Look at the world in 1700, just prior to the IR: maybe China was economically and technologically advanced, but they didn’t control the world’s oceans, plantations, and mines.
But what need had they for oceans? China itself was full of plantations and mines; the only good they reliably imported from the rest of the world at that point in time was silver. Opium later became a foreign policy issue in part because the government wanted to protect users from addiction, and in part because it wasn’t grown in China and yet was demanded in China, so allowing the import of opium would break the advantageous balance of trade position that China was in.
The question is whether the IR would have happened in China if they, and not the Europeans, controlled the world’s oceans, plantations, and mines. (And by that I mean, imagine if in the 1700s the Americas were all Chinese colonies, if the Indian and Pacific and Atlantic oceans were controlled by Chinese fleets and port-forts, if kingdoms all along the coast of India and Arabia and Africa and Europe swore fealty to China instead of Europe… In this scenario, would the IR still have happened in Britain?)
Yeah, china was rich, but plenty of rich places failed to generate IRs. The unique thing about Europe prior to the IR may have been its WEIRDness… but it also may have been the fact that it controlled so much of the world at the time. Why would this help? Well, maybe having a glut of resources for a relatively fixed labor pool raised GDP per capita a bunch and incentivised labor-saving devices like windmills and watermills and eventually steam engines. Maybe all the oceanic trade made for a robust free-ish market and spurred the development of good financial instruments and institutions (in other words, maybe what makes capitalism work so well was particularly present due to all the oceanic trade).
I have something for this: Asia in general and China in particular was doomed by the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. The argument is essentially that China locked themselves into stagnation by disrupting trade over land.
Land-bound trade in Asia took place primarily over the Silk Road. This is something of a misnomer, as it isn’t a trade route between Rome and China but rather trade with and through Inner Asian economies. The success of the Silk Road is defined by these economies, and these economies in turn are defined by the nomads who populate the steppe and Central Asia.
However, agrarian empires are traditionally hostile to trade. The reason is that the volume of trade is higher the closer two trading partners are. This in turn means most of the gains from trade are realized by the recently-conquered frontier, and that trade is happening with their not-conquered-yet neighbors, which runs the perpetual risk of drawing the frontier away from the imperial core.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk fixed trade at a certain volume and to go through specific locations between the Russian and Chinese empires. This suited the interests of Peter the Great and the Kangxi Emperor, but severely constricted the flow of goods going through the interior in both directions.
This was the period that ocean going trade exceeded overland trade in volume. Along with the decline in total wealth generated, they also cut themselves off from the flow of information that comes with trade. I suggest this pitched the Qing Empire into stagnation, radically reducing the likelihood they would experience an industrial revolution internally.
Thanks, I hadn’t heard of that. First the burning & banning of ships, next the reduction of overland trade—that’s two massive unforced errors on the part of Chinese emperors, during the same couple of centuries that European power was waxing.
But wait, the wiki article doesn’t say this restricted trade, it seems to say it promoted trade? Do you have a source for your claim that it reduced trade?
It promoted trade between Russia and China but all of that came at the expense of trade through the rest of inner Asia. The treaty was negotiated shortly after the Qing defeated the Dzungars, and was the first time they could trade directly because they shared a fixed border.
Further, this trade was imperially backed, so the actual imperial families and their patronage networks were the prime beneficiaries. This is a very different situation to one where trade is unrestricted, because patronage from the court is the deciding factor rather than, say productivity. By analogy to the English case, why would a Qing textile mill care about producing more if the demand is satisfied locally and the amount they can send to Russia is fixed by imperial writ? Or more broadly, suppose England swore off trade with Europe and signed a large trade treaty with Russia instead; would that have helped or harmed the industrial revolution?
The strongest argument is located in the book Empires of the Silk Road by Christopher Beckwith. He goes further than the consensus position about the influence of trade on China, but the consensus has been updating rapidly for years and his picture agrees better with my understanding of economics. The position that Beckwith is arguing against is articulated by Thomas Barfield in The Perilous Frontier. The most detailed description of the period of history is Peter Perdue, China Marches West. The latter two are on my reading list, so I might wind back my estimation; consider it a strong opinion lightly held.
And by that I mean, imagine if in the 1700s the Americas were all Chinese colonies, if the Indian and Pacific and Atlantic oceans were controlled by Chinese fleets and port-forts, if kingdoms all along the coast of India and Arabia and Africa and Europe swore fealty to China instead of Europe...
I think we had a trial run of that, and it didn’t result in an IR for China. That is, the tributary system was a lot like “everyone aware of China swore fealty to China.”
In this scenario, would the IR still have happened in Britain?
