[Fwd: Dialogue: Frank, Landes et al #6 (2 messages)]

Mon, 18 May 1998 10:39:38 -0400
christopher chase-dunn (chriscd@jhu.edu)

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

17 May 1998 08:17:35 -0500 (EST)
Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 07:24:35 -0500
From: manning@neu.edu (Patrick Manning)
Subject: Dialogue: Frank, Landes et al #6 (2 messages)
To: H-WORLD@h-net.msu.edu
Joshua Rosembloom <rosenbl@lark.cc.ukans.edu>

******************************************
H-WORLD editor's note: This is the sixth
in the series of postings containing the
dialogue of Gunder Frank, David Landes and
others on global economic history. It
includes two messages posted to H-WORLD on
May 16. PM
******************************************

(1). Originally posted on H-WORLD

From: Jim Blaut, University of Illinois - Chicago
<70671.2032@compuserve.com

Herewith a brief response to two of Brad DeLong's thoughtful, quizzical
comments.

(1) "[As] Alan Taylor eloquently pointed out, to reduce the European
Miracle from a ten-century to a two-century affair makes understanding and
accounting for it much, much harder..."

I don't think that anyone, and certainly not Gunder Frank, is arguing that
you don't have to look for pre-18th-century csauses for 18th-century
effects. The problem is: how far back do you have to go? Frank and I argue
that you don't have to go back before the 16tth century, because the rise
of Europe relative to other civilizations was kicked off initially by the
inflow of silver (etc.) from the Americas after 1492.

Landes, Jones, & Co. of course argue otherwise. They find saome unique
European genius (mentality, culture) in Europe 1000 years ago (Landes, Lynn
White, MacFarlane, Weber, et al.) or 5000 years ago (Jones, Mann, Hall,
Wittfogel, et al.), something, or some things, that propelled Europe and
only Europe forward toward later modernization. This, of course, is the
conventional position. I think it has in it a large dose of Eurocentric
folklore. For every trait in ancient or medieval Europe that seems to be
part of the explanation for Europe's later rise (relative to other
civilizations), I think you find either that (1) the trait was also present
in non-Europe, or (2) the trait was not really all that progressive, or
all that pregnant with implications for later progress, or (3) the trait
could be balanced off against some trait of non-Europe which was equally
pregnant with implications for later development. The problem here is what
I call "tunnel history." You know that Europe in later times had some
undeniable superiority or priority. You search for the causes of that
superior or prior fact *only* in prior European facts, neglecting the rest
of the world.

(2) "Where are the self-governing cities of Asia?"

There were self-governing cities, city-states or small kingdoms dominated
by a single city, along all the coasts of the Indian Ocean from Sofala and
Kilwa around to Malacca and beyond. There were many port cities lying
within large empires but enjoying essenmtially complete autonomy in matters
relating to the economy. I think the Weberian idea that European cities
were somehow uniquely "free" is folklore: everything European was endowed
with freedom, everything Asian was unfree, oppressed by Oriental despotism.

A similar argument applies to the now-conventional idea that the political
fragmentation of medieval Europe allowed for economic development in ways
not possible ("blocked") elsewhere by "empire." Note first that the older
conventional view held quite the opposite to be the case: the fragmentation
of feudal societies was altogether bad, and had to be replaced by central
governments before modernization was possible. The newer pro-fragmentation
theory seems to me to be more of the Oriental despotism mythology. Empires
like China did not fundamentally suppress economic activity in local
regions and cities (see Bob Marks' post on his work on South China). Indian
Ocean port cities under the Mughals were allowed, even in some ways
encouraged, to operate as autonomous economic entities. Centralized
polities indeed had specific advantages: a large area serving as labor shed
and market (this argument anticipates the modern theory of the "national
economy"), a potential for the diffusion of technology uninhibited by
political and migration barriers. Etcetera. There is the view that smaller
polities somehow mean more individualism. I think this is romantic
nonsense. Was a baron more democratic than a king in Magna Carta times?
What about all those medieval tolls between markets? My guess is that
markets were freer under empires, ceteris paribus, than under fragmented
feudal semi-polities.

Respectfully submitted,

Jim Blaut

*************************************************************************

(2). Originally posted on H-WORLD

From: Brad DeLong, University of California - Berkeley
delong@econ.berkeley.edu

(Responding to Andre Gunder Frank, May 16):

>Thank You One and All for your interest, attention, consideration and
>patience with me. A family medical emergency is the real reason and David
>Landes' absence the official excuse for the tardiness of this my first
>general response and the delay till still later of my detailed reply.

I hope that everyone involved is better--or at least recovering.

>I fully agree with Taylor and others that circa 1800 represents a
>disjuncture, and that it remains to be explained by me and others.

I find myself worried that we might be about to fall into what I think of
as the Rostow strap. A generation ago W.W. Rostow knew that the industrial
revolution was important, and concluded that it must have shown itself in a
rapid jump in economy-wide productivity levels and rates of economic growth.

It didn't.

Even large structural changes in a small sector have--initially--little
effect on economy-wide averages.

Today I think that we are in danger of making that mistake in reverse: just
because we can see no large productivity differentials at the level of the
economy as a whole between, say, southern France and Lingnan (:-) I'm
learning) in the eighteenth century doesn't mean that the differences in
technology, economic structure, ideology, politics, and culture weren't
important...

