Semi-Daily Journal

Quite a number of other societies reached, and more to the point valued, stasis at a level of comfort (Byzantium, etc.). These were only quasi-stable, being vulnerable to shocks produced by outsiders, but on the time scales available to us we can't yet rule that out for ourselves.

Anyhow, this raises the possibility that our own case is the anomaly. That in turn raises the question of what mechanisms not only got our own industrial revolution up and running but also turned it into something sustained (again, on the time scales available to us).

For the former I can suggest some odd quirks of the British society and economy in the 18th century, British resources in that century, and the Europe wide shocks of the Napoleonic Wars and their ending. For the latter I can suggest some market imperfections and the continued increasing access to new geographical opportunities.

Yes, that seems right to me. Since none of the other great cultures had an industrial revolution either, the real question is not why China didn't, but why Europe did.

Not that that gets us any closer to an answer....

I incline towards some version of the Weberian city state thesis myself - and if you look at other explosions of new ways of doing things - they generally took place in such periods. The warring states period of China is a good example.

Of course that still leaves the qualitative difference of the industrial revolution unexplained.

Roberto Unger has some interesting thoughts about the "reversion crisis" of agrarian-bureaucratic societies in his "Plasticity Into Power" (1987), online at:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/unger/english/pdfs/plasticity2b.pdf

In particular, he argues that in such societies the land lords/magnates periodicly amass excessive power, destroying the small peasantry and fragmenting the state and the money economy. In China he observes such a disintegration and "reversion" in the late Sung period 1127-1279 AD. Unger theorizes that the later Ming-Ch'ing imperial governments "solved" the problem by statecraft, but in a way that emphasized stability and led to technological stagnation.

'Gwailo

There could be no dictionary for chinese. A set of books had to be memorized, word for word and the ideographs for each word learnt, and each had to be correctly painted. With the european alphabet, most people can learn to read, even a child can scrawl a word sufficiently well to be read. thus knowledge can accumulate, and be dispersed about europe, in a very short time. The chinese too, gave up on gunpowder, europe developed cannon, the boring machines for the barrels were crucial for the cylinders of the steam engines. Other things too clocks ,opticals,alchemy all contributed to advance knowledge.

>P.M.Lawrence at July 22, 2003 08:23 PM

>"...Anyhow, this raises the possibility that our own case is the anomaly..."

(Perish the very heretical THOUGHT of it ;!)

So... what does Perkins think of "The Great Divergence"?

It would be curious to know if there are any answers to be found by looking at the Roman World. Some of the same social stigmas against engaging in commerce emerged among the Roman upper classes as among the Chinese. How innovative was Roman society? Anyone know???

I remember reading a talk by Jared Diamond (of "Guns, germs and steel" fame) along those lines, i.e. why Europe and not China...

The talk is called "How to get rich". You can find it on the Edge site:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p1.html">http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p1.html">http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p1.html

Pay attention to pages 6 and 7...

"Chinese inventions include canal lock gates, cast iron, compasses, deep drilling, gun powder, kites, paper, porcelain, printing, stern-post rudders, and wheelbarrows — all of those innovations are Chinese innovations. So the real question is, why did Renaissance China lose its enormous technological lead to late-starter Europe?
We can get insight by seeing why China lost its lead in ocean-going ships. As of the year 1400, China had by far the best, the biggest, and the largest number of, ocean-going ships in the world. Between 1405 and 1432 the Chinese sent 7 ocean-going fleets, the so-called treasure fleets, out from China. Those fleets comprised hundreds of ships; they had total crews of 20,000 men; each of those ships dwarfed the tiny ships of Columbus; and those gigantic fleets sailed from China to Indonesia, to India, to Arabia, to the east coast of Africa, and down the east coast of Africa. It looked as if the Chinese were on the verge of rounding the Cape of Good Hope, coming up the west side of Africa, and colonizing Europe.

Well, China's tremendous fleets came to an end through a typical episode of isolationism, such as one finds in the histories of many countries. There was a new emperor in China in 1432. In China there had been a Navy faction and an anti-Navy faction. In 1432, with the new emperor, the anti-Navy faction gained ascendancy. The new emperor decided that spending all this money on ships is a waste of money. Okay, there's nothing unusual about that in China; there was also isolationism in the United States in the 1930's, and Britain did not want anything to do with electric lighting until the 1920s. The difference, though, is that this abandoning of fleets in China was final, because China was unified under one emperor. When that one emperor gave the order to dismantle the shipyards and stop sending out the ships, that order applied to all of China, and China's tradition of building ocean-going ships was lost because of the decision by one person. China was a virtual gigantic island, like Tasmania. "

And so on...