I think this is less obvious, but that the answer is still “yes.” Like, Britain would still be developing an engineering culture; steam engines would still be useful for pumping water out of coal mines; the people that made textile mills didn’t themselves own cotton plantations, instead buying their inputs as commodities on the open market, and selling their outputs as commodities on the open market. Would there have been brain drain from Britain to China, so that the prime inventors are missing from Britain? Maybe, but it seems somewhat unlikely to me.
Like, when you look at industrialization efforts in other countries, it always involves the importation of cultural practices and technological knowhow, and only sometimes involves colonialism or acquisition of territory.
The “tribute” entailed a foreign court sending envoys and exotic products to the Chinese emperor. The emperor then gave the envoys gifts in return and permitted them to trade in China. Presenting tribute involved theatrical subordination but usually not political subordination. The political sacrifice of participating actors was simply “symbolic obeisance”.[8] Actors within the “tribute system” were virtually autonomous and carried out their own agendas despite sending tribute; as was the case with Japan, Korea, Ryukyu, and Vietnam.[9] Chinese influence on tributary states was almost always non-interventionist in nature and tributary states “normally could expect no military assistance from Chinese armies should they be invaded”. [...]
The gifts doled out by the Ming emperor and the trade permits granted were of greater value than the tribute itself, so tribute states sent as many tribute missions as they could. In 1372, the Hongwu Emperor restricted tribute missions from Joseon and six other countries to just one every three years. The Ryukyu Kingdom was not included in this list, and sent 57 tribute missions from 1372 to 1398, an average of two tribute missions per year. Since geographical density and proximity was not an issue, regions with multiple kings such as the Sultanate of Sulu benefited immensely from this exchange.[7] This also caused odd situations such as the Turpan Khanate simultaneously raiding Ming territory and offering tribute at the same time because they were eager to obtain the emperor’s gifts, which were given in the hope that it might stop the raiding.
OK, thanks—this is the sort of argument I was looking for, and it is updating me.
Do you think there’s a common cause between colonialism and the IR? Say, science + capitalism? Or maybe simply engineering culture (producing steam engines, but before that ships + navigation?)
Do you think there’s a common cause between colonialism and the IR? Say, science + capitalism? Or maybe simply engineering culture (producing steam engines, but before that ships + navigation?)
Possible but unclear. China had its own engineering culture, for example, as did the Muslim world, and both had proto-capitalism, in that they had large mercantile networks with significant wealth.
My models of this have shifted a lot over the last decade or so. One factor that’s seemed the most variable in importance over that time has been political centralization. It looks to me like the old world has spawned three or four major civilization groups, depending on how you count things; Europe, the Middle East, India, and China. Europe was the only one that ‘never really unified’; Rome only barely touched the bits of Europe that ended up leading the IR. When you have books like a Farewell to Alms, they point to Britain becoming a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ through downwards social mobility, and this being a sort of domesticating and improving force. But those forces were even stronger in China (according to Sinologists who have reviewed his book; he touches on the comparison only briefly).
Was it relevant that lots of different countries in Europe were trying different things, with different focuses, and a handful of them led to industrial growth, that then ended up seeming like “what all of Europe” was like? Or, if it had happened in China instead, would we be pointing at features of Fujian that turned out to be the ideal birthplace, and ignore its position as an imperial province in much the same way my analysis here is ignoring Britain’s position as part of Christendom?
See, if they both had engineering cultures and proto-capitalism, that seems like evidence for the “Because colonialism” hypothesis.
But I do think the “never really unified” hypothesis is intriguing. After all, the Chinese not only destroyed their own treasure fleet but basically banned maritime trade and sent the army to depopulate their own coastline for 20km or so inland, IIRC, because of the misguided policy decisions of the central government. No central government, no misguided policy decisions applied to entire civilizations.
that seems like evidence for the “Because colonialism” hypothesis.
Another thing to think about: according to my way of looking at things, Muslim Arabs colonized the middle east, southern side of the Mediterranean, and India; this includes massive transfers of resources from the periphery to the heartland. (Mansa Musa going on the Hajj seems similar to Spain discovering Cerro Rico, for example.) And yet we don’t see an IR in the Muslim world; is this just because barbarians on the frontiers caused collapse too soon, or was it just not going to happen there?
if they both had engineering cultures and proto-capitalism
I think there’s a difference between ‘proto-capitalism’ and ‘capitalism’, and a difference between ‘proto-science’ and ‘science’. Like, I can point to several Islamic figures who are the equivalent of Bacon, but I can’t point to many institutions that are the equivalent of the Royal Society or Republic of Letters. (I’m only moderately informed about this period of history, tho, so absence of evidence is only mild evidence of absence.)
