Now this is an experience that must not have been much fun...
R. Bin Wong writes, on p. ix of his R. Bin Wong (1997), China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 0801483271), that his "interest in economic history, political development, and social conflicts goes back many years... In graduate school at Harvard University in the mid-1970s, I was unable to answer a question posed by David Landes about what he, as a historian of Europe, could learn by studying China--a failure I remember quite vividly because it occurred on my Ph.D. oral examination. This book is a belated response."
(Somehow, however, I, even after reading R. Bin Wong's book, still don't grasp the answer to R. Bin Wong's question. The differences between pre-industrial China and pre-industrial Europe are pronounced yet subtle, and I find it hard to see how what happens in one does much to illuminate what happens in the other.)
Posted by DeLong at June 17, 2004 08:39 AM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postWong and Pomeranz believe in the Smithian 'stationary state' and think Malthusian-cum-ecological dynamics were operating in ALL parts of early modern Eurasia until c. 1750. This similarity is the basis of their comparison. Based on this, one can then better isolate the differences between England and Yangzi that made a difference. Wong highlights the state (Pomeranz and Goldstone do not) -- the European interstate system created 'merchant empires' that encouraged growth, while the politically monolithic Chinese 'agrarian empire' stifled economic development. So its using a new comparison to make an old argument.
Posted by: jlevy on June 17, 2004 09:09 AMThe normal historical descriptions of the European Industrial Revolution, etc., almost always find a moral to the story -- why the West was able to do it, what it was about the West that made this possible. A study of China can provide a check -- many things which supposedly contributed to the rise of the West were also present in China, which did not "rise".
In what I've read recently, the multinational, un-unified state of Early Modern Europe is treated as a strong positive, and military factors in Europe which led to this disunity are also positive even though it led to frequent wars -- it was also a factor leading to the making of empires. I think that the emphasis on the military factor (Steensgaard, Lane, and more recent things) is relatively new.
While military empires are inefficient in the long run, long-distance trade always requires military protection of some sort, and empire is just one form.
I haven't read Wong's book, but Brad's question seemed very general.
Posted by: Zizka on June 17, 2004 09:59 AMMore specifically then, Brad, is the book worth reading?
I'm sure it has value, most books do --- but is it worth the opportunity cost, or do we wait a few years for someone else to do better?
Indeed, speaking as a non-historian, I found Pomeranz' "The Great Divergence" (focusing on China) easily the best book on the European industrial revolution I've encountered. He uses a huge amount of data to show that pre-industrial China was not, economically speaking, significantly behind Europe. This basically demolishes most older arguments for why Europe industrialized, which had increasingly focused on "finding" supposed European advantages further and further back in time. Historians of Europe kept finding innovation, economic growth and dynamism, and market institutions further and further back in European history before the industrial revolution. But they didn't look at the history of non-European regions to see if they had been as underestimated as pre-industrial Europe once was, so there was no reality check about whether having XYZ factors as far back as the Renaissance made Europe's eventual triumph inevitable. Pomeranz, Wong, and others provided the reality check - finding that China had been drastically underestimated by European historians, and that based on concrete economic indicators it was simply not behind until the British industrial revolution appeared.
Some of the reality checks are also more specific - China managed to match European economic performance with very different institutions, so certain forms of market-related law can't have been quite the unique engine of growth that some historians such as Douglass North argued them to be. North wrote some really great stuff going into detail about the evolution of market institutions in pre-industrial Europe and showing how they contributed to growth. But the basic thrust coming out of his work seemed to me to be "without these institutions the growth wouldn't have happened, and the failure to develop these institutions is why the non-European world was behind". The newer non-Eurocentric historians are contradicting that thrust of his argument by showing how similar economic outcomes can be produced by very different institutions, especially much less legalistic ones (such as complex networks of family alliances substituting for strong legal protections of business partnerships between strangers).
Daniel Chirot explained it this way- societies that work don't change. Change happens when something goes wrong.
So some of the questions you might ask about China are why, or whether, things worked so well as to forestall change.
Other questions get into the region of pre-industrialization. In England, for example, we know that pre-industrialization tended to destabilize the economy and emphasize the profits available to innovators. It would be nice to know why this didn't happen in China.
And, of course, it would be nice to know more about what happened in China over the past 50 years, especially considering how much we've heard about Mao's "mistakes".
Posted by: serial catowner on June 17, 2004 02:18 PMThe best critique of Pomeranz/Wong, I think, is by Robert Brenner, which is in a forum in the Journal of Asian Studies, don't know the exact citation. Brenner makes a persuasive case that English labor productivity witnessed a secular long-term increase after the sixteenth-century which set it apart from China (pace Pomeranz), and that England's 'organic economy' (Wrigley) was not at the brink of a Malthusian crisis c. 1750. Hard to know what statistics to believe...
Posted by: jlevy on June 17, 2004 03:21 PMHi,
I am neither a historian nor an economist. So I have a naive question. Isn't it possible that the standard rules of competition applied to the whole China (or Asia) vs Europe scenario pre-industrialization? I.e China (and India) were established dominant trading powers with no real incentive to change, while European traders had an incentive to innovate to compete and improve their trading shares. There is also the additional issue that the Europeans needed to develop better trading routes through the sea, to compete and this itself lead to technological innovation.
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