Big Al; forgive me if this comes across a bit harsh.
> There could be no dictionary for chinese
Then what on earth is the 1200 page tome I've got in my basement from when I tried to learn Chinese? It looks for all the world like a Chinese dictionary, based on breaking characters down into radicals, and then arranging the main radical according to the number of brush-strokes, just like every other Chinese dictionary since the Han dynasty.
> With the european alphabet, most people can learn to
> read
This is of course true of Chinese characters as well; witness the current literacy rates in Taiwan, Hong Kong and indeed mainland China. For that matter, the scientific and industrial revolutions happened in Europe while it was overwhelmingly illiterate; _China_ may in fact have been more literate than 17th century Europe. (I can't find my copy of Cipolla's history of mass literacy at the moment.)
> thus knowledge can accumulate, and be dispersed about
> europe, in a very short time
Part of the reason we're having this discussion is that knowledge accumulated in China, and circulated rapidly there, owing to things like printing, _yet there was no scientific revolution_.
> The chinese too, gave up on gunpowder
The mind boggles. Have you _seen_ Ming or Qing dynasty cannons? Those were not toys. Yes, the Europeans developed the best guns in the world --- eventually --- but I think the only people to ever try to give up guns entirely were the Japanese, under the Tokugawas.
I don't have the heart take up clocks or alchemy.

May I respectfully suggest reading Joseph Needham's _Science and Civilisation in China_ before venturing into this kind of discussion again, or at least Mark Elvin's _The Pattern of the Chinese Past_?

Tough love, Cosma. It's good.

One thing not mentioned is that the emperor at the time cancelled the expidetions not just because they were wasteful (one man's waste is another man's pork) but because of concern for incursions from the North. There were rational reasons for cancelling a program that was not in the nation's immediate interest.

China has a history of balancing between development and unity. If development must be sacrificed to ward off Mongol invasion, so be it. I think that China has a very strong sense that there is historical inertia which will drive the country to prominence again, even hundreds of years after losing it. This is why the Chinese describe their relationship with the British in 19th century as 'humiliation,' as opposed to 'invasion.' Invasion is bad, but humiliation is demeaning. (By contrast, I have never heard of Napoleon 'humiliating' Spain - he just took it over.)

As China navigates the 21st century, these themes will come to play again and again. China will become a great superpower, according to many Chinese I know (actually, I agree - but I don't know Europeans that speak proudly of this for the EU). They will have to balance between allowing freedom of information and developing information technologies. They will have to triangulate and will do it in traditional ways.

So the question of: "Why didn't the industrial revolution happen in China." is related to "How will China achieve an information rich first-world economy?"

The mystery is indeed why Europe happened to industrialize. We had the same discussion here before about the transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to farming cultures. There is no propensity for systems like agriculture to transform - on the contrary, they are quite stable. Hunter-gatherer cultures still exist, agricultural societies dominate sub-saharan Africa.

Transition is unlikely, but if it anyway has happened to occur into a strong and stable new system, that one will grow and be the one we will observe.

Darwin and the species of course, but the same selection phenomenon is frequent also in physics. Tones are no more likely to occur than noise - but in a good instrument the noise is dampened and the tone is not.

Is industrialized cultures stable then? Probably not like farming cultures - fertility rates are too low. When there is no acricultural societies left to draw immigrants from - what will happen to the demography of the industrialized world?

Probably completely clueless here, but why did England industrialize first and not France? Maybe France was like China (or China like France?).

How much of this can be related to the relative population of China? Especially given the unity of government and length of time for travel. In effect, China has always had its own internal source of cheap labor. Perhaps the need to industrialize never occurred.

We're probably all more or less clueless at these ones. The thing is that this does not matter. You don't need to no how or why the desired tone is produced when you hit a string. In fact, lots of tones in a wide band is produced when the string is hit.

What wee need to know is what properties the string has to have to preserve the desired tone (on a timescale that is longer than the one on which the noise is dampeded). Practically speaking, when playing a well tuned guitar, this means the length.

Likewise, we cannot gain much from speculations about how to revolutionize society, only about how to preserve it.

Britain did the industrialising part under the pressure first of the Napoleonic Wars, then of processes that were turned loose by the ending of those wars (given that France was not then strong and/or willing to take a chance). We see some of that from the way some of the new mechanised processes became less viable at the end of the wars - Marc Isambard Brunel went broke when his system of making pulley blocks for the navy was abandoned.