Like, one of the things that was relevant to James Watt commercializing his steam engine was an engineer who knew how to bore iron cylinders in the right way, which he knew because it was useful for making cannons. I think Europe had much higher demand per capita for cannons than China (but am not sure about this, and maybe absolute demand is what matters?), which maybe led to tech transfer in a way that the high points of Chinese engineering didn’t.
Good point about the colonization. One thing I was surprised to learn when I researched the conquistadors stuff is that Muslim merchants, fleets, armies, and rulers had penetrated into India, Indonesia, all around the indian ocean, and even into China I think by the time the Portuguese showed up. Malacca was ruled by a Muslim for example. And yeah, no doubt this led to a lot of resources flowing back towards the middle east.
How much damage did the Mongols do to Muslim science? My vague guess would be, quite a lot? Perhaps this is also relevant.
How much damage did the Mongols do to Muslim science? My vague guess would be, quite a lot? Perhaps this is also relevant.
Both the capture of Cordoba in 1236 and the capture of Baghdad in 1258 seem relevant to me; both were home to some of the aforementioned Muslim paragons of science, and we don’t see any further paragons after that period (until the Timurid Renaissance, which I view as mostly having regional paragons instead of global ones, and so was more akin to the Carolingian Renaissance in terms of broader historical impact than the European one).
This is perhaps more evidence for the “centralization decreases robustness to disruption” theory; the House of Wisdom in particular was an attempt to gather all of the intellectual wealth of the empire into one place, which then meant that if it’s burned down and the scholars murdered, there’s not much to start over from.
But what need had they for oceans? China itself was full of plantations and mines; the only good they reliably imported from the rest of the world at that point in time was silver. Opium later became a foreign policy issue in part because the government wanted to protect users from addiction, and in part because it wasn’t grown in China and yet was demanded in China, so allowing the import of opium would break the advantageous balance of trade position that China was in.
The question is whether the IR would have happened in China if they, and not the Europeans, controlled the world’s oceans, plantations, and mines. (And by that I mean, imagine if in the 1700s the Americas were all Chinese colonies, if the Indian and Pacific and Atlantic oceans were controlled by Chinese fleets and port-forts, if kingdoms all along the coast of India and Arabia and Africa and Europe swore fealty to China instead of Europe… In this scenario, would the IR still have happened in Britain?)
Yeah, china was rich, but plenty of rich places failed to generate IRs. The unique thing about Europe prior to the IR may have been its WEIRDness… but it also may have been the fact that it controlled so much of the world at the time. Why would this help? Well, maybe having a glut of resources for a relatively fixed labor pool raised GDP per capita a bunch and incentivised labor-saving devices like windmills and watermills and eventually steam engines. Maybe all the oceanic trade made for a robust free-ish market and spurred the development of good financial instruments and institutions (in other words, maybe what makes capitalism work so well was particularly present due to all the oceanic trade).
I have something for this: Asia in general and China in particular was doomed by the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. The argument is essentially that China locked themselves into stagnation by disrupting trade over land.
Land-bound trade in Asia took place primarily over the Silk Road. This is something of a misnomer, as it isn’t a trade route between Rome and China but rather trade with and through Inner Asian economies.
The success of the Silk Road is defined by these economies, and these economies in turn are defined by the nomads who populate the steppe and Central Asia.
However, agrarian empires are traditionally hostile to trade. The reason is that the volume of trade is higher the closer two trading partners are. This in turn means most of the gains from trade are realized by the recently-conquered frontier, and that trade is happening with their not-conquered-yet neighbors, which runs the perpetual risk of drawing the frontier away from the imperial core.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk fixed trade at a certain volume and to go through specific locations between the Russian and Chinese empires. This suited the interests of Peter the Great and the Kangxi Emperor, but severely constricted the flow of goods going through the interior in both directions.
This was the period that ocean going trade exceeded overland trade in volume. Along with the decline in total wealth generated, they also cut themselves off from the flow of information that comes with trade. I suggest this pitched the Qing Empire into stagnation, radically reducing the likelihood they would experience an industrial revolution internally.
Thanks, I hadn’t heard of that. First the burning & banning of ships, next the reduction of overland trade—that’s two massive unforced errors on the part of Chinese emperors, during the same couple of centuries that European power was waxing.
But wait, the wiki article doesn’t say this restricted trade, it seems to say it promoted trade? Do you have a source for your claim that it reduced trade?
It promoted trade between Russia and China but all of that came at the expense of trade through the rest of inner Asia. The treaty was negotiated shortly after the Qing defeated the Dzungars, and was the first time they could trade directly because they shared a fixed border.
