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China Normal: Patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and trade on a Eurasian discursive base
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2019
Abstract
Comparative historians have illuminated the weaknesses in the Europe-derived and Europe-centred historical paradigms of the preceding century-and-a-half, while questioning the factual foundations and depth of Europe's development towards capitalism, imperialism, and industrialism. But a continental perspective on China's early modern development suggests the possibilities of a vicinage—or integrated environment—approach to China's development and its relevance to more widespread changes of the early modern period.
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Footnotes
As this article has taken its various forms, I have been guided by long or short exchanges with a number of scholars who have commented on the article as a whole, or parts of it, or a few words of it. All has been valuable. I would single out Peter Perdue, Lillian M. Li, Donald Pease, and, for extended engagement with the text, Stefan Link. I owe a special debt to Norbert Peabody and the anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful to the Dartmouth Society of Fellows for ongoing support of my work and criticism of this manuscript. No single one of these individuals or groups should be regarded as responsible for unwarranted interpretations or assessments found herein. More likely than not, they tried to talk me out of it.
References
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3 Patrick O'Brien, in his retrospective on the ‘Great Divergence’ debates, puts it well: ‘[Braudel] observed, “a historiographical inequality between Europe and the rest of the world. Europe invented historians and made good use of them. Her own history is well lit and can be called as evidence or used as claim.”’ P. O'Brien, ‘Ten years of debate on the origins of the Great Divergence’, Reviews in History, Nov. 2010, https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1008, [accessed 7 October 2019].
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11 Wong, China transformed, p. 5. He continues to an explanation of his own method in the book, which was to use comparison of China and Europe to test, qualify, and refine the discursive categories received from social science.
12 See, for instance, the invitingly titled work, Pomeranz, K., ‘Beyond the East-West binary: resituating development paths in the eighteenth-century world’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61:2 (May 2002), pp. 539–590CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It only made the ‘East-West binary’ more rigid as Pomeranz fended off the critique by Philip Huang. Peter Perdue remarked upon the ‘normal’ qualities of China, as implied by the work of Pomeranz in his review: P. Perdue, ‘Lucky Europe, normal China’, H-World, (Aug. 2000), https://networks.h-net.org/node/20292/reviews/21064/perdue-pomeranz-great-divergence-china-europe-and-making-modern-world, [accessed 7 October 2019], which, in my reading, limns the implied but not explicit reconceptualizations of the comparativists.
13 See both Victor Lieberman, Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context c. 800–1830, Vol. 1: Integration on the mainland, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003; Lieberman, V., Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830, Vol. 2: Mainland mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009Google Scholar. See also Mair, Victor H., ‘Comments on Strange parallels’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 70:4 (Nov. 2011), pp. 979–982CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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20 All casualties associated with these events are guesses. Contemporary imperial records (as in the case of the Zhang Xianzhong rebellion) give total deaths in excess of the population, but sober estimates have ranged as high as one death for every three people in the areas affected by this rebellion; provinces in the middle of the fighting have an estimated 70–75 per cent drop in population by the end of the Ming period in 1644. For a detailed discussion of the difficulties of assessing death tolls, see Swope, Kenneth, On the trail of the yellow tiger: war, trauma, and social dislocation in southwest China during the Ming–Qing transition, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2018, esp. pp. 1–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rowe, W. T., ‘Social stability and social change’, in Peterson, W. J. (ed.), The Cambridge history of China, Vol. 9: The Ch'ing dynasty to 1800, Part 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 473–562CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Collective estimates by Chinese scholars comparing Ming and early Qing population evidence suggest a loss of 20 to 40 million in the initial phase of the conquest (which Angus Maddison thought was too high), and tens of millions are also thought to have expired in the Three Feudatories War, giving a total loss (over several generations) of a something between 50 million and 100 million for the seventeenth century.
21 This seems to correspond to Mair's and Lieberman's views of exposed Eurasian zones where states formed early and through exchange created equilibriums of technology among established civilizations. See Mair, ‘Comment on Strange parallels’.
22 For further discussion see Crossley, Hammer and anvil, pp. 3–21.
23 For discussion of commonly invoked paradigms of urbanization, see Davis, Kingsley, ‘The urbanization of the human population’, Scientific American, vol. 213:3 (Sep. 1965), pp. 40–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bairoch, Paul, Cities and economic development: from the dawn of history to the present, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991Google Scholar; van der Woude, A. M., Hayami, Akira and Vries, Jan de, Urbanization in history: a process of dynamic interactions, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995Google Scholar.
