Comparativism and local reification

For more than half a century, dissatisfaction with the historical benchmarks derived from European history has led to several critical movements to displace European normality as it was once proposed by European philosophers from the Scottish stadialists (conjecturalists) to Marx and Engels. Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, Jack Goldstone, Giovanni Arrighi, R. Bin Wong, Kenneth Pomeranz, Hurichan Islamoglu, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Kaoru Sugihara are among the historians, sociologists, and political scientists best known for undermining the European paradigm.Footnote ¹ The result has been a flourishing of comparative history, usually posing Europe in some period against somewhere else in Asia.

Use of European history as an anchor for comparisons—even if for the purpose of undermining assumptions of normality in the European developmental paradigm—unavoidably reinforces the centrality and indispensability of a hypostatized ‘Europe’. Because the explosion of European economic and military power in the nineteenth century is an unavoidable problem in any global narrative, and because of the long history in social science of proposing deeply deterministic explanations, the use of an ostensible Europe to leverage any comparison is difficult to avoid. To the extent that comparative history is designed as a test of hypotheses of causation, the continual use of European comparisons may remain of value to students who have not assimilated the concept of non-inevitability.Footnote ² Moreover, European economic and social life in the early modern period makes it difficult to relinquish as a continuing comparative yardstick, for the very good reason that raw and comprehensive documentation of economic and material life in Europe from the early modern period to the middle of the twentieth century is unparalleled.Footnote ³ This may induce many historians to accord significance (that is, importance or indispensability to understanding patterns of change on any significant scale) to events and developments in direct relation to the amount of documentation related to them. The logic recalls the joke of looking under the street lights for your car keys because that is where the light is, despite the fact that you last had them in the darkened parking lot.

This deep documentary mine partly explains why comparativism privileges reconstructing historical development with reference to Europe. But the degree of documentation and the degree of significance may not be identical. As most of human experience is completely undocumented and otherwise unevidenced, it is likely that even the most significant developments in history will be perpetually lacking in explicit information, leaving every historiographical effort in a tentative, inconclusive state. This suggests that while the relative practicality of comparisons and of hierarchies of causation may be determined by the amount of documentation relating to them, their relative importance cannot be. This does not mean that historical speculation may run rampant in the absence of evidence. It means, as will be discussed below, that logically rigorous reconstructions by contextual inference might be given the same respectability as inferences drawn from surviving documentation. The reader will note that this may still rely upon a kind of comparativism, but it may be comparativism to which European data or the European paradigm are not indispensable.

Recent critiques of comparative history as a concept and as a method have characterized it as resistant to moving objects.Footnote ⁴ This is not limited to a style of comparativism that depends upon an immobile historical paradigm, particularly Marx's transition from feudalism to capitalism.Footnote ⁵ It may also well characterize the elements of spot comparisons that exist outside a paradigmatic (or predictive) framework. National boundaries tend to become fixed rather than fluctuating; national entities tend to become reified; social structures and political institutions become static; England and the Low Countries become ‘Europe’; the YangtzeFootnote ⁶ delta becomes ‘China’ or even ‘Asia’. None of these is the intention of historical comparativists; instead each is unavoidably emergent from comparative methods and concepts.Footnote ⁷ In partial remedy, Sanjay Subrahmanyam extended some of Braudel's ideas to ‘connected’ history, in which change over time is restored by examining the sustained economic, cultural, or environmental interactions of contiguous or otherwise horizontally intertwined societies.Footnote ⁸

Most relevant to the present discussion, the fixed-point schemas of comparativism promote the facility of plug-in explanations for disparities. This may be a legacy of historical dialecticism's semantics of crises and resolutions: Immanuel Wallerstein suggested the ‘European world system’ as a resolution of Europe's resource crises,Footnote ⁹ anticipating Pomeranz's suggestions of fortuitous acquisitions of land or resources in distant locales. Under such conceptualizations, the tendency to pose problematics—Europe's late medieval market cycles, China's ‘high level equilibrium trap’,Footnote ¹⁰ as examples—requires answers in the form of resources (including labour or capital) or lack of them. The influence of continental or global integrating mechanisms may be obscured. A and B tend to be compared in relation to discrete input from resource Z, whether human, natural, or financial. But seeing B as the explanation for A, or the inverse, is more or less disallowed.

None of this has gone unremarked by the leading practitioners of Europe: X comparativism. R. Bin Wong, in the introduction to his China transformed, commented, ‘The radical alternative to reliance on Western categories is to ignore them entirely… But reliance on native categories limits us to imagining possibilities within that specific linguistic frame of reference.’Footnote ¹¹ Wong's caution against substituting one solipsism for another is powerful. Moreover, the implication that China may supply a more representative basis for discussion of historical development, particularly in the early modern period, is present in virtually all the comparativist work on London/Yangtze material parity. Wong's Europe transformed, after all, was a reference to Europe's departure from more common patterns of change, and Pomeranz's Great divergence referred not only to a widening disparity between London and the Yangtze delta but also the divergence of European patterns from Asian patterns.Footnote ¹² However, the implication has not been followed up with a framework for a new discussion, nor has it been underscored that we already were as far as that in the eighteenth century. As will be discussed below, comparative findings can be generalized as actual comparative paradigms, positing ‘paths’ beyond the European path to industrialization or modernization. Demonstrating non-European ‘paths’, however, continually reifies a fixed Europe as essential to establishing any teleology at all of early modernity.

Historical comparativism is essential to historical study generally and will not disappear. Nevertheless, some additional modalities may be needed for teaching and research. Victor Lieberman's treatment of Eurasia combines some comparativist taxonomies (‘parallels’) with an integrating geographical gradation model of culture and economy, proposing that particular forms of insularity produced belated political and economic cohesion in Europe and in Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹³ Such treatments can tend to marginalize China, which will be the literal effect of any Eurasian-scale study. That still leaves the issue of China as exemplary of—if not always central to the development of—economically complex societies of EurasiaFootnote ¹⁴ and far more representative of early modern urbanization and industrialization than places such the Arabian Peninsula or the Himalayas or England. This article explores some simple conceptual issues that arise if we move away from a Europe-comparison discourse to one based on aggregated Eurasia, with China its easiest example.

