This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
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18 May 1998 08:03:48 -0500 (EST)
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 07:10:50 -0500
From: manning@neu.edu (Patrick Manning)
Subject: Dialogue: Frank, Landes et at # 7
To: H-WORLD@h-net.msu.edu
Joshua Rosembloom <rosenbl@lark.cc.ukans.edu>
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H-WORLD editor's note: This is the seventh
in the series of postings containing the
dialogue of Gunder Frank, David Landes and
others on global economic history. It
includes two messages submitted to H-WORLD
on May 17, and distributed with this
posting on May 18. PM
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(1). Originally submitted to H-WORLD, first posted here.
From: Mark Jones
jones_m@netcomuk.co.uk
(Responding to Brad DeLong, May 17).
> 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).
The evidence for this is partial and there are counterfactuals. The booming
West European population 1750-1800 was generally and often accompanied by
depressed living standards, hunger and civil unrest. Equally, there is no
single 50-year period in the previous 500 years where population swings in
Europe and Asia cannot be more easily acsribed to the obvious effects of
war, plague, adverse or positive climate fluctuations. In general, there
has been no eco-equilibrium in human settled populations during the present
Interglacial, ie, the agrarian period. The entire period has been
characterised by secular growth trends in population and productivity. So
what is the evidence for the existence of 'set-points' which in any case
are moving targets? So the qualitative change which the IR represents was
only an inflection in a long-term underlying trend; and it's too early in
any case to argue that we've escaped the Malthusian trap :).
The argument for the effects of American silver and the European price
revolution, in altering the balance of input and especially labour costs
between Europe and Asia is more compelling. The real catalyst of change
however was the mobilisation of fossil fuels, which also of course explains
why Britain and Belgian has an IR and the Dutch didn't. Belgium and Britain
had coal. Holland did not.
Mark Jones
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(2). Originally submitted to H-WORLD, first posted here.
From: Ken Pomeranz, University of California - Irvine
klpomera@uci.edu
I've been trying to keep up with the Landes/Frank discussion
while (like most of us) doing 15 other things, and so have kept postponing
joining in; but now I can't help myself. I write from a serious
disadvantage, not yet having read Landes, but much of the discussion seems
to stand on its own.
First, I think Frank's work, my own work and that of various others
whom Jack Goldstone calls the "California school" does make it seem very
likely that the "great divergence" is a post-1750 phenomenon, perhaps even
a post 1800 one; at least I think the burden of proof would now lie with
those who think it came earlier. It may well be, as Alan Taylor suggests,
that this shorter time frame makes the "European miracle" harder to
explain than if we saw it slowly emerging since 1000, but so be it; I
think it is the task we have nonetheless.
Greg Clark asks how we can explain the huge size of the gap circa 1900
if it had only been growing for 150 years or so. Various possibilities
come to mind, including 1)that the higher estimates of British growth
during the "Industrial Revolution" may turn out to be not far off after
all; and 2)that not only was Britain/Europe growing rapidly during the
19th century, but China -- or at least many parts of it -- were actually
going through a pretty significant decline. Most of my estimates of per
capita consumption ca. 1750 in China are in fact, considerably higher than
ca. 1900, and in at least one important area -- cotton cloth -- I think a
good case can be made for almost no change in absolute levels of output,
or even a slight decline, over a period in which population doubled.Nor
do we lack for explanations of such a decline in 19th century China.
There was a serious breakdown in government, at least in mid-century, with
massive civil wars, and serious decay of some important public
infrastructure (especially, though not exclusively for water control).
Opium, still a fairly trivial problem in 1750, became an astonishingly
widespread problem during the 19th century. Estimates of the amount of
opium produced and imported ca. 1900 might have been enough to supply as
many as 40,000,000 addicts. Third, and seemingly independently, there
seems to have been a breakdown in some regions (though not all) of the
micro-level social structures that in other Chinese times and places were
central to the operation of preventive checks on population, leading to
very rapid, ecologically disastrous population growth in these regions
(especially North China) -- and to a contraction of the crucial streams of
cheap primary products (rice, timber, raw cotton) that these regions had
previously exported to china's richest areas. Moreover, as the population
of these poorer regions grew much faster than that in wealthier regions,
they further depressed Chinese averages.