24 The original idea is in Walter Christaller's Zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland, translated by Baskin, Carlisle W. into English as Central places in southern Germany (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1966)Google Scholar, and offered as a thesis to the University of Virginia in 1933. It established basic concepts of population threshold for survival in a central place, and range as the viable distance for commonly accessed services, including markets. There are many refinements and variations, notably by August Lösch and Edward Ullmann, all built on the idea of nested patterns of markets, transport, and population, often represented hexagonally.
25 William Skinner, ‘Marketing and social structure in rural China’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 24:1–3, 1964–65. See also D. Little, ‘Skinner's spatial imagination’, Understanding Society, 27 March 2010, https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2010/03/skinners-spatial-imagination.html, [accessed 7 October 2019].
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28 Hayashi, ‘Long term world population history’.
29 Hayashi though that Japan was in the 2 per cent profile for the early Tokugawa, but Skinner believed that the post-eighteenth-century ratio had to be much different from China's. See Mann, Susan, ‘Urbanization and historical change in China’, Modern China, vol. 10:1 (Jan. 1984), pp. 79–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of Skinner's and Rozman's China-Japan comparisons.
30 Hayashi, ‘Long term world population history’, p. 11.
31 This factor has been emphasized by Rozman, Gilbert, ‘Urban networks and historical stages’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 9:1 (Summer 1978), pp. 65–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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33 See Rozman, Gilbert, Urban networks in Ch'ing China and Tokugawa Japan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974Google Scholar, and Mann, ‘Urbanization and historical change’, p. 81. See also Wheatley, Paul, ‘Handle sans blade: A misappropriation of central place theory’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 6:3 (Winter 1976), pp. 477–483CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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36 Such a development is graphically represented in Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma and Karen C. Seto, ‘Data descriptor: spatializing 6,000 years of global urbanization from 3700 bc to ad 2000’, Scientific Data, no. 3 (Jun. 2016), Figure 5, https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201634, [accessed 7 October 2019].This recalls (but is not a restatement) of the ideas of Skinner and Rhoads Murphey on the relationships between city and hinterlands. See, in particular, R. Murphey, The treaty ports and China's modernization: what went wrong?, University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, Ann Arbor, MI, 1970.
37 Mendels, F. F., ‘Proto-industrialization: the first phase of the industrialization process’, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 32:1 (1972), pp. 241–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which it is suggested that shifts to cottage industry and urban dwelling were attempts by late medieval societies in Europe to accommodate rising populations and falling wages, and that the mode persisted in societies that were unable to accumulate capital to make the transition to mechanization.
38 By this I mean applying ‘proto-industrialization’ in the specific sense of that which precedes industrialization, as it happened in Europe. More than a few historians have used the word ‘proto-industrialization’ to refer to what I mean here by industrialization and applied it to Asia. See, for instance, Perlin, Frank, ‘Proto-industrialization and pre-colonial South Asia’, Past and Present, no. 98 (Feb. 1983), pp. 30–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For comparisons of its use with respect to Europe and Japan, see von Glahn, R., The economic history of China from antiquity to the nineteenth century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016, p. 399, note 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Wong, China transformed, pp. 35–52; Rosenthal and Wong, Before and beyond divergence.
40 Frank, ReOrient, p. 31. Frank's positioning of himself in this context is worth quoting: ‘Several other authors (Ad Knotter, Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly) draw on recent works about “industrialization before industrialization” in the Netherlands, Flanders, and elsewhere in Europe. It is enough to make only these comparisons to show that “van Zanden's terms do not enable analysis of the process: the articulation of merchant capitalism and precapitalist modes of production was not at issue, and the proto-industrialism was not the most dynamic element in the transition to industrial trial capitalism” (Lis and Soly 1997: 237). All the more so would these “modes of production” cease to be the issue if, instead of limiting their purview only to parts of the marginal peninsular Europe, the examination is extended to the rest of the world—let alone analysing them as part and parcel of the whole global economy, as this book does.’
41 The chronology of Hayami's early work on ‘industrious revolution’ (kinben kakumei) has been carefully laid out by Osamu, Saito, ‘Kinben kakumei-ron no jisshō-teki saikentō’, Keio Journal of Economics (Sanda gakujutsu jānaru), vol. 97:1 (Apr. 2004), pp. 151–161Google Scholar. See translations and elaboration in Akira, Hayami, Japan's industrious revolution: economic and social transformations in the early modern period, Springer, Tokyo, 2015Google Scholar.
42 This idea is easily linked to Huang's ‘involution’: see Huang, Philip C. C., The peasant economy and social change in North China, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1985Google Scholar. This is related to and is as hotly contested as the material parity problem. See also Huang, P. C. C., ‘Development or involution in eighteenth-century Britain and China? A review of Kenneth Pomeranz's The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61:2 (2002), pp. 501–528CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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57 I see this as consonant with a major theme of Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, in which he predicted that the fundaments of industrialization—not mechanization—predicted the economic and power relationships of the twenty-first century.
