Religion and the Great Divergence of East and West : The Persistent Effects of Networks of Church and State in the History of China and Europe

This article explores the contribution of religion to the cultural capital of the modern market economy. Networks of church and state that originated in premodern times played an important role as conduits for the transmission of cultural values that have endured into the present and set the China’s economic history apart from that of Europe. The imprints of those networks, which preceded by at least a millennium the Great Divergence in living standards and GDP, have led to important underlying differences between Chinese and Western market structures and persist in informal constraints, i.e., customs, norms, and ethics