None of this, however, changes the fact that Europe (or at least
Northwestern Europe) underwent an astonishing growth spurt in this period,
which we still need to explain. If we define "institutions" broadly
enough, then an explanation of this spurt in terms of "superior
institutions" becomes almost tautological: the only alternative to it
would be to say it was all a matter of luck or (which amounts to the same
thing) Europeans riding the wave of developments that were really centered
elsewhere. And while I do think global processes deserve more attention
than they usually get, they aren't the whole story.
But if "superior institutions" is to be a meaningful answer, it needs
to be broken down considerably. What were European institutions better
for? Reducing transactions costs? Encouraging technological innovation?
Plundering others? Developing human capital? We need some ways of
assessing these possibilities, assessing the impact of "superiority" in
each area in which it might have existed, and assessing the impact of
those things that do fall outside the bounds of even a broad definition of
institutions (e.g. resource endowments).
When it comes to lowering transaction costs, I'm dubious about overall
European superiority before the breakdown of public order in mid-19th
century China. Chinese land markets were remarkably active and in many
ways less restricted than those in Europe; a similar case could also be
made for labor markets, and for at least some product markets (both the
degree of price integration and the scale of product flows in china's
long-distance grain trade, for instance, would compare quite well with
anything int he Atlantic world before It is however, probably important
that a lot of European inferiorities in these areas get erased at the end
of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, as guilds, common land,
etc., were vastly reduced by French Revolutionary and Napoleonic-era
reforms on much of the continent. And as these deficits disappeared, one
area in which European institutions probably were much better at keeping
transaction costs down -- namely financial markets-- became much more
important. As technological and other changes created various economic
sectors in which firms needed large sums of relatively patient capital,
which exceeded the capital-raising abilities of families and other sorts
of personal networks(first, perhaps in railroads, then in a whole set of
industries affected by Chandler's managerial revolution) institutions like
the corporation became quite important. Previously this institutional
form, however clever, had been of limited importance for anything besides
extra-continental trade and colonization. And the sophistication of
European public finance -- which had exceeded that of China (though I'm
not so sure about India) for quite a while, became much more significant
as states a)began to do more things that could be beneficial to the
economy, rather than spending almost all the money they raise don
war-making and b)extended their war-making (with the aid of new weapons)
to continental Asia, making China's relative weakness in public finance
far more important than it had been when the Empire's only serious
external rivals ( various steppe and NE Asian tribal groups) had been
people who had still less of a system for drawing on future state
revenues. Add together European catch-up in areas where it had been
behind, the expanded importance of one area where it had long been ahead,
and the spectacular if temporary collapse of public order in mid-19th
century China and one can see a significant role for "institutional
superiority" in lowering transaction costs during "the great divergence"
without having to posit that this superiority came from a gap that had
long been growing.
The question of promoting technological change (in part by encouraging
science) seems like the best case for a slowly maturing Western European
advantage -- Margaret Jacob's work on the culture of science in Britain,
for instance, makes a lot of sense to me. But even here, we are talking
about a post-1500 development, not a post-1000 one. Moreover, it's
relationship to the Industrial Revolution (at least in its early stages)
remains, I think, pretty controversial -- certainly there were people using
Newtonian mechanics to calculate how much power they'd get out of a new
water wheel, but there were also a lot of crucial advances that seem to
have been fairly distant from science. Moreover, we should remember that
Europe was not ahead in all important areas, even as late as 1800 -- and
that which technological advantages turned out to be crucial and which
relatively unimportant depended on a lot of things. Thus, Europe remained
relatively backward in agricultural yields per acre even in 1800 (though
the potato was helping it close some of that gap) -- and that particular
bit of backwardness might have mattered a lot more had it not been for the
existence of a)parts of Europe, which, thanks to rather rigid
institutions, had not participated nearly as much in the post 1450
expansion (either in output or in population growth) as the most advanced
parts of Europe, or many parts of China, and thus still had relatively
large amounts of land per capita (something Frank emphasizes as a European
"advantage of backwardness) and b)had Europe also not had, due to a
combination of skills, luck (especially in the form of epidemics) and
ruthlessness, the Americas as a place to which to send 50,000,000 people
over the next century, and from which to export staggering quantities of
primary products (something which I have contrasted with the very
different relationships between China's most advanced regions and its
peripheries, most of which were rapidly filling up by the late 18th/early
19th century). And for all that European technology advanced a long a
broad front in this period, I wonder how much many of these clever
innovations would have mattered had it not been for the fundamental
coal/steam engine breakthrough in Britain -- one which took plenty of
knowledge to be sure (though it should be noted that both the Chinese and
the Indians, and probably others, had all the basic science you needed for
a steam engine), but also depended, as I have argued elsewhere, on the
fortunate location of large coal deposits near the crucial market and
artisanal center of London (which both enabled and encouraged the very
inefficient and awkward first steam engines, useful only for pumping out
mines,into something vastly more important). By contrast, virtually all
of China's coal was hundreds of land-locked miles from the markets and
artisanal talents of the Lower Yangzi, Lingnan, and Southeast Coast.