Species of Eurasian cities

Fifty years ago, China's demographic history was taught to students as the most unique and determinative of China's historical attributes—population booms in the eighteenth century and afterwards were supposed to be the explanation for the hardships of early twentieth-century China. The legacies of Malthus and Ricardo were clear in such explanations.Footnote ¹⁵ But they also fit very well the classic historical narrative suffusing the work of John King Fairbank and, through him, disseminated to American historians of China: the story of a comprehensively precocious medieval China, including huge population growth and urbanization, followed by ruin in the modern period as previous successes created complacency, or advantages were exhausted, or, as in the case of population, became incompatible with changing conditions.Footnote ¹⁶

China's demographic history is not commonly pathologized in that way today and, thanks to the passage of time, China's struggles between 1850 and 1950 are seen not as the culmination of a historical arc but as a modulation of longer and more deeply rooted patterns in Chinese and global history—but there is more to be said. We are used to being told that China is the biggest of everything—most populous, biggest economy, biggest dam, biggest urban complexes, and so on, but being the biggest might also mean being the most normal. China and things Chinese are the ‘biggest’—when they are—in relation to external things, like Belgium. Within Chinese society and economy, however, the relationships of forces and factors to each other are not necessarily affected in any major way by scale. China's history is probably the most representative of agricultural societies in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere.

The reasons for China's exemplary value seem self-evident. China's two earliest agricultural centres are still productive, still populated, and still within the boundaries of a modern state of unified statistical representation. This cannot be said for South AsiaFootnote ¹⁷ (much of which is not in the temperate zone), where the earliest agricultural centre was divided between present-day India and Pakistan, and modern density is distributed across northern India and Bangladesh. Overall, ‘China’ as a statistical entity encompasses sufficient space, variety of terrain and resources, scale of population, and continual engagement with the other cultures of Eurasia to allow it to represent some fundamental features of Eurasian development.

Consistent with this, the constructed curve of population change in China nearly reproduces the constructed curve of global population change, and the population of historically defined China was 20 to 30 per cent of the global total until the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸ The contours of this representation include a relatively stable population with minimal incremental growth (at about 50 to 100 million for China and about 250 million for the world) from the beginning of the agricultural period to about the eleventh century. This was succeeded by a period of steady growth until about the fourteenth century, when expansion stalled in both perspectives—normally explained in China by the traumas of the Mongol conquest and occupation of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, and in Europe by the ravages of the Black Death and related ills (both medical and social). Populations had recovered virtually everywhere and were on the rise again by 1500, when China's population was certainly higher than 100 million and the global population was possibly approaching 450 million. The great ‘explosion’ of China's population in the eighteenth century from about 150 million or a little less in 1700 to something over 350 million in 1800 was comparable to (even if a bit higher than) a rise in the global population from about 600 million in 1700 to the first surpassing of the billion mark in around 1800. The factors behind China's growth are recognizable as the distinguishing developments of the early modern period globally: improved agricultural efficiency, expansion of arable land, more reliable travel and communications, better hygiene and nutrition, and relative peace in the eighteenth century compared to the violence of the seventeenth century before it and the nineteenth century after it.Footnote ¹⁹

This is not to say that China's population trajectory was a duplicate of the curve of known global population growth. For instance, China had a dip in its population that contrasts to the pattern of Eurasia generally in the seventeenth century—a violent period in many parts of the world, but extraordinarily violent in China. Late Ming rebellionsFootnote ²⁰ were followed by 40 years of invasion by the Qing empire which eventually sealed its control of China after the conclusion of the ‘Three Feudatories War’ in 1683. This certainly resulted in tens of millions of deaths through war and the usual exponential impact upon deaths from hardship and disease (including at least one large-scale smallpox epidemic), as well as the ultimate effects upon population totals of suppressed birth rates. In the big picture this is a distinct and explicable deviation, the sort of exception that proves the rule.

Equally important, because of its location in the temperate zone, China has enjoyed the benefits of lengthy growing seasons, adequate water, and fertile soil to sustain and expand agriculture—a contrast to, for instance, portions of the Middle East which experienced political and climatic changes roughly a thousand years ago that give it an unrepresentative demographic trajectory. China has also been in a position to enjoy continuous contact with Central Asia, and by that means has experienced a nearly unbroken exchange of technological knowledge with the rest of the continent.Footnote ²¹ China's history evinces an optimal balance between periods of smaller political units with dispersed and often competitive political centres, on the one hand, and periods of unification under large empires, on the other. In periods dominated by smaller states, competition, local innovation, and efficiency have tended to thrive, and in periods of unification, innovations of previous periods and new cultural influences could be more refined and disseminated. As a result, over the centuries China was both a recipient of technological knowledge—especially via Central Asia—and a contributor of improvements and original knowledge or devices. The result is a manifest history of a populous, optimally well-networked agricultural society of temperate Eurasia.Footnote ²²

Medieval China's largest cities of Chang'an and Kaifeng were not significantly larger than Constantinople or Cordova and were probably less populous than Baghdad.Footnote ²³ Such cities in China, their relationships to surrounding economic environments, and the degrees to which extrinsic forces such as states, aristocracies, religious institutions, or imperialist interference influenced their growth or contraction, also have the potential to establish discursive structures for Eurasian history generally. At least as important, the relationship of some forms of urbanization to population growth can be a powerful tool for inferring developments that have inadequate documentation. Reiko Hayashi used a variation of central place theory, which posits that without the distortions of geographical and climatic features or political administration, the distance of major population centres from each other would be directly related to their size in relation to each other. The task of the historian, geographer, or sociologist is to determine the distorting effects of terrain, climate, economy, political structure (usually considered a distinctive element in the history of China's major cities), or technology.Footnote ²⁴ She adapted it as a tool to reconstruct pre-colonial population histories for parts of Africa. Earlier, William Skinner used a similar approach in his studies of China.Footnote ²⁵ Hayashi proposed a simple index of the relationship of agricultural to non-agricultural services in communities within a given society by considering the populations of the ten largest, concentrated, non-agricultural settled spaces—no matter what size they were in absolute terms—in proportion to the population as a whole (with the advice that larger populations give more credible and smaller populations, less credible ratios).Footnote ²⁶

