On 12 May, Gunder Frank wrote:(posted 8757 days ago)>many congratulations and best wishes to Brad for beginning to see the >light, which alas is not very compatible with Brad's 'defense' of David >Landes' book and his own theses in the ensuing debate -- which i have just >continued with my posting on the Landes book, in which I apologize for not >adding that Ken is the best guy and thing on that [non-Landes] wavelength. >But Dear Brad, Ken does not limit himself to 'comparisons'. He also makes >connections. I hope yuu will too.
Most of what I might have written has already been written--very well--by Alan Taylor.
I do, however, find it interesting to look back and reflect upon my own thoughts on western Europe compared to Chinese patterns of development...
I suppose that my first image--acquired while taking Social Studies 10, which because of its concentration on *theory* leaves one with a somewhat shaky empirical foundation corresponding to the state of historical knowledge about 1870--was that of Max Weber: that the key to understanding why and when the industrial revolution took place was to grasp the peculiar means-ends instrumental rationality of Protestant northern Europe, that this peculiar cultural complex was closely tied up with religions and values, and that as a result Confucian, Hindu, and Buddhist Asia had no chance at all of successfully industrializing for centuries. This--Weberian--point of view has been decisively proven wrong by East Asian industrialization since 1950.
I think that my second image--acquired after reading a little too much of Hannah Arendt and Karl Wittfogel--was that of South and East Asia as dominated by water-monopoly empires that are fundamentally hostile to change (which may disrupt the power of landlord and priestly elites) and that in their control over agrarian infrastructure have the power to make their hostility to change effective. You can see this position too as essentially Weberian-- although the key here is the independence of the European city rather than the Protestant Ethic. And I still find myself believing (say, two days a week) that there was something very special about the Medieval Commune and what it developed into, and that this did play a major role in bringing us to where we are today.
My third image was that constructed by Ernst Gellner and John A. Hall--I think of _Plough, Sword, and Book_, of _Powers and Liberties_, and of _Liberalism_. Their image of pre-industrial societies--of Agraria--is of societies in which warrior-princes, priests, and landlords all conspire to keep the peasants ignorant, barefoot, pregnant, and over taxed; to keep the urban merchants in constant fear of losing their fortunes, their businesses, and their lives; and in which technological advance is quickly abandoned either because the inventors have become rich and no longer wish to be corrupted by contact with production and toil, or because cheap and unfree labor forces leave those with power with no incentive to maintain and operate technology. In their view, the natural state of post-Neolithic Revolution humanity is somewhere between Merovingian Gaul and the Moghul Gangetic Plain, and that only a true miracle allowed our escape from Agraria's trap. I find myself believing their story, but also believing that they have vastly overstated the power of warrior, priest, and landlord elites to control historical developments.
My fourth image was one I drew from Joel Mokyr's _Lever of Riches_: it is of Chinese and Indian civilizations that are progressive, dynamic, technologically and demographically expansionary up until about 1400 or so. But then circumstances--foreign conquest, Ming ideology, whatever--create a profound hostility to further change, transform the ruling class into a purely parasitic ruling class, and set both India and China on the track toward the semi-Malthusian subsistence-level near-catastrophe that they reached in the nineteenth century.
Now Ken Pomeranz's work (and not his alone) is transforming my image of South and East Asian civilizations once again--but I do not yet have a clear picture of just what it was that blocked what is now Greater Shanghai (or Greater Canton, or Greater Tokyo, or Greater Mumbai, or Greater Calcutta) from becoming the locus of an advanced commercial economy on the brink of an industrial revolution in the sense of Greater London, Greater Paris, and Greater Amsterdam.
Jim Blaut has an answer (which is, I think, the same as Eric Jones's answer in the _European Miracle: although Blaut talks in terms of pillage, murder, and extortion and Jones in terms of "ghost acreage" they are referring to the same phenomena). But I look at the size of the Dutch herring fleet compared to the VOC, and at the profits of the English wool industry compared to the fortunes of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, and I find myself still thinking that long- distance trade is too small to bear the burden and that more is to be learned from trying to think hard about