I recently finished State, Economy, and the Great Divergence by Peer Vries. It’s a comparison of the activities of the state in Great Britain and China in the period running up to and including the Industrial Revolution, roughly 1650-1850.
Vries critiques the standard view on the role of the state and the divergence between these two places, encapsulating that view in the following:
In the Smithian interpretation of British economic history, that fits in quite neatly with the Whig interpretation of Britains overall history, the primacy of Britain and its industrialization are by and large regarded as the culmination of a long process in which Britains economy increasingly became characterized by free and fair competition and in which government increasingly tended to behave according to Smithian logics.
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For those who endorse them, the predicament of imperial China, that it did not industrialize, has always been quite easy to explain…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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