Skinner had earlier proposed a percentage for China's top ten urban centres of 2 per cent.Footnote ²⁷ What Hayashi found was that a 2 per cent figure is the most frequently encountered for large agricultural societies before 1900 all over Eurasia (including most of the European subcontinent) and for the populous parts of Africa before 1600.Footnote ²⁸ This suggests that a China-exemplified top-place model would, for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, put France, Spain, Italy (then the wealthiest European country), Korea, Nigeria, Ghana, and a long list of other countries on the 2 per cent profile. Whether or not 2 per cent will be found to be the most exemplary proportion, they all contrast to Europe's eighteenth-century mechanized fringe, which probably had a Skinner-Hayashi persisting top-place percentage of something like 20 per cent or higher by 1800, and to Japan, which probably had a ratio of at least 10 per cent.Footnote ²⁹

Top-place population proportion is what might be called an index phenomenon—it outlines the cumulative effect of a variety of social and economic elements, most of them not in themselves urban, but rural.Footnote ³⁰ There must be sufficient agricultural product to feed both the rural and urban populations, and production must be efficient enough to allow a proportionally declining agricultural labour force to supply it.Footnote ³¹ There must be a reliable material infrastructure to allow food and raw materials to be transported to urban localities, and there must be a developed market and currency system to ensure that products are consistently distributed. There must be a governing mechanism large enough and expert enough to regulate the trade without impeding it. These were all characteristic of the other societies that Hayashi found to be within her 2 per cent league, as well as other societies that can be hypothesized to be in it during the period between about 1500 and 1850 (as examples, most of South Asia; Iran; Uzbekistan; peninsular Southeast Asia; the agricultural territories of the Ottoman empire, including North Africa; northwest, northeast, and North Africa outside Ottoman control; and Brazil). They suggest not only important species of relationships between cities and surrounding countryside across Eurasia, but highlight an interesting non-Eurasian pattern in British North America, where huge sea ports were fed by the Atlantic trade while rural dwellers were dispersed along the coasts and river valleys, instead of arranged in market trellises around the major cities.Footnote ³²

Urbanization of the sort characterized in the Skinner-Hayashi model is not at root a direct function of total population growth; instead, it posits a steady-state 2 per cent top-place relationship before the nineteenth century (and, in many instances, through it), despite continued and often rapid population growth (which could include distinct elevations of the conventional urban population generally without violating the predictability of the top-place 2 per cent model). Moreover, Skinner had suggested a mechanism of intermediate market development that would continually feather out both population placement and market networks, which (in my interpretation) would preserve the top ten places ratio even while rising degrees of urbanization were affecting the population as a whole. Very large economies would inevitably be marked by multiple economic spheres, each built around a top-place hierarchy. In this way, Skinner's contrast of China and Japan in the early modern period provided a model of progressive urban-rural integration in large, ecologically complex, populous agricultural societies of continental temperate Eurasia that also resonated strongly with Gilbert Rozman's emphasis on the transformative power of urban networks. Indeed, Rozman used the term ‘narrow-based pyramid’ to characterize the smaller number of very large cities (as in the case of Japan) and the ‘wide-based’ paradigm of the more numerous but smaller population of urban centres, as in China.Footnote ³³ The ‘wide-based pyramid’ was the more common pattern across Eurasia in early times, and persisted in the early modern period in the largest, most agricultural economies. Skinner himself clearly thought that France (meaning, one presumes, the regional system within early modern Europe that best corresponded to what we would now call France) was an obvious parallel.Footnote ³⁴

Although Skinner's approach yields comparative possibilities, the idea of urban species across Eurasia does allow an integrative approach. Peter Burke drew a useful distinction between the pre-modern cities of Europe and East Asia—which sat on a continuum with their littorals and surrounding agricultural matrices—and the very intentional and sometimes discontinuous colonial cities of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.Footnote ³⁵ From these discussions, two loose models of a Eurasian ‘city’ emerge. One is produced primarily by a confluence of rurally rooted transfer mechanisms, secondarily shaped by state, religious, or aristocratic interventions, and a second that is primarily intentional and fed both by domestic transfer mechanisms and by external trade connections. Extending Burke's discussion, the first (roughly cognate to Skinner's centrally cumulative market lattices and Rozman's ‘wide-based pyramid’) was the most common across historical Eurasia. Chang'an conformed to the model as well as Rome (and both were about the same size in the first century ce), and Hangzhou and Kaifeng fitted as well as Damascus, Constantinople, and Cordova (and all were about the same size as of about 1000 ce). The second species better described ancient Alexandria, medieval Baghdad, and some cities of early modern Japan as well as coastal trade cities throughout Eurasia that were enlarged after 1500 by global sea connections. It becomes especially useful when considering the urbanization variations of the eighteenth century, when the voluminous Atlantic trade extrinsically fed the leading port cities of London, Liverpool, Bristol, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Boston, Newport, and Charleston; the less voluminous but still powerful Indian Ocean trade nurtured Cape Town, Madras, Calcutta, and Colombo, while the volume of long-distance sea transport only faintly brushed Singapore (not yet a British colony), Macao, and Guangzhou.

Skinner's concept, as applied by Hayashi, allows a diachronic modelling of the partial transition from a historically convergent city type across Eurasia to an extrinsically sustained trade city—earliest apparent in cities connected to mining or religious complexes, later to the overland trade system—showing from the twelfth century on a rising, transformative tide of coastal ports that in the early modern period evinced a marked gradation from the Atlantic ports eastwards, with East Asia brought in last.Footnote ³⁶ Before the twentieth century there were probably no cities without hinterlands, and few communities anywhere completely untouched by long-distance trade. Nevertheless, the plotting of variations across Eurasia does predict something about later developments and commends Skinner's discussions in particular for reintegration by historians of Eurasia.

