Scholarshave Asked, Why Is China Poor? Why Is Europe Rich? Indeed, Those Questions
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The Origins of Divergence: China, Europe, and the Future of Development Max Ajl* Scholarshave asked, why is China poor? Why is Europe rich? Indeed, those questions launched thousands of research projects looking into the lineages of Chinese destitu- tion and European opulence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.I For decades the standard scholarly explanation was the one Max Weber advanced: only in the West did ratio- nalization, understood as the clear and premeditated pursuit of delineated objectives on the basis of self-conscious calculation and selection procedures, combine with an ascetic value system to lead to sustained and self-sustaining growth.2 More recent work has undermined the empirical foundations of this claim. There is plenty of evidence of rational thought, defined in Weber's terms, in second millennium China. Furthermore, explaining tremendous processes of historical evolution of political economies through resort to "culture," essentially concluding that European industrialization was a product of European rationalism and its antecedents in the philosophy and knowledge of antiquity, hardly suffices to explain the available evidence. Furthermore, as Chinese industrialization proceeds apace, with a swelling middle class and a burgeoning emissions profile, those age-old assumptions about Chinese backwardness Student of development sociology at Cornell University. Thanks to Philip McMichael for discussion. See e.g. Perry Anderson, Lineages ofthe Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979) at 401ff. 2 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline ofInterpretativeSociology, ed by Guenther Roth & Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) vol 1 & 2 [Weber, Economy and Society]; Max Weber, The ProtestantEthic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930) [Weber, The ProtestantEthic]. Mark Elvin, "Why China Failed to Create an Endogenous Industrial Capitalism: A Critique of Max Weber's Explanation" (1984) 13 Theory and Society 379 at 379-82. 144 JSDLP - RDPDD AJL hold even less sway. In Before and Beyond Divergence, Rosenthal and Wong's examination of the trajectories and institutions prevalent at the far ends of the Eurasian land mass provides critical information for understanding the Chinese and European pasts, the present, and also their futures. Of course, as both empirical processes of development as well as knowledge about the Chinese past and present has accumulated, the assumptions that condition how research ques- tions get formulated have shifted. It has become increasingly clear that China used to not be so poor relative to Europe, while European affluence is a recent historical phenomenon, or at least, more recent than earlier Eurocentric accounts had posited. As demographic-statistical studies have shown with mounting force, the great divergence in living standards between the two ends of Eurasia may be of fairly recent provenance-perhaps, some argue, as late as 1850.6 But the precise moment when living standards started to diverge is a secondary issue. More significant is the ongoing process of revising the petrified orthodoxy created by past scholar- ship: China as a despotic Oriental state mired in backwardness, Europe as an industrial, mod- ernizing continent. As the picture has become clearer, it has become evident that the question of the social origins of industrialization is central to explaining modern Western wealth. It is to the debate about the provenance of European industrialization and China's relative lack of industry-the separate trajectories the two ends of Eurasian ended up taking-that Rosenthal and Wong contribute in Before andBeyond Divergence. Put differently, why was it that modern industrial growth was more likely to take place in the Occidental end of Eurasia? What was it about the specific socioeconomic configuration in Europe that made it the first region in the world to experience an industrial revolution? It is to that question that Wong and Rosenthal turn. They do not dispute the quotidian notion that the Euro-Atlantic world was the first place on the globe to experience modern economic growth-that is, to break through Malthusian limitations. What they do dispute are the the- ories that have been used to explain that fact, since revisionist scholarship has increasingly eroded some of the claims such theories were built upon, especially the foundational notion of European economic exceptionalism. Furthermore, as provocations like Andre Gunder Frank's ReOrient and Giovanni Arrighi's Adam Smith in Beijing have argued, the rise of the Euro-Atlantic world to economic preemi- nence may well prove to be an evanescent phenomenon, as the world's center of economic gravity returns to its traditional equilibrium somewhere between the Indian Ocean trading system traditionally traversed by commodity chains connecting the various coastal entrep6ts, and the vast landed trading system of China, the historical repository of the world's population, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal & R Bin Wong, Before andBeyond Divergence: The Politics ofEconomic Changein China andEurope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 5 See e.g. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Lif: The Limits of the Possible, vol 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) at 102, 362. 6 Kenneth Pomeranz, "Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture" (2002) 107 American Historical Review 425 at 428ff. 7 See e.g. Anderson, supra note 1; Weber, The ProtestantEthic, supra note 2; Weber, Economy and Society, supra note 2; Braudel, The Structures ofEveryday Lft, supra note 5. AJL Volume 8: Issue 1 145 and thus unshockingly most of its material wealth. Indeed, it is hardly heterodox anymore to point out that the European trading system was for a long time relatively peripheral to the world trading system in terms of net flows.' And as development slowly begins to catch up with the weight of demographic mass, there are strong possibilities for a partial decentering of the economies sitting on either side of the Atlantic. Of course, later scholarship has toned down initial and overreaching claims.10 China has always had a huge chunk of the world's population. In preindustrial economies, most wealth comes from the land. Since the productivity of land in noncapital intensive agriculture can only go so high, one would expect a very rough correlation between a countrys wealth and its population in a preindustrial era. Indeed, before industrialization it would have been unrea- sonable to expect sharp divergences in income or productivity in the most fecund and devel- oped regions of the world. And in any case, in many regions of China, towards the latter part of the second millennium income and productivity-per-worker in the agricultural sector were filly on par with those in Europe-in some places, perhaps exceeding them." However, many are understandably chary of explanations that go beyond demolishing Eurocentric tropes and substitute Sinocentric tropes in their place, or overemphasize the simi- larities between the two ends of Eurasia: Europe and China. As Peer Vries argues, "[t] he more 'Eurasian' resemblances and equivalents are brought into prominence, the more miraculous if not downright inexplicable becomes the enormous gap that emerged during the nineteenth century between Britain and China. How can situations that are surprisingly similar produce such huge differences?" 1 2 The search must be for some factor that made Europe and China dif- ferent from one another-the Industrial Revolution did not come from nowhere. Part of Wong and Rosenthal's method is intellectual demolition, the better to lay the ground of their own theory. Thus, they take aim not merely at what they consider myopically Eurocentric explanations like Douglas North's institutionalism, which moves briskly from the description of European institutions to the theoretical inference that such institutions were the only ones necessary for modern growth.1 They also take issue with Kenneth Pomeranz's seminal The Great Divergence, which focused on the propinquity for British development of coal seams located close to British industrial centers as well as a colonizing tendency which was able to overcome the equilibrium trap that would have been entailed by the land squeeze." Rosenthal and Wong do not discard such explanations, suggesting that they may well have 8 Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007). 9 Janet L Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 10 Peer Vries, "Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence" (2005) 12 Journal of World History 407. Peer Vries, "The California School and Beyond: How to Study the Great Divergence?" (2010) 8 History Compass 730. 12 Ibid at 736-37. 13 Rosenthal and Wong, supra note 4. 14 Kenneth Pomeranz, The GreatDivergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 146 JSDLP - RDPDD AJL facilitated modern European growth. Indeed, total net primary production necessarily imposes its own limits on growth. Resources matter, and being able to burn wood from elsewhere or use the stored energy of the past in the form of coal is a boon to development. For example, Rolf