The Great Divergence

China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

Kenneth Pomeranz

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400823499
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: 19th Century History

The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.

Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.

Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.

PART ONE

A WORLD OF SURPRISING RESEMBLANCES

ONE

EUROPE BEFORE ASIA? POPULATION, CAPITAL ACCUMULATION, AND TECHNOLOGY IN EXPLANATIONS OF EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT

THERE IS no consensus on how Europe became uniquely wealthy by the mid-nineteenth century. However, Eric Jones’s European Miracle probably comes closest to enunciating the current “mainstream” position. Jones’s argument is eclectic, and many Europeanists would reject or question many of his claims; but several of his general propositions nonetheless command wide assent. For our purposes, the most important of these general statements—one also found in any number of other works—is that industrialization was not the point at which European economic history departed from other Old World trajectories; instead, it represents the full flowering of differences that had been more subtly building for centuries. In fact, many scholars simply take this for granted; since Jones explicitly argues for the proposition, his work serves as a useful point of departure.

According to Jones, “Europeans”¹ were already uniquely wealthy before industrialization. In particular, they had vastly more capital at their disposal, especially livestock,² which they accumulated by “holding back population growth a little below its maximum.” This in turn allowed Europeans to “ho ld their consumption levels a little above those of Asia.”³ Moreover, their capital stock was less liable to destruction, because Europe suffered fewer natural disasters and began sooner than other places to build with fire-resistant brick and stone.⁴ Thus, less of Europe’s annual surplus above subsistence was needed to offset depreciation, and its advantage in capital stock grew steadily with time, even before the Industrial Revolution.

But in fact there is little evidence to suggest a quantitative advantage in western Europe’s capital stock before 1800 or a set of durable circumstances—demographic or otherwise—that gave Europe a significantedge in capital accumulation. Nor is it likely that Europeans were significantly healthier (i.e., advantaged in human capital), more productive, or otherwise heirs of many years of slowly accruing advantages over the more developed parts of Asia.

When we turn to comparisons of the technology embodied in the capital stock, we do find some important European advantages emerging during the two or three centuries before the Industrial Revolution; but we also still find areas of European backwardness. Europe’s disadvantages were concentrated in areas of agriculture, land management, and the inefficient use of certain land-intensive products (especially fuel wood). As it worked out, some of the areas in which Europe had an edge turned out to be important for truly revolutionary developments, while the particular areas in which other societies had better techniques did not. But even Europe’s technological leadership in various sectors would not have allowed a breakthrough to self-sustaining growth without other changes that made it much freer than other societies of its land base. This was partially a result of catching up in some of the land-saving technologies in which it lagged, a process that was greatly facilitated by knowledge gained through overseas empire, and partly a matter of serendipity, which located crucial resources (especially forest-saving coal) in particularly fortunate places. It was also partly due to global conjunctures. Those global conjunctures, in turn, were shaped by a combination of European efforts (many of them violent), epidemiological luck, and some essentially independent developments. (One example of the latter is China’s switch to a silver-based economy, which helped keep New World mines profitable and sustain Europe’s colonial presence during the long period before other products were developed.)

These global conjunctures allowed western Europeans access to vast amounts of additional land-intensive resources. Moreover, they could obtain these resources without needing to further strain a European ecology that was already hard-pressed before the great nineteenth-century boom in population and per capita resource use, and without having to reallocate vast amounts of their own labor to the various labor-intensive activities that would have been necessary to manage their own land for higher yield and greater ecological sustainability. Without these “external” factors, Europe’s inventions alone might have been not much more revolutionary in their impact on economy and society than the marginal technological improvements that continued to occur in eighteenth-century China, India, and elsewhere.

Agriculture, Transport, and Livestock Capital

Europe did indeed have more livestock per person than most other settled societies, and within a European system of farming that livestock constituted such valuable capital equipment that more farm animals usually meant more prosperity. And in a few places in Asia a shortage of livestock did interfere with cultivating more land. In parts of eighteenth-century Bengal, for instance, landless laborers were unable to take advantage of empty, fertile land because they lacked access to plow animals; but this was less because of an absolute shortage of livestock than because landlords, fearing the loss of their labor force, took care to monopolize the necessary animals.⁵ The very fact that unused land was still plentiful makes it unlikely that Malthusian pressures were to blame for people not having livestock.

