchants. And these were all people that did not go out as individuals, they went out as castes. They, you know, traded back with their caste associations in India. They created this trans Arabian Sea, you know, very intense trade. And these are the people now that are the core of the business community in a lot of East Africa. Even in the United States, if you go into almost any motel owned by an Indian motel owner. I tried this actually once. So I checked into a Best Western or something in Iowa and the owner came out and checked me in. I said, thank you, Mr. Patel. He said, how did you know my name? And I said, well, I just know things, you know. So religion in India limits political power. It does it in historically, I think it's done it in four distinct ways. So first, the whole Varna Jati system severely limits military mobilization. In a tribal society like the Mongols or the Xiongnu or the Huns or, or in China, once they switched over to a land based infantry system, you could mobilize close to 100% of the available able bodied manpower as soldiers in India. Obviously you can't do this because being a warrior is a monopoly of the Kshatriyas. I mean there's some mobility but it's very, very limited. And then if you think about all the aversion to death and blood, it makes fighting wars actually fairly problematic. And it's interesting because unlike in China you have a number of big historical figures like Chandragupta Maurya or the great Emperor Ashoka of the Mauryan dynasty who actually at the end of the big battle just said this is so terrible, I'm going to stop fighting. And I, you know, so Chandragupta became a Jain and he actually killed himself in this traditional Jain way of slow starvation. Ashoka after the battle of Kalinga killed so many people that he said, I regret this, I'm not going to touch the, you know, another, you know, living being as long as I live. And he basically gave up political power after that point. It's just hard to imagine that sort of thing happening in Chinese civilization where you got a lot of really bloody minded tyrants that just, you know, essentially use their power as much as they, as much as they want. So that's the first way, second it created, you know, Indian religion creates this village level, very, very self sufficient society. The British noticed this all the time, that they said we actually don't need to rule India because India rules itself, you know, on a village level. Usually Indian village is dominated by one particular caste. They have a governance mechanism. You do not need to insert centralized political power, at least in an agrarian society for this kind of thing to work. And so it's a very self sufficient, not just self sufficient, but it's extremely hard for the state to penetrate this kind of society. Whereas in China civil society right from the beginning is almost non existent. None of the social organizations that exist in India or that existed in the west exist in China. So you don't have a blood aristocracy living in their own castles. You don't have a commercial bourgeoisie living in cities. You don't have religious organizations with their own resources and territory and so forth. And in India you had all of them. So in that respect the strength of Indian civil society is much more similar to what exists in Europe at the same time than anything that existed in the third thing that limits Indian administrative power is the control of the Brahmin class over literacy. And I think this is probably one of the most damaging legacies of that belief system in India. If you, I'm sorry, in China, we know a tremendous amount about things that happened more than 3,000 years ago because of oracle bone inscriptions, because then of extreme, extremely detailed literary histories. All of the great Chinese classics, you know, the Book of History, the Book of Odes, Spring and Autumn Annals, these were all written in the middle of the first millennium B.C. you have extremely good administrative records of who paid taxes, who sent a mission to what place and so forth. And in India, virtually none of that existed because the use of writing was restricted for religious reasons that, I mean, this was part of the Brahmin monopoly that the Vedic. The key to their economic position was the fact that they could memorize the Vedas and repeat them. And they didn't want anyone honing in on that by writing them down and then being able to repeat them themselves. And so they held onto this monopoly. And so a lot of the stages in Europe and in China of the spread of a literary culture simply never happened until a very, very late point in Indian society. So it did not become really common to use written language as the administrative language until, you know, after the first millennium A.D. whereas this has been going on for a couple thousand years in China. And I think that that's one of the, you know, the legacies in India today. I mean, one of the reasons that you have such great poverty is you've got this tradition where a large part of the society just never expects to learn how to write. Whereas in China, the entrance examination into the mandarinate is the main channel of upward mobility for a purpose. So a lot of times in China, if you had a really bright young boy who could take the examination, even though you didn't come from a high status family, the whole village would pitch in to get him a tutors and so forth. And, and if he could take that examination and actually get into the Mandarin, then the whole village would be made, I mean, from that point on, because he would become a high official. And so the Amy Chua's tiger mother, you know, that's where the tiger mother comes from. You know, quite frankly, I mean, literary learning and education in India, in China, sorry, in China was highly associated with social mobility. And that's why, you know, in that society you had such an emphasis. In India, it was true of the upper castes or the upper varnas, but it was not true of the society as a whole, which I think is something that still persists that day. So the fourth respect