‘Industrialization’ in word and deed

In English-language historiography of the early modern period it is common to conflate mechanization and ‘industrialization’. Historians of Europe (following Franklin MendelsFootnote ³⁷) sometimes refer to a period of ‘proto-industrialization’, primarily the practices through which cottage industries linked to and adapted to market systems. Whether or not such practices presaged the accumulation and deployment of capital or the fluidity of labour necessary for ‘industrialization’ is murky, leaving the semantic as well as the progressive relationship between ‘proto-industrialization’ and ‘industrialization’ a perplexing one. Proto-industrialization as a possible preparatory period for industrialization has been a problem in European history primarily, and application of its criteria to economic developments outside Europe has been limited to Japan.Footnote ³⁸

As Wong pointed out, the similarities between European ‘proto-industrialization’ and a vast part of the Chinese rural economy hardly suggests that proto-industrialization is a meaningful determinant of ‘industrialization’ in the sense of massively mechanized production and transportation.Footnote ³⁹ The first part of Wong's observation should not be neglected: the behaviours and the resource use patterns of European ‘proto-industrialization’ were, in fact, common in China and in many other parts of Eurasia—among them Korea, Iran, parts of Russia, and above all South Asia. Manufacturing (by definition, handiwork), and particularly manufacturing for distant markets, on any scale accounted for a significant part of economic output. Wong implied that what is described as ‘proto-industrialization’ in Europe could just as easily be called ‘proto-industrialization’ in China, and that the only reason it was not was that China was not perceived to have proceeded to industrialization. From the Eurasian perspective, though, the question arises of why these phenomena in either context should be called ‘proto-industrialization’ and not ‘industrialization’. Andre Gunder Frank pointed to discussions of ‘industrialization before industrialization’ as a way of opening his path-breaking book on the role of Asia in early modern global commercial transformation.Footnote ⁴⁰

The conceptual problem of ‘proto-industrialization’ that is not followed by mechanized industrialization is the large matrix in which discussion of plural ‘paths’ to industrialization (and, by implication, modernity) has developed. During the 1970s Hayami AkiraFootnote ⁴¹ proposed that Japan's path to industrialization was not a deviation from the European model that needed explaining, but was merely another way of achieving increased productivity and wealth accumulation without expanding land area or input from draft animals or steam-powered mechanization. Hayami referred to an ‘industrious revolution’—a pattern of maximally intense exploitation of land and labour with a comparatively small capital investmentFootnote ⁴²—as being typical of Japan and parts of China. ‘Industrious revolution’ has remained a catchphrase which—although given a distinctive twist by Jan de Vries—connotes the recognition of labour intensification, particularly, as a foundation of wealth accumulation and, ultimately, massive mechanization. The arguments have been extended and brought into sometimes productive dialogue with the interpretations by Wong and Pomeranz, most recently, and (perhaps most meticulously) by Kaoru Sugihara.Footnote ⁴³

What may strike the non-economic historian about this discussion is the narrow focus on the relative productivity of land and labour with and without mechanization. As will be discussed below, the early modern period was distinguished by the magnification of wealth and productivity under the stimulus of long-distance trade, which had speeded up enormously in the age of long-distance sea transport. The historical domination of global gross domestic product (GDP) by South Asia and China had relied not only on the thickening of domestic market patterns but upon increasing production for faraway markets—in other terms, export. The necessity of understanding these developments in the context of large-scale organization and integration of transport, communications, money, credit, and labour would appear to require an assessment of how all these factors worked to create and concentrate wealth. ‘Industry’—that is, manufacturing on a significant scale—in South Asia and in China was distinctly oriented towards long-distance trade. As a consequence, large-scale labour discipline and resource command in the production of textiles, ceramics, precious metals, furniture, and so on were conducted on a scale that dwarfed the production of non-agricultural wealth elsewhere. The terminology used here is not trivial; it might be possible to avoid the false teleologies of ‘proto-industrialization’ and it allows us better to describe the confrontations across Eurasia between industrialization and mechanization. ‘Paths’, regardless how many there are, to massive mechanization and one form or another of capitalism implies that industrialization was not already in place. But the question may be: how has the global web of market asymmetries of the eighteenth century and earlier formed a matrix in which the patterns of mechanization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been guided towards the redistributions of wealth in the twenty-first century?

Industrialization in this sense would encompass not only small-scale manufacturing but also larger-scale manufacture of the sort seen in China and in India from the thirteenth century on. Output of manufactured goods historically relies upon large-scale discipline of human and natural resources, routinization of manufacture, standardized transportation systems, and development of receptive markets more than it relies on incidental mechanization by steam power (which is impossible without the foregoing phenomena). The cotton gin was being used in India by the sixth century and was in common use before 1000 ce, while vertical looms are attested from the late twelfth century.Footnote ⁴⁴ Variations of gins and looms were widespread throughout Eurasia by the thirteenth century. In China, the breadth of industries—among them, mining of both metals and natural gas, smelting, brick making, paper making, silk spinning, and weaving—were illustrated for the purposes of technical education in the Tiangong kaiwu, first printed in 1637.Footnote ⁴⁵ The book was a continuation of a genre of illustrated albums of manufacturing—particularly of porcelain—that not only served the purposes of technical education but, by the Qing period, was also used as a way of broadcasting China's powers as a manufacturer to both domestic elites and a world market.Footnote ⁴⁶ Traditionally in both India and China these manufactures were done by teams, each managing the entire process of manufacture, but some sort of assembly line strategies had been used in Chinese ceramics from early periods. By the early modern period they were fundamental to porcelain production.

These industries may not have evinced rapid technological advances since the fourteenth century, but the commercial context was changing very significantly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and producers were responding rationally. The Ming court, for instance, attempted to restrict the production and ban the export of blue-and-white ware between the mid-fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. The reasons for the suppression were various, including the destruction of the facilities in the war to establish the Ming in the mid-fourteenth century; attempts to maintain an imperial monopoly (including destruction of seconds); determination to stop feeding piracy; and imperial dislike of importing cobalt.Footnote ⁴⁷ During the century of the ban, China slipped from dominating the ceramics trade globally to exporting about half its previous volume of ceramics. However, the pull of demand revived the trade, first in private and unlicensed kilns using newly discovered local cobalt, and then in imperial kilns after the lifting of the ban in 1487, as the Ming court backed full (if regulated) participation in global commerce. By 1500 China was, for a time, the world's major exporting power.

