"East Asia, Europe, and the Industrial Revolution" Kenneth Pomeranz Dept. of History University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3275
[email protected] Work in progress: comments welcomed, but please do not cite without permission This paper has emerged from one very familiar and one less familiar project. The familiar one, which provides the focus for the early part of the paper, involves thinking about how the literature on European economic history could be usefully brought to bear on the much less advanced field of Chinese economic history. This involves generating estimates for China of some things that are more or less known for Europe, such as levels of consumption, real earnings in different kinds of work, and so on. The results greatly undermine any notion -- which still lingers in various ways -- that late Imperial China had a subsistence economy, or that despite massive commercialization, there was no growth in pgi_aaaita output. Well also see that it significantly modifies another of the old war-horses of the China literature: "over-population," suggesting that that term can only be applied in a very restrictive, anachronistic sense -- and that, since in that sense, it could be applied to 18th century Western Europe, too, it will hardly do as an explanation for the longer-term course of Chinese economic development. In fact, my data on living standards, resource shortages, and so on suggest a rough comparability between the more advanced portions of 18th century China and the more advanced portions of 18th century Europe. And that brings up a second, more unusual, project: to think about how, if we describe China and Europe in comparable terms, the Chinese experience may cast light on Europe.