Mark Cohen received his PhD in Sociology from New York University. He is a comparative-historical sociologist, and his research is oriented to the basic question of what brought about the large-scale social changes that laid the foundation of the modern capitalist world. His published work has mostly focused on Japan, analyzing major political events and economic trends from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. He is currently working on a book based on his dissertation, investigating the processes of rural economic development beginning in the nineteenth century in countries outside the West such as Japan as well as Russia and China.