The porcelain industry is important not only for its response to global profit opportunities in spite of imperial interference, but also for its visible development of the industrial organization of production. Assembly line techniques and mass production could surely have been invented independently in different localities, but it is impossible that English and Dutch merchants involved in the porcelain trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not know of the Chinese factories at locations like Jingdezhen and Dehua, particularly once it became common for European merchants to order custom-decorated items which required close communication between the merchants and the manufacturers (although not always at the manufacturing site). The factories themselves were certainly visited by Europeans in the early eighteenth century, when Fr. François X. d'Entrecolles (1664–1741) wrote in great detail about the manufacturing processes.Footnote ⁴⁸ Europeans, including Josiah Wedgwood, knew of the long-established mass-production practices at enormous industrial complexes like Jingdezhen and Dehua, even if they never visited them personally.Footnote ⁴⁹ Like the great porcelain centres, China's textile factories were practising the management of human resources on a large scale before the industrialists of Western Europe had learned the basics of shift work and the advantages of employing women in some industries.Footnote ⁵⁰ This is not to say that all assembly line industries in early modern China were unmechanized nor that large-scale industry significantly displaced cottage industry and putting-out.Footnote ⁵¹

From ancient times through to the eighteenth century, global manufacturing output had always been dominated by South Asia and China. South Asia had been the greatest producer of agricultural, natural, and manufactured products, particularly cotton. It could probably claim more than 25 per cent of global GDP for most of the years between 200 bce and 1750 ce, except for a period in the early sixteenth century when China returned to ceramics export and probably pulled ahead for a few decades. The outstanding global economic event of the eighteenth century was the increase in China's share of global GDP from, probably, over 20 per cent (compared to India's 25 per cent or a little more) in 1700 to 35 per cent of global GDP in 1820, compared to India's less than 20 per cent and falling. In the entire period between 1700 and 1820, the Western European component (including England, France, and the German territories) is likely never to have surpassed 15 per cent of global GDP, leaving their combined wealth at less than half of that of China. It was not until the late nineteenth century that Britain, France, and Germany were able to produce a high of 22 per cent of global GDP, though together they still ranked below the emerging power, the United States. Ultimately, by the middle twentieth century, China's output had fallen as low as 5 per cent of global GDP when the United States became the single greatest contributor in history. This did not imply a significant fall in China's absolute output, which remained strong throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵² In the 1860s alone, American trade with China rose by about 350 per cent, and from that Anson Burlingame made it a major argument for the favourable treaty of 1869.Footnote ⁵³

South Asia's loss of position to China as the leading industrial nation was the great economic event of the eighteenth century. The decline of Indian manufacturing is a contested point in Indian historiography.Footnote ⁵⁴ As the British East India Company (BEIC) was expanding its influence at the Indian courts in the eighteenth century, South Asia was already supplying itself with manufactured textiles, carpets, brass household items and astronomical instruments, wrought iron, cast iron, high-quality steel, leather goods, handguns, swords, and knives. Mechanization was rare but not unknown in the textile industries and metallurgy. Whether these industries were impinged upon by British imperialism or expired as a result of the lack of support for competition in international trade, what is significant is that India went from being a giant exporter of manufactured goods in the eighteenth century to an eclipsed competitor against other economies (largely but not exclusively massively mechanized, and often privileged by imperially imposed minimal import duties) by the mid-nineteenth century. The pattern was delayed by almost a century in China but followed a similar trajectory. This was a widespread pattern across Eurasia. It was, in short, the normal development for industrial economies with exposure to massively manufactured imports. Considering China as an exemplary industrializing society of the Eurasian middle ages and early modern period highlights the very particular role of mechanization in the transformation of Europe's western fringe. Interventions such as that by d'Entrecolles occurred at the point at which Europe began its deviation from the pattern of steadily enlarging industrial activity across the populous economies of Eurasia.

The fundamental pattern of these Eurasian industrializing economies was their ability to sustain domestic consumption. Workers were paid, and in some circumstances skilled workers were paid more, whether directly or indirectly. Large economic systems such as those of China and South Asia fostered steady development by depending in part on industrial workers being able to buy across the entire range of agricultural and industrial production. Machines do not buy anything, and massive mechanization forces a search for external markets, particularly after domestic consumption is exhausted. So much is basic economics, and is often narrated as a device for finding further markets for cheaply manufactured goods in the rise of imperialism. De Vries, addressing this problem, described a European ‘industrious revolution’ as partly ameliorating the domestic consumption problem, with early modern practices strengthening the household as a venue of manufacture while culture and society changed to promote more avid consumption of a greater variety of manufactured goods.Footnote ⁵⁵ But imperialism and consumerism are not logically required to be understood as the history of industrialization. They are, rather, the history of de-industrialization in response to the importation (willing or not) of mechanized goods and processes. Mechanization was not the essence of Eurasian industrialization, but its adversary. The market draft from the wealth of the great industrial societies of South and East Asia, in particular, controlled the patterns of early modern global commerce and its attendant industries.Footnote ⁵⁶

While markets of this size and depth are not transferable, technology is.Footnote ⁵⁷ What interests us here is the way in which the more generalized pattern of steady industrialization and commercialization across Eurasia before the intrusion of massive mechanization suggests how much of the modern world might be attributable not to European mechanization, financial transformation, or imperialism, but to the deeper factors that had produced industrialization across Eurasia long before the surfacing of European hegemonies in the early modern period. The assimilation of mechanization by historically industrialized economies has produced the most salient trends of the twenty-first century, generally bringing the markets of Asia to dominate development. From this perspective, the ‘Anthropocene’ of Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen, and McNeill appears not only as a plague of mechanized and accelerated ecological pathologies,Footnote ⁵⁸ but as a product of the nineteenth-century impingement of Western European mechanization upon industrializing Eurasia.