>Under title 3 below, I then append MY OWN ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION as a
>somewhat longer but still excessively short summary extract from my book
>ReORIENT. Of course, that is intended as a challenge to others to join in
>to the still outstanding task of constructing a holistic real world or
>really holistic global/world embracing explanation, in which Ken Pomeranz
>is also engaged, but alas David Landes is not [yet?].

I think that David Landes's treatment of non-European Eurasia and North
Africa is probably wrong in two different dimensions, but let me
concentrate only on the first. The first is Landes's belief that climate
near the equator somehow militates against first commercial development and
second industrialization. The second is his overly-static picture of the
agrarian civilizations of temperate-zone Asia.

Landes wants to argue that because tropical climates are hot and
disease-ridden, that human productivity there is low, hence no civilization
can ever amass the surplus above biological subsistence necessary to set
out on the road that eventually leads to industrialization.

The problem is that Landes is also a follower of the tradition of M.M.
Postan (as am I) --that before the industrial revolution it is probably
informative and insightful to try to analyze human civilizations from the
perspective of ecologico-cultural equilibrium. When living standards are
relatively high, birth rates are high and death rates are low; when living
standards are relatively low birth rates are low and death rates are high
(or, rather, variable). This means that if technological progress is
sufficiently slow (and before the industrial revolution it was
"sufficiently slow" always and everywhere), then a civilization's
population density will within several generations adjust itself to
resources and technologies in such a way that keeps living standards
oscillating around the civilization's set-point of rough population balance.

Thus in the long-run of a century or so, a civilization's living standards
are determined not by its summer temperature or by the prevalence of
pinworms, but by its ecological and cultural practices that determine its
set-point. A civilization like northwest Europe can have a relatively high
set-point if culture delays marriage until the male member of the couple
has a farm or a secure place. A civilization like that of the Yangtse delta
as described by Ken Pomeranz can have a relatively high set-point if heads
of lineage restrict their younger siblings fertility . A civilization like
that of Poland can have a relatively low set-point if the second serfdom
turns large proportions of the population into landless laborers with no
incentive to delay nuptuality or diminish fertility. A civilization like
that of the Yellow River valley can have a relatively low set-point if
senior members' control over lineage juniors breaks down.

As a result, I think that Landes's argument that regions near the equator
were always extremely unlikely places for commercial and industrial
revolutions is deeply flawed. Hot summers and the consequent difficulty of
hard summer work might keep Ceylon from having the pre-industrial
population density of the Rhine delta (or the Yangtse delta), but I don't
think that they have any implications for pre-industrial average living
standards. If you wanted to rescue Landes's argument about climate, I think
you would have to identify a line of causation running from location near
the equator to some particular set of ecologico-cultural practices that
leads to a relatively low living-standard set-point...

>- Western Europe and particularly Britain were hard put to compete
>especially with India and China. Europe was still dependent on India for
>cotton textiles and on China for ceramics and silks that Europe re-exported
>and from which it profited in its [economic and/or political] colonies in
>Africa and the Americas. Moreover, Europe remained dependent on its
>colonies for most of the money it needed to pay for these imports, both for
>re-export and for its own consumption and other use, eg, as inputs for its
>own production and export. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
>centuries, there was a decline in the marginal if not also the absolute
>inflow of precious metals and other profits through the slave trade and
>plantations from the European colonies in Africa and the Americas. To
>recoup and even to maintain - never mind to increase - its [world and even
>domestic] market share Europeans collectively and its entrepreneurs
>individually had to attempt to increase their penetration of at least some
>markets, and to do so either by eliminating competition
>politically/militarily or by undercutting it by lowering its own costs of
>production, or both.

I have often wondered whether late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early
nineteenth century European perceptions that labor was cheap in the Orient
might not have been consequences of American silver and the price
revolution: wages were low in the Orient, but subsistence was cheap as
well. Large nominal wage differentials (large enough to make China and
India super-competitive with Europe as producers of cotton textiles,
ceramics, and silks) are perfectly consistent with relatively equal real
wages and living standards, with a higher nominal price level in Europe,
and with a consequent flood of specie out of Europe to Asia. (And, later, a
flood of EOC opium out of India to China.)

>In short, changing world demographic/ economic/ ecological circumstances
>suddenly - and for most people including Adam Smith unexpectedly - made a
>number of related investments economically rational and profitable: in
>machinery and processes that saved labor input per unit of output, thus
>increasing the productivity and use of labor and its total output;
>increasing productive power generation; and increasingly productive
>employment and productivity of capital. This transformation of the
>productive process was initially concentrated in selected industrial,
>agricultural, and service sectors in those parts of the world economy whose
>comparative competitive POSITION made -- and then continually re-made --
>such Newly Industrializing Economies [NIE] import substituting and export
>promoting measures economically rational and politically possible.

A point for Gunder Frank is the failure of the industrial revolution to
take root first in the Netherlands. It seems as though the Dutch had
better--more productive and more value-adding--things to do than to monkey
with steam engines and put workers who could be adding lots of value on the
Amsterdam docks to work watching early spinning machines.

Or so I read Jan de Vries and Adrian van der Woude's [? the book is in the
office] argument in their _The First Modern Economy_.

Brad DeLong