Moreover, the problem in these mines was not water that needed to be
pumped out, but, on the contrary, such severe aridity that explosions were
happening all the time. So while there were limited incentives to try
shake Chinese coal mining (by this time a rather backward sector) out of
its torpor, the Chinese instead dealt with fuel shortages through the
diffusion of extremely efficient stoves, a very far-flung timber trade,
the use of crop residues (and finding ways of preventing that diversion of
residues from impoverishing the soil) and so on -- all quite clever, too,
but not part of a path that would lead either to the fundamental break
with dependence on annual flows of solar energy that England's fossil fuel
breakthrough represented, or the tremendous iron/steel boom, or the clever
idea of putting the steam engine on a set of tracks to solve transport
problems, etc. The point is not that Europe was "just lucky," by any
means, but that a lot of things are involved in determining which
technological advantages/disadvantages opened a world of self-sustaining
growth (or foreclosed it) and which led to incremental improvements (or
the lack of them) but no great transformation. In this regard, I'm
somewhat dubious of Landes' apparent stress (I'm still getting his
argument second hand, so I may be being unfair) on clocks and spectacles.
It's true, Europeans were the world's leaders in both these areas (as far
as I know) by the 18th century, but Chinese made remarkably good copies of
both (see Needham, for instance, on the very high quality of cuckoo clocks
based on European models but made in places like Suzhou and Hangzhou --if
the point is that the skills developed in making these gadgets developed a
reservoir of skills in making complex gear systems, etc., which had
broader application, the extremely elaborate jackwork of these gadgets
should establish that this was no European monopoly.) Assertions of
blanket technological superiority still seem shaky to me, even near the
end of the 18th century: and when we try to figure out which kinds of
technological superiority mattered, we get a series of path-dependent
stories in which scientific knowledge and artisanal cleverness per se
often don't seem to me the most important factors.
As far as having institutions for developing human capital, is
concerned, it seems to me one would have to grant a Western European and
North American advantage by sometime in the mid-19th century, with the
spread of public education and so on. But at least so far, I don't see
strong evidence of a clear advantage that kicks in early enough to explain
the beginnings of the great divergence.
Finally, we get to exploiting other parts of the world, at which
Europeans clearly did excel. Clearly, this story cannot be reduced to
"Europeans were nastier, or better at being nasty," and I don't think
people who point to this factor generally mean to do so: effectively
exploiting the new World in particular involved navigational skills,
joint-stock companies, etc., along with plenty of violence, good luck with
geography and germs, and a peculiar political economy (a bunch of
relatively equal states almost constantly at war with each other) which
quite likely did more harm than good within Europe's own boundaries, but
created big benefits for Europe insofar as it encouraged overseas
expansion. (Not to mention the irony that the buoyancy of Chinese silver
demand had much to do with keeping the price high enough to make the first
couple of centuries of European presence in the New World sustainable in
the first place: take away that demand, as Dennis Flynn and others have
shown, and the slide in silver's value would have been so rapid in the
16th century that Spanish administration in the New world would have
become a money loser within a few decades.) Again, the point is not to
"bash Europe" and say that the post-1750 miracle can be reduced to luck
and ruthlessness, or that it can be explained entirely based on post-1750
developments: I would certainly agree with Brad DeLong that we don't want
to make the "Rostow error" of thinking that just because we can't see big
divergences until the last couple hundred years there weren't some pretty
important differences that go back further. The point is, I think, that
those differences cut both ways, so that only at the very end does it
become clear that one place is headed for something much better than the
other; indeed what might have seemed like advantages at one point (e.g the
more or less free land and labor markets in china's hinterlands, as
opposed to the many growth-slowing institutions in much of continental
Europe) could be disadvantages later. Moreover, this eventual result
depends on complex interactions involving many factors that neither
Europeans nor Chinese could have predicted or controlled. So by all
means, let's look for stories that place the 19th century in the context
of much longer regional trajectories,as Landes does -- but we also have to
look at how non-linear those trajectories were, at their similarities as
well as their differences, and at the effects of their interactions.
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