Introduction

In the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith wrote that the nations of Europe were the most prosperous in the world while India and China were exemplars of past greatness, but present-day stagnation. Smith attributed the decline of these Asian regions to social and political institutions that constrained the operation of the market. In drawing this contrast between Europe and Asia, Smith was following a venerable tradition. We know that Smith had read the work of the seventeenth-century French physician François Bernier, whose “acrid account of the Orient exercised a deep influence on subsequent generations of thinkers.” Bernier drew an unflattering portrait of life in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires, where he argued that the inhabitants were oppressed by despotic rulers, denied access to the fruits of their labor, and took little economic initiative as they feared for the security of their property. His vivid descriptions influenced Montesquieu, who in several widely read works described Asia as unchanging (“the laws, customs and manners of the Orient – even the most trivial, such as mode of dress – remain the same today as they were a thousand years ago”), despotic (“power must always be despotic in Asia”) and unfree (“in Asia there reigns a spirit of servitude . . . it is impossible to find a single trait that marks a free soul”).