58 In most instances the ‘Anthropocene’ examines the real and conceptual inversion of the relationship of the earth and humanity in natural history: the earth was once a constant and humanity the variable, and now humanity is the constant and the earth, the variable. See, among many recent sources, Steffen, Will, Grinevald, Jacques, Crutzen, Paul and McNeill, John, ‘The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 369:1938 (Mar. 2011), pp. 369, 842–867CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
59 My references here are to Smith, A. and Cannon, E. (eds), An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976 (hereafter, WN)Google Scholar.
60 As Pomeranz, The great divergence, p. 24, notes, ‘… it is striking that where significant differences are discernible, they are consistently related to deviations from simple Smithian market dynamics—especially to state-licensed monopolies and privileges, and to the fruits of armed trade and colonisation’, which seems to be Smith's point.
61 Smith's work as a whole fits well with Lieberman's comment on two broad patterns of economic growth across Eurasia: growth by accretion of markets and resources, and growth (‘Smithian growth’) through long-distance trade. Lieberman, Strange parallels. Vol. 2, pp. 7–9.
62 One of the earliest and most searching criticisms of Pomeranz came from the leading Marxian historian of Europe, Robert Brenner. See Brenner, R. and Isett, Christopher, ‘England's divergence from China's Yangzi delta: property relations, microeconomics, and patterns of development’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61:2 (2002), pp. 609–662CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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65 This is not Smith's express ratio but is extrapolated from WN by Barry R. Weingast, ‘Persistent inefficiency: Adam Smith's theory of slavery and its abolition in Western Europe’, SSRN, 8 December 2016, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2635917, [accessed 8 October 2019] or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2635917, [accessed 7 October 2019].
66 WN, p. 264.
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68 WN, p. 53.
69 WN, pp. 39–40. For further comment on the implications of Smith's single remark and Malthus's large and sweeping theories of population growth, see Rosenthal and Wong, Before and beyond divergence, pp. 529–531. See also Li, Fighting famine, pp. 74–76.
70 Wong, China transformed, p. 22.
71 WN, Book 1, Chapter 5: ‘On the real and nominal Price of Commodities, of their Price in Labour, and their Price in Money’.
72 This, according to Deng and O'Brien, ‘Nutritional standards’, pp. 233–267, is what happened.
73 Allen, R. C., Bassino, J. P., Ma, D., Moll-Murata, C. and van Luiten Zanden, J., ‘Wages, prices, and living standards in China, 1738–1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan, and India’, The Economic History Review, vol. 64:1 (2011), pp. 8–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Deng and O'Brien, ‘Nutritional standards’. Twenty years ago historians such as Pomeranz and Wong reached the same general conclusion as Smith—that real living standards in China and in England were comparable—but for their own reasons. They disputed Smith's claim that England's real wages were higher than China's. For their part, Allen et al. correct Smith also, but their grounds are that while he was correct on wages, an average Chinese labourer, in fact, had a lower standard of living than an Englishman because of the tension between comparatively low wages compared to England but a cost of living that was roughly similar—differences that were already established in the seventeenth century, well after the old ‘1500’ mark proposed by Huntington as the ‘great divergence’, but well before the ‘1800’ mark proposed by Pomeranz for roughly the same phenomenon.
74 WN, p. 106.
75 Ibid., p. 114.
76 Ibid., pp. 40–41. Kitson explored somewhat the origins of the idea that Smith had described China as limited and declining, and found it emerging in the aftermath of the Macartney mission of 1793. Smith and Macartney were both members of Samuel Johnson's Literary Club in London, but neither one was the source of British readings of Smith as providing evidence of China's poverty or political weakness. Kitson, Forging romantic China, pp. 128–129.
77 WN, p. 106.
78 Ibid., pp. 39, 45.
79 Ibid., pp. 369–370.
80 Smith's dissertation on credit is worth an article in itself, especially since it touches on a true difference between the mechanizing and militarizing economies of the early modern period, on the one hand, and those discouraging private debt and avoiding public debt, on the other. Ibid., pp. 253–254, 408. See also Mathee, R., ‘The Safavid economy as part of the world economy’, in Floor, W. and Herzig, E. (eds), Iran and the world in the Safavid age, I. B. Tauris, London, 2012Google Scholar, especially pp. 40–42; Kilinçoğlu, D. T., Economics and capitalism in the Ottoman empire, Routledge, London, 2015, esp. pp. 65–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 WN, pp. 369–370.