Adam Smith, China, and the long-distance differential

To any eighteenth-century observer with knowledge of global trade, it was clear that China's productivity and the resulting wealth was driving the development and increasing efficiency of other societies. Just as intensifying mechanization at the Western European fringe was creating a thirst for external markets, the material and financial infrastructure of the global sea-commerce system was making European trade with China more practical and more profitable. This was the world observed by Adam Smith in The wealth of nations in 1776 (and in subsequent editions until 1790),Footnote ⁵⁹ where he asserted—as do many historians todayFootnote ⁶⁰—that nothing very historically profound distinguished English from Chinese or Indian economic development apart from a few peculiarities in English urban security, the new phenomenon of mechanization, the encroachment of monopoly and imperialism (particularly as both were amalgamated in the BEIC) upon the flow of trade, and the unfortunate tax and trade policies of the Chinese state. His overall description of China, its productive potential, and its economic mechanisms were fundamental to his thesis that not merely external trade, but very long-distance trade with large (and what I would call deeply industrial) economies was the key to transformational profit.Footnote ⁶¹

Twentieth-century historians of Asia tended to read Smith backwards through the lens of Marx, underscoring Smith's remarks regarding Chinese stagnation and inefficiency. These assumptions about Asia in general, and China in particular, were apparently shared with Malthus and Ricardo. As the comparativists have forced a reconsideration of stadial and paradigmatic thinking, they surely also have undermined the efficacy of seeing Smith and his contemporaries through the often unconscious lens of historical dialecticism, racism, and imperialism. Retrograde teleology is not more conducive than anterograde to effective historiography. Perhaps no point demonstrates the distortion of the reading of Smith so much as the questions of poverty and maldistribution in China. Marx's paradigm (as normally employed) virtually forces a conclusion that China was impoverished by traditional economics and then by imperialism.Footnote ⁶² As Pomeranz, Wong, and other comparativists showed, this is a conclusion of Marx-inspired social science that was more theoretically than empirically derived. But in order to make this case, they sometimes swept up Smith in the retrospective on European paradigm-making.

Marx's views of Asian development tended to evolve along with journalistic coverage of BEIC affairs, including the last legal interventions by parliament in 1853.Footnote ⁶³ His earliest interests were focused on India and the impact of the BEIC (for, like Smith, his attention was steadily trained upon the Company) upon a traditional society. He hypothesized that in the ‘Asiatic’ case the transition from slave society was incomplete, the rudiments of private ownership had not generated a true concept of property, and individuals were not meaningfully distinguished from the community.Footnote ⁶⁴ Later, Marx defined a distinct ‘Asiatic mode of production’ in Das Kapital and Engels continued to develop it after Marx died in 1883. Marx and Engels considered the development of Europe—particularly the transition from feudalism to capitalism—as standard and the deviation from it in Egypt, India, and China as pathological; in other words, they created an illusory problématique of why the normal was not deviant.

Marx saw China's and India's non-development as a fact—an absence of history, meaning the absence of the contradictions of true feudalism and a failure to enter capitalist modernity. As completed by Engels, the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ was ‘Asiatic’ not because it was Asian in any essential way but because it was manifest in areas of Asia where centralized states had appeared disastrously early. The result was impeded societies in Asia attempting to survive in an increasingly capitalist world, which, in the views of Marx and Engels, would inevitably lead to imperialist exploitation and revolution that would push Asia back onto the road of historical transformation. It might be tempting for us to let Marx's normalization of Europe's developmental stages and his diagnosis of failed transformation in Asian societies distort our perception of Smith. However, Smith was closer in most ways to our twenty-first century view of a de-normalized Western ‘Europe’, and current prospects for constructing Eurasian narratives of economic transformation strongly recall Smith's testament.

This is not to say that Smith was a principled progressive. He opposed slavery, but on the grounds of its inefficiency; paid labour, he speculated, would raise overall economic gain by a factor of 12.Footnote ⁶⁵ He despised the BEIC and, by extension, imperialism, for the ‘rapacity’ of the ‘monopolizing spirit’ and its invariable generation of inefficiency and indifference to justice.Footnote ⁶⁶ In relation to China, Smith's overall attitudes were governed by his connections to the nascent ‘orientalist’ clique at the University of Edinburgh.Footnote ⁶⁷ He accepted the claims of early modern European writers that China's elites were free to pillage and intimidate commoners as they pleased, which he regarded as an obstacle to commerce.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Wealth of nations he credited and published anecdotal remarks that appear to have affirmed the bleakest European impressions. In the most horrific passage of this sort he writes:

Such remarks inspire an impression of Smith as being contemptuous of China and consigning it to a medieval past. Wong wrote, ‘Adam Smith stressed the limits on Chinese economic growth when he suggested that the country may have reached its height before Marco Polo's arrival’; he goes on to quote this passage from Wealth of nations: ‘Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times. It had perhaps, even long before his time, acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire.’Footnote ⁷⁰

Some context helps. In the first reference—to floating populations eating dog carcasses—Smith was talking about the ‘lower ranks’, classes he placed well below labourers and difficult or impossible to find counterparts for in England. Of the general labouring population he had something else to say, which was that they ingeniously and energetically expended their energies acquiring low wages and incidental income at a rate that enabled them to live at roughly the same level as labourers in London. Smith reasoned that the low price of goods for export scaled down to low prices in personal and family economies,Footnote ⁷¹ and he assumed that shortfalls in income were remedied by continuous searches for additional labour opportunities, allowing the Chinese to live comparably to Londoners.Footnote ⁷²

This question of how well Smith perceived the relationships between wages and standards of living in China and England has washed up as central not only to the comparativist debate but also to opinions on Smith as a commentator.Footnote ⁷³ Attempting to resolve who was right about wages and who was right about cost of living is not part of the present discussion. To be fair, Smith did not actually say that the lower limit for household expenses was as low as the floor for wages: He wrote, ‘The difference between the money price of labour in China and in Europe is still greater, than that between the money price of subsistence.’Footnote ⁷⁴ He was cautioning readers against imputing to Chinese labourers any radical differences in subsistence from that of British labourers, despite a disadvantageous price differential—and he had an important reason for doing so.