in which the cultural system limited political power was through the rule of law. And this was, I think, a much more legitimate thing that we actually want to see happen in societies. We don't want the kind of unbridled tyranny that exists, existed in China. We want rulers to rule through law. And in this respect, India has had it right from the beginning. They have had a very strong rule of law. Now, that tradition of rule of law was highly disrupted during the British Raj. The thing about Indian tradition, traditional law, was that a lot of it was unwritten. It was judge made law in a certain way, like, you know, like the common law. So you had a prohito, he had religious status, but he could interpret law in particular cases. And you had the equivalent of case law and precedence and so forth. But it was less formal and less written than in the case of English common law. The British authorities looking at this, they were always projecting their own institutions. This is like the isomorphic mimicry that Blanc Pritchett talks about. So they're always projecting their own institutions into these cultures where it didn't really work very well. And so the British in the late 18th century said, you guys should write this down. You know, write down the. And they thought that the laws of Manu, which were really not authoritative law, was the equivalent of European ecclesiastical law. And so they tried to hire a bunch of scholars to try to codify and formalize this body of law. It didn't work very well. And so finally, in the 1860s, they just gave up and they said, okay, well, we'll just either apply English common law, or we ourselves, we Europeans, will interpret it for you. And so that whole tradition of customary law in India was lost. And under the Indian Republic, they've tried to revive it, but the continuity of that tradition at that point had been broken for several generations. And so in many respects, the Indians were trying to reconstruct that tradition where they had to do historical research themselves because they knew as little about it as people in the. As their European colonial masters. So let me just fast forward to the present. So I think you get the idea that India and China, they're kind of the complementary opposites of one another. After the Qin unification, China falls apart roughly every 300 years in an interdynastic collapse, the latest of which was the one that took place in the 20th century. But it always reunifies as a centralized unitary state, or it's been doing that for the last 2500 years. India's default position is the opposite. It's to be pretty small scale and disunified with periods when either an Indian regime or a foreign conqueror will try to create a unified political structure. And those periods only last for a few hundred years before they break down into something else. So you've got this persistent weakness or limitations on the ability to concentrate and use political power. And this is why I think that the. So democracy, modern democracy in the sense of multi party elections is not a deep Indian tradition, contrary to Marty Essen. I mean, you had kind of tribal level or village level consensual decision making which you could say was some kind of a precedent. But what has no precedent in Indian history or culture, I think is a kind of ruthless centralized dictatorship that you have seen very, you know, consistently in Chinese history because they've got all these limitations on power. It's very hard to exercise power, it's very hard to penetrate Indian society. And on the other hand, in China, you know, you've got this extremely strong state that has tried to eliminate all of the competitors for power. And so they've not allowed civil society or they, they're doing their best to prevent civil society from emerging because they don't want that kind of competition. Whereas India is all about civil society. That's what the civilization is really. In fact, a graduate student of mine was telling me there's just a new study that's been done by some scholar in China where they're analyzing all the Weibo postings, you know, on the Chinese Twitter after something happens. And as a result of the statistical analysis, apparently this person found that the Chinese authorities, what they go after is not necessarily anti regime things, people saying things against the regime. What they go after and try to suppress is any attempt to create, create collective action. Because again, this 2000 year tradition, the Chinese do not want people getting together and talking about the government. And so they've gotten very good at doing that. So I think you can bring the story to the present. China does a big infrastructure project, the Three Gorges Dam. It requires moving 1.3 million people out of the flood plain. They just do it. It takes 10 years, but they build a freeway, they build a high speed rail. India has a lot of trouble with collective action. So you get all of these stalled projects that cannot go forward because you've got lawsuits from. You know, that Indian tradition of law is now manifest in a pretty inefficient but very powerful legal system. So you can sue the government, you can sue government at multiple levels. You've got a highly mobilized civil society, peasants, associations, labor unions and so forth. And it's what prevents Chinese style dictatorship. It also prevents Chinese style kind of rapid decision making. And I think all of this is subject to change. So maybe I'll stop there because I've talked too long already. What you have to remember, though, about these long historical continuities is that the modern world really reshuffles the deck a lot because rapid economic development creates and mobilizes all these new social actors. So the fact that China has been a centralized dictatorship for 2,000 years, I think, does not necessarily tell you what China is going to be in another 25 years as they get richer, as a middle class emerges, as people are better educated and so forth. And I think the same thing with India, because India's society is changing very rapidly as well. Thank you.