The debate over the Great Divergence between Asia and Europe tends to ignore Southeast Asian countries. Reid (1993) argues that the mid-17th century marks the beginning of a period of relative economic decline in Southeast Asia. However, the quantitative information currently available is limited. Estimates for Java suggest that living standards were above Chinese and Indian levels from 1680–1914 (De Zwart and van Zanden 2015). For most Southeast Asian countries circa 1913, per capita GDP at purchasing power parity was comparable to that of Japan (Bassino and van der Eng 2020). The research project, which builds on a recent exploratory study (Bassino 2021), will evaluate levels and trends in living standards to assess the sustainability of economic development in early modern Southeast Asia using the conceptual framework proposed by Dasgupta (2009).
The research outcome will be presented in a monograph and two article-length papers. The monograph will document levels and changes in urban and rural living standards, population growth, urbanization, land use, international trade, state capacity, and human capital accumulation. It will also assess resilience to exogenous shocks such as climate anomalies (Cook et al. 2000, Lieberman and Buckley 2012) and natural hazards as well as inter-state wars and other forms of collective violence. The study will provide a comprehensive assessment for the region as a whole, with a focus on some areas for which quantitative and institutional information is comparatively abundant, for instance Java, central Luzon, central Thailand, coastal Vietnam, and upper Burma. One article will discuss the implications of what appears as a rather sustainable economic development in early modern Southeast Asia to the debate on the Great Divergence; the second article will focus on early modern Vietnam with an analysis of the differences in economic trajectories of northern, central, and southern Vietnam.