As Smith saw it, the volume of trade combined with the low cost of labour allowed China to remain the world's leading exporter and kept China, as a society, much richer than any society in Europe. (We know that in Smith's time it was probably wealthier than all the European economies combined.) For him, the first source of the wealth of China and India was the rice economy, which he thought supported large populations more efficiently than other grains, which in turn produced great revenue, much of it monopolized by aristocrats. Because he was focused on the shift of capital to export—the third stage of his ‘natural’ development paradigm—he may have been less interested in China's steeply rising output from copper, silver, and sulphur mines; lumber mills; brick-making; papermills; pre-fabricated construction; printing, and the many industries that marked China's domestic development and animated its internal markets. He noted that while China relied contentedly upon material techniques that were at least a couple of centuries old, its economy, like that of India, was robust enough to be the most productive in the world and potentially competitive with any other: ‘In manufacturing art and industry, China and Indostan, though inferior [to mechanization], seem not to be much inferior to any part of Europe.’Footnote ⁷⁵

Smith's description of China's immense wealth was inseparable from this insistence that China was not declining, but was in an economically steady state—for him, a critical point. He did not think that China had peaked in the days of Marco Polo; in fact, he said something distinctly different:

This distinction between standing still and going backwards may seem trivial, but not when put in perspective with Smith's pronouncements on China. First, Smith's taxonomy of economic states distinguished between ‘advancing, stationary, or declining condition’,Footnote ⁷⁷ and he consistently and repeatedly put China in the second category, not the third. ‘Rich’ countries were to be found only in the second and third categories. Those in the first category were ‘thriving’. For Smith, these were not comparative categories, it was about the rate of change. Among many factors governing the speed with which economies transformed (‘state of propagation’) was, he thought, compensation for labour. As a result of demographic and urban structures, this speeded up the wealth accumulation of British North America, produced a modest pace in Europe, and a steady state in China.Footnote ⁷⁸

Smith's explanations for why China was not one of these rapidly expanding economies were complex. In his view, China overvalued agriculture and undervalued skilled labour,Footnote ⁷⁹ and disdained credit.Footnote ⁸⁰ It preferred the BEIC monopoly to open trade and it showed no serious interest in export-carrying as an industry in itself. As a consequence, China lacked the velocity of the ‘unnatural’ explosive growth and expansion that characterized England. The reasons had nothing to do with culture, or population, or resource limits, but were due to the government's way of handling the economy: ‘Upon their present plan, they have little opportunity of improving themselves by the example of any other nation, except that of the Japanese.’Footnote ⁸¹ To Smith, though, China's stable labour compensation and economic policy habits as well as its long history of manufacture were the keys to its role in England's wealth.

Smith was keenly interested in the fact that the Chinese were content to allow Europeans to do the carrying for them. He realized that the profits to be made from sales for export in China were small in comparison to the profits made by the joint-stock companies who acted as middlemen (which always made it difficult for observers, from Smith to Marx, to figure out exactly where the BEIC came in calculations of volume and profitability of ‘exports’ and ‘trade’). It was not exporting in itself but exploitation of cost and profit differentials that Smith saw as the new source of wealth, and of the transformations—in credit, insurance, and eventually in privatization—that would make more wealth possible. This was the multiplier that he saw China as neglecting. Conversely, the benefits to the English economy of long-distance trade with China dwarfed the benefits of export to smaller but less industrialized economies. For instance, Smith looked dimly on the steady English export of grain to Scotland. The proximity made costs minimal, but there was no profit to be had in a poor country that had adequate (but ‘inferior’) grain of its own.Footnote ⁸² The key to making money, Smith argued, was not in producing products for export generally (since a mechanized society had to do that to survive), but in long-distance exchange, with China in particular.

Smith made a distinction between the massive mechanization that would later be seen as the essence of the ‘industrial revolution’ and the profitability of long-distance trade. Mechanization, which he explained largely by virtue of some distinct features of English urbanization, offered a better quality of life in the cities than that experienced in the countryside. The cost was a requirement to find some people to buy the goods once they had surpassed British purchasing capacity, which, in his view, was accomplished properly by free trade and improperly by imperialism. These consumers were found in foreign lands—for choice, lands that had produced significant pools of coastal, urban wealth and showed no signs of the mechanization that would erode their broad consumer base. Between 1780 and about 1800 England (not Britain) exported half of its industrially produced goods and was on its way to exporting a majority of textiles and carpets.Footnote ⁸³ Yet foreign markets were not as significant as foreign sources of products that were in high demand in Europe. In Smith's time, the largest imports of the BEIC from China were tea and silk (though he seems to have assumed that porcelain was equally important, which modern research does not confirm).Footnote ⁸⁴

What made the long-distance trade profitable, Smith underscored, was the differential in the trading value of silver, which he estimated to be twice as great in China as in Europe. This was of significance, he suggested, in elevating English foreign trade (still outweighing that of any other European nation by a factor of two or three).Footnote ⁸⁵ In this, he is confirmed by our present knowledge: the cost of goods in China or India was indeed running at about half the sales price in Europe.Footnote ⁸⁶ Smith thought that in China and in India 10 ounces of silver would buy an ounce of gold, while in Europe it would cost 14 or 15. This caused silver to be the most important British export to both countries. China, in particular, was a transformative field in which English silver took on twice its buying power. Traders were active all over the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, but only in China could profitability be consistently doubled by the silver field—a resource that would be available indefinitely because of China's steady-state economy. What made China the silver magnifying machine was its long history of industrialization and commercialization; its steady labour and compensation patterns; and its distance from Europe, which allowed it to sustain its own silver values for the long term:Footnote ⁸⁷