The comparability of the two countries was earlier, but at that point things like the putting out system of entrepreneurship made more sense than mechanised factories. But even in that earlier period Britain had had two conflicting groups working to become the dominant partner in the upper class. In the end the landed interest that was more interested in stasis lost out to the merchant interest that had gained by the wars and was more interested in progress (suitably defined).

It's very, very important not to write of "England". The similarities and differences of Scotland and Ireland made a lot of difference too - not least from a Scottish brain drain into England, e.g. James Watt.

Have a look at my material on British transport history since that period, kindly hosted by John Quiggin at http://mentalspace.ranters.net/quiggin/archives/001133.html.

Henry C K Liu has a series at Asia Times which addresses this. Among other things the Chinese warrior ethos militated strongly against guns as a 'cowardly' way of fighting. Similar attitudes prevailed in Europe with respect to crossbows and longbows until Agincourt.

Let's not forget the importance of the development of complex financial markets. The Netherlands invented (or at least commodified) the use of bonds for financing business enterprises, and similarly the English coffee house culture was the birthplace of the first stock market. Thanks especially to Alexander Hamilton, the U.S. also had a surprisingly resilient and sophisticated financial system relatively early in its history.

I think finance is at least one key to answering this question. Follow the money.

China never developed a sophisticated financing system (possibly because of too much government centralization?), though it certainly had highly sophisticated markets for goods. France was (and in some ways still is) hostile to finance in a way that the (mostly Protestant) Dutch (enirched by the Hugenots), English, and Americans were not. Some speculate that this was for cultural reasons, some because of the political/economic structure. I think the latter factor is more important--you need a burgher class for entrepreneurial development, to my mind, not something that France or China had in abundance compared with England. But the social position of merchants (low) vis-a-vis scholars in China (high) also must have had an effect on the best-and-the-brightest in Beijing.

I have a couple of thoughts on this issue:

1) I don't think China was unique in being far ahead of Europe and quite technologically advanced, but failing to industrialize. The Byzantines were mentioned here, and the Arabs were doing a fine job until the 1700s. I'm sure some history major can give us some other fascinating also-rans.

2) "Europe" didn't industrialize. Britain industrialized, and it caught on. The only reason, it seems to me, that Britain didn't end up simply annexing Europe is that nationalist fervor developed in France and then promulgated across Europe made it an unprofitable endeavor (certainly not an impossible one).

3) The lesson I draw from this is, once one culture (no matter how essentially minor) manages to industrialize, every other culture on the planet will have to either catch up or get run over. Thus, industrialization will be _by_definition_ a unique event. Trying to figure out why it happened in one place and not another seems fruitless, since no matter where it happened to take place, it could not also happen (except by extreme coincidence) anywhere else.

This is not to diminish the role of rational banking systems or other factors making industrialization somewhere in Europe more likely; that information is useful for us to try to sort out how countries which aren't currently industrialized can work toward prosperity. It is merely to say that industrialization (again, barring tremendous coincidence) is only going to happen once, no matter what. So wherever it happened, that's where it happened, if you catch my meaning.

The Chinese Empire was always suspicious of any internal forces that might challenge its control (including its own military, and above all the merchant class). Economic development and trade are hard to keep under control, and before 1840 China's technical and economic iferiority relative to Europe was unimportant to the Chinese, and in fact unknown to them. So economic development was traded for stability and control. And since, after about 1300, China was always unified, no economic experiments could take place anywhere (no Holland, Switzerland, England, or Venice was outside the control of the Empire). I'm convinced that the unity of China was curse.

I don't think Kimmitt's reasoning applies, at any rate not to industrialisation; it does seem to fit the earlier age of exploration a bit.

But technological advances have been deliberately rolled back, e.g. gins in Japan, and even the industrial response to the Napoleonic Wars went back a bit before railways took off; industrialisation could easily have become unviable after all. And as for "everybody else had to industrialise as well", the interesting thing is that the earlier part of industrialisation actually made isolationism more realistic. Whereas 18th century Britain could send a fleet around the world (under Anson), and this fleet could intimidate China, 19th century USA found it realistic to stop any European threats before they started. This was because Anson only had to face down the local forces in the ports he went to. Until quite late, the problems of coaling etc. meant that industrialised navies had less range but more punch than their predecessors - which meant that even a small amount of local strength was enough to reduce risks of invasion except from immediate neighbours.

That worked very much to the advantage of the 19th century USA; if that had chosen to be non-industrial (say, if things had worked out the way the southern states preferred), it could have afforded to stop the industrialisation process early without any particular risk from outsiders. After all, France couldn't even prevail over Mexico, so great were the problems of projecting out of area capability (the French had to try to work through proxies, which wasn't enough).