In some other Asian societies, human populations had reached densities at which they restricted the availability of livestock; but nothing in those cases indicates that a shortage of farm animals inhibited agricultural production. Indeed, had a shortage of animals been a crucial problem, it is hard to see why at least larger, wealthier farmers would not have raised and used more of them; yet for the period in which we have reasonable data, there is no observable difference between large and small North China farms in animal power used per acre.⁶ Moreover, what by European standards was a tiny number of animals sufficed to do all the work needed to keep virtually all usable land under cultivation. Moreover, in this region—with a crop mix and ecology more like Europe’s than that of the rice-growing south—my best estimate is that even with relatively few draft animals, late eighteenth-century Chinese placed considerably more—and higher-quality—manure on the soil than did their European contemporaries.⁷ The resulting yields supported an exceptionally dense population for a dry-farming region,⁸ at living standards that, as we shall soon see, were probably comparable to that of western Europe. Meanwhile, in the rice regions of Asia, even smaller numbers of draft animals coincided with the highest agricultural yields in the world; rice farming simply does not require as much animal power, and post-harvest operations also require much less power than does making wheat flour.⁹ Subtropical and tropical regions elsewhere, such as Meso-America, also supported dense populations with few or even no plow animals. If even with more animals European farming was not exceptionally productive, it is hard to see this as a crucial advantage.

Of course, plow animals can also pull other loads. The huge preponderance of land transport in preindustrial Europe probably results in part from the availability of so many farm animals, who had to be fed everyday but were only needed part-time for farming. Did Europe then have a crucial advantage in capital equipment for land transportation? Perhaps so, compared to east Asia, where pasture land was so scarce, but the remarkable development of water transport in China and Japan surely offset this and represented an at least equally valuable form of capital in transport; east Asia’s overall advantage in transport was noted at the time by Adam Smith.¹⁰ And in parts of Asia where, as in Europe, there was lots of meadow and grassland, rural transport was probably just as highly developed. The enormous bullock trains of north India, sometimes including 10,000 beasts,¹¹ are a powerful, if anecdotal, example. Quantitative estimates are fraught with many uncertainties, but what we can piece together suggests that the animal-borne freight-hauling capacity of eighteenth-century north India was not wildly different, on a per-person basis, from Werner Sombart’s estimate for Germany in 1800.¹² And both China and India had long purchased warhorses and some other livestock from central Asia, which had enormous amounts of pasture. After 1700, the Qing dynasty controlled much of this territory and bred its own warhorses. Had the Chinese needed to import other animals, this would have been ecologically feasible, too.¹³

Nor do we see other signs of a shortage of transport capital in Asia. Such a shortage would presumably inhibit marketing, particularly of bulky goods such as grain. Yet in one of the most crowded societies of all—China—the share of the harvest that was marketed over long distances seems to have been considerably higher than that in Europe. Wu Chengming has conservatively estimated that 30,000,000 shi of grain entered long-distance trade in the eighteenth century,¹⁴ or enough to feed about 14,000,000 people.¹⁵ This would be more than fivetimes a generous estimate of Europe’s long-distance grain trade at its pre-1800 peak¹⁶ and over twenty times the size of the Baltic grain trade in a normal year during its heyday.¹⁷

Furthermore, Wu’s figure includes only the largest of many grain-trading routes in China and uses cautious estimates even for those. He omits, for instance, Shandong province, which had a population of about 23,000,000 in 1800¹⁸—slightly larger than that of France—and was neither particularly commercialized nor particularly backward. It imported enough grain in an average eighteenth-century year to feed 700,000–1,000,000 people—more than the Baltic trade fed—and exported roughly the same amount.¹⁹ Thus, if we treat the grain entering and exiting this nation-sized piece of China as the equivalent of “international trade” in Europe, we find that this one province engaged in a grain trade comparable to all of Europe’s long-distance grain trading; and there must have been quite a bit of grain trading within the province as well, since even this volume of imports could not have met the demand from its urban areas (not to mention its cotton and tobacco growers).

Nor was China unique. Many cities in various parts of Asia (and probably one or two in precolonial America) were larger than any European city before eighteenth-century London, and several were larger than London as well. It has been estimated that 22 percent of Japan’s eighteenth-century population lived in cities, versus 10–15 percent for western Europe;²⁰ and the Malay archipelago, though sparsely populated overall, may have been 15 percent urban.²¹ Many of these cities—as well as some in south Asia and the Middle East—were heavily dependent on long-distance shipments of bulky foods.

Overall, then, it seems very hard to find evidence of a European advantage in transportation. A last possibility would be that European animals provided a crucial difference by providing power for industrial activities, such as turning millstones. But the rice-eating parts of Asia needed less milling to begin with, since rice (unlike wheat) was often eaten without being turned into flour. When rice was to be pounded into flour, this was generally done in very small quantities at a time, but not for lack of animal power; rather, it was the nature of rice itself, which spoils very rapidly once unhusked, which called for hand-processing small daily amounts.²² Moreover, most mills and other industrial facilities, whether in Europe or Asia, were small; they also took many days off due to limited demand, customary restraints such as holidays, and other shortages (e.g., of fuel for forges). Thus, large numbers of animals were not generally needed, and there is nothing to suggest that a shortage of animal power was a significant brake on industrial development anywhere.

So if Europe’s animals made a difference, it would not have been as a “capital good,” but only as an item of consumption: i.e., as a source of protein for which other areas had no adequate substitute. Europeans certainly ate more meat and far more dairy products than most peoples in Asia. But this advantage wa...