Smith's comment is not comparative; he attributes the buying power of British silver, and part of the enrichment of Britain, to the essential qualities of China's economy. The differential, which was a product of distance (that is, China's ability to maintain an independent valuation of silver) and of China's long, normal, slow progress through urbanization and industrialization, was the essence of the world's greatest industrial and financial enterprise of the day: shipping.Footnote ⁸⁹ With all its attendant financial and industrial requirements, shipping was another index phenomenon—it required coordination of timber, tar, and canvas supplies; rope, iron fittings, crates and barrels, bedding and cutlery; shipyards (not mechanized) manned by skilled labour forces with all living requirements provided one way or another; complex funding, including direct investment and ample credit, as well as insurance (something like 8 to 10 per cent of any voyage's costs); and access to or command of wharves. By the eighteenth century, European long-distance vessels had evolved in size and shape to have decks well above the water for the placement of cannon in the hull to defend against pirates or enemy vessels in times of war. This added to the complexity of ship construction, maintenance, and staffing, which now included gunners and engineers. Shipping had become the essential industry that facilitated the second-order transformation in the value of European capital in China. It was also, for Smith, the primary capital instrument of the century, one which no country could neglect if it intended to pursue rising wealth.Footnote ⁹⁰

Smith was in a position to understand the impact of the China silver differential and of shipping between China and Europe on British wealth. In the overall scheme of British shipping in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and throughout the South China Sea, the parts outside the Atlantic seem to have been growing at a little over 1 per cent per year, from the founding of the BEIC in 1600, compared to a 0.4 per cent annual increase in Europe's GDP in the same period. It is also likely that slipping BEIC monopoly power, variable ship size and increasing durability, reductions in crew size, and more rapid turnaround (for instance, BEIC voyages to China shortened from 211 days in 1770 to about 160 days by 1828), all contributed to an explosion in China-bound voyages after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. It is likely that British shipping costs to the Indian Ocean and China fell by 75 per cent between the 1780s and the 1820s, and insurance costs by about 6 per cent. The result was that the British share of shipping to Asia doubled from about 30 per cent to 60 per cent between 1783 and 1829 (though, Smith would not have been surprised to discover, the American percentage of the trade shot up from 1 to 14), while the Netherlands and France steadily lost share.Footnote ⁹¹

Smith was sure that China had no interest in developing such an economic appendage for itself. As an agriculturally profitable, industrialized (in the present sense), and wealthy society with a huge domestic market and products highly desired abroad, China could not be expected to find efficiencies in spending money to take its products to distant consumers. Moreover, the institutions of mercantile banks and private insurance that backed English shipping would have had no appeal in a country where the cost of money was high and debt of all kinds discouraged.Footnote ⁹² Historically, Chinese shipping had concentrated on the routes to Malacca and back; only in unusual circumstances did the private ships continue into the Indian Ocean.Footnote ⁹³ Though the ships were eminently seaworthy and large enough to deposit plentiful supplies of Ming porcelain or, later, Qing tea and silk, they had not been customized to allow them to defend themselves against eighteenth-century weaponry. As a consequence their range was diminished in direct proportion to the routes claimed by militarized BEIC and VOC (Dutch East India Company) carriers. All in all, Smith's reasoning and the historical circumstances provided no rational argument for China to attempt to control its own shipping.Footnote ⁹⁴ Its wealth would therefore remain in steady state, fuelling the accelerating accumulation of wealth in Britain.

The great detour

Marx predicted well the global economic conditions of the twentieth century. He was a prophet of the deviation that permitted Europe's mechanized fringe to disrupt the larger development patterns of Eurasia, with results that eventually distributed its enabling technologies—at a price—to virtually the entire world. Marx argued that objective historical forces were effecting long-term transformations that would eventually force the oldest and most populous societies of Asia and Africa into convergent transformation, cognate to the convergent transformations of France, Germany, and Scandinavia that had produced Europe's transition to capitalism. The consistency of Marx's predictions with conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inspired a century of social science either drawn from or conceived in opposition to the paradigm ascribed to him. As Patrick O'Brien pointed out,Footnote ⁹⁵ from Braudel on, historians have been sceptical of the historical dialectic of sharp material disparities between Europe and non-Europe (and Asia, in particular) in the early modern era. The historiography of Frank, Wong, and Pomeranz provided the comparativist model to dispute the logical entailments of prior wealth and later power, and possibly the empirical underpinnings, of the paradigmatic model. As global conditions in economy and trade began to dispel the effects of Europe's nineteenth- and early twentieth-century deviations, the comparativist discourse allowed historiography to also slip its grip, and possibly end a detour into such false problems as stadial deviance and the crediting of temporary conditions as cumulative. The normality of China and the exceptional qualities of England were part of Smith's discourse and are subliminal to the discourse of comparative history now. What is less common is to make the next logical step and name urbanization and industrialization as normal processes in Eurasia long before and during the early modern period. This is well implied in Wong and Pomeranz's work, and described by Smith at length, but still not developed as a discursive base.Footnote ⁹⁶

Smith, from his eighteenth-century perch, predicted well the conditions of the twenty-first century, which drew the attention of Giovanni Arrighi. Contingency was certainly part of Arrighi's understanding of global economic change. The United States has knocked itself off the centre stage by initiating and pursuing its twenty-first century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yielding benefits for China that correspond in some ways to Wallerstein and Pomeranz's vision of American land and silver opening the door to European wealth. But Arrighi noticed something else about Smith. Living in an age in which mechanization was only beginning to demonstrate its powers, and the world was still controlled by agriculture and trade, Smith was forced to turn his attention to the deep and long forces that had made China and India the world's most productive and wealthiest societies. Their structural blessings, Arrighi argued, in combination with their absorption of technologies both material and financial, would reveal markets as more dominant factors than technology in explaining twenty-first century development.Footnote ⁹⁷

Smith anticipated both the shape and the specifics of the comparativist debates regarding labour productivity and standards of living, and reminds us that twenty-first century scholarship may move on from there. In this respect it is helpful that Smith's identification of the interlocking factors of silver, credit, shipping, and the basic contours of industrialization in China as all key to English wealth anticipates a great deal of twenty-first century scholarship on global history. Those factors, which were critical for Smith and continue to promise new directions in global history, are less accessible through comparativist study and more likely to be part of an integrated process of mutual reference, in which A and B are not compared to each other but supply partial explanations for each other. Modern research on shipping and trade of the eighteenth century confirm some of Smith's interpretations but not others. What is important are the ways in which contemporary testaments of the eighteenth century recall and reinforce the normalizing vision of wealthy, stable China and India, as essential to the commercial modernity of Eurasia and of England in particular.