82 Ibid., pp. 105–106.
83 G. Daudin, K. H. O'Rourke and L. Prados de la Escosura, ‘Trade and empire, 1700–1870’, Centre de recherche en économie de Sciences PO (Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris), Document de travail (no. 2008-24) (July 2008) is largely identical to O'Rourke, K. H., Prados de la Escosura, L. and Daudin, G., ‘Trade and empire’, in Broadberry, S. and O'Rourke, K. (eds), The Cambridge economic history of modern Europe, Vol 1: 1700–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 96–121, see p. 17Google Scholar.
84 Daudin et al., ‘Trade and empire, 1700–1870’, p. 25.
85 Smith considered the volume of non-British European sea imports to Europe as negligible in comparison to the volume handled by the BEIC. WN, pp. 113–114. This appears to have been a bit of an overstatement, but certainly in Britain volume was growing steeply in his own time while in the Netherlands and France it receded, and the United States, was miniscule.
86 Solar, P. M., ‘Opening to the East: shipping between Europe and Asia, 1770–1830’, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 73:3 (2013), pp. 625–661, p. 653CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
87 Smith seems to have struggled to explain why a country taking in so much silver would nevertheless value it so highly—his explanations ranged from a liking for silver decoration on clothes, furnishings, and people, to unusual losses of silver cargoes in river transport, to ‘the almost universal custom of concealing treasures in the bowels of the earth, of which the knowledge frequently dies with the person who makes the concealment, must occasion the loss of a still greater quantity’. WN, pp. 114–115.
88 WN, p. 22.
89 Following on in time from comparativism has come an increase in closely interlocking studies of maritime history. The importance of the sea was probably foreseen earliest and most clearly by Wills, John E. Jr, ‘Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: the interactive emergence of European domination’, The American Historical Review, vol. 98:1 (Feb. 1993), pp. 83–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Commenting on a wave of new studies of the maritime joint-stock companies, Wills remarkably pinpointed the clear conceptual links among shipping, long-distance trade, and the normality of large Asian economies, almost replicating Smith's logic: ‘In the works here discussed is an even more interesting paradigm shift, in which Asian patterns of production, trade, and governance are seen to have fundamentally shaped the long process of emergence of the Asian maritime facets of the modern world-system’, ibid., p. 84.
90 WN, p. 53. Smith was wrong in assuming that there was no interest in China in shipping. Von Glahn relates a case study of a Chinese ship-owning family. Such family firms gradually dissolved through division among heirs and reliance on equity rather than credit (bringing in more partners, further dissolving the firms; resolving debts through liquidation). See von Glahn, The economic history of China, pp. 341–342.
91 Solar, ‘Opening to the East’.
92 Smith seems to have assumed that interest rates in China were higher than they were; he thought the legal limit was actually the real rate in use: WN, p. 53. But he was right that they were distinctly higher than in Europe; see von Glahn, The economic history of China, p. 462.
93 Frank, ReOrient, p. 101.
94 ‘The wealth of ancient Egypt, that of China and Indostan, sufficiently demonstrate that a nation may attain a very high degree of opulence, though the greater part of its exportation trade be carried on by foreigners. The progress of our North American and West Indian colonies, would have been much less rapid, had no capital but what belonged to themselves been employed in exporting their surplus produce’: WN, p. 207.
95 ‘More than three decades ago, Marshal Hodgson … opined that “all attempts to invoke pre-modern seminal traits in the occident to account for the divergence in living standards can be shown to fail under close historical analysis”.’ Two generations of post-war research on India, China, and Southeast Asia (synthesized in the recent writings by Fernand Braudel, Kirti Chaudhuri, Gunder Frank, Jack Goldstone, Jack Goody, John Hobson, Ken Pomeranz, John Reid, Kaoru Sugihara, David Washbrook, Bin Wong, and Harriet Zürndorfer et al.) concur. Braudel inferred that ‘the populated regions of the world faced with demands of numbers seem to us to be quite close to each other’. O'Brien's passage occurs very nearly the same in O'Brien, P., ‘Metanarratives in global history of material progress’, The International History Review, vol. 23:2 (2001), pp. 345–367CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
96 As Pomeranz, The great divergence, p. 207, concludes, ‘rather than looking at other advanced economies in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as cases of “Europe (Britain) manqué”, it probably makes more sense to look at Western Europe (Britain) in this period as a none-too-unusual economy’. See also note 67 of this article.
97 Arrighi took paradigmatic ideas of capital and labour more seriously than I am suggesting here, but he also considered Marx and Smith as more compatible that I do, seeing Smith as conceptualizing a European ‘high-level equilibrium trap’ from which Europe escaped by industrialization. See Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, particularly pp. 13–39.