Further, this trade was imperially backed, so the actual imperial families and their patronage networks were the prime beneficiaries. This is a very different situation to one where trade is unrestricted, because patronage from the court is the deciding factor rather than, say productivity. By analogy to the English case, why would a Qing textile mill care about producing more if the demand is satisfied locally and the amount they can send to Russia is fixed by imperial writ? Or more broadly, suppose England swore off trade with Europe and signed a large trade treaty with Russia instead; would that have helped or harmed the industrial revolution?
The strongest argument is located in the book Empires of the Silk Road by Christopher Beckwith. He goes further than the consensus position about the influence of trade on China, but the consensus has been updating rapidly for years and his picture agrees better with my understanding of economics. The position that Beckwith is arguing against is articulated by Thomas Barfield in The Perilous Frontier. The most detailed description of the period of history is Peter Perdue, China Marches West. The latter two are on my reading list, so I might wind back my estimation; consider it a strong opinion lightly held.
I think we had a trial run of that, and it didn’t result in an IR for China. That is, the tributary system was a lot like “everyone aware of China swore fealty to China.”
I think this is less obvious, but that the answer is still “yes.” Like, Britain would still be developing an engineering culture; steam engines would still be useful for pumping water out of coal mines; the people that made textile mills didn’t themselves own cotton plantations, instead buying their inputs as commodities on the open market, and selling their outputs as commodities on the open market. Would there have been brain drain from Britain to China, so that the prime inventors are missing from Britain? Maybe, but it seems somewhat unlikely to me.
Like, when you look at industrialization efforts in other countries, it always involves the importation of cultural practices and technological knowhow, and only sometimes involves colonialism or acquisition of territory.
It sounds like in practice they didn’t?
OK, thanks—this is the sort of argument I was looking for, and it is updating me.
Do you think there’s a common cause between colonialism and the IR? Say, science + capitalism? Or maybe simply engineering culture (producing steam engines, but before that ships + navigation?)
Possible but unclear. China had its own engineering culture, for example, as did the Muslim world, and both had proto-capitalism, in that they had large mercantile networks with significant wealth.
My models of this have shifted a lot over the last decade or so. One factor that’s seemed the most variable in importance over that time has been political centralization. It looks to me like the old world has spawned three or four major civilization groups, depending on how you count things; Europe, the Middle East, India, and China. Europe was the only one that ‘never really unified’; Rome only barely touched the bits of Europe that ended up leading the IR. When you have books like a Farewell to Alms, they point to Britain becoming a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ through downwards social mobility, and this being a sort of domesticating and improving force. But those forces were even stronger in China (according to Sinologists who have reviewed his book; he touches on the comparison only briefly).
Was it relevant that lots of different countries in Europe were trying different things, with different focuses, and a handful of them led to industrial growth, that then ended up seeming like “what all of Europe” was like? Or, if it had happened in China instead, would we be pointing at features of Fujian that turned out to be the ideal birthplace, and ignore its position as an imperial province in much the same way my analysis here is ignoring Britain’s position as part of Christendom?
See, if they both had engineering cultures and proto-capitalism, that seems like evidence for the “Because colonialism” hypothesis.
But I do think the “never really unified” hypothesis is intriguing. After all, the Chinese not only destroyed their own treasure fleet but basically banned maritime trade and sent the army to depopulate their own coastline for 20km or so inland, IIRC, because of the misguided policy decisions of the central government. No central government, no misguided policy decisions applied to entire civilizations.
Another thing to think about: according to my way of looking at things, Muslim Arabs colonized the middle east, southern side of the Mediterranean, and India; this includes massive transfers of resources from the periphery to the heartland. (Mansa Musa going on the Hajj seems similar to Spain discovering Cerro Rico, for example.) And yet we don’t see an IR in the Muslim world; is this just because barbarians on the frontiers caused collapse too soon, or was it just not going to happen there?
I think there’s a difference between ‘proto-capitalism’ and ‘capitalism’, and a difference between ‘proto-science’ and ‘science’. Like, I can point to several Islamic figures who are the equivalent of Bacon, but I can’t point to many institutions that are the equivalent of the Royal Society or Republic of Letters. (I’m only moderately informed about this period of history, tho, so absence of evidence is only mild evidence of absence.)
Like, one of the things that was relevant to James Watt commercializing his steam engine was an engineer who knew how to bore iron cylinders in the right way, which he knew because it was useful for making cannons. I think Europe had much higher demand per capita for cannons than China (but am not sure about this, and maybe absolute demand is what matters?), which maybe led to tech transfer in a way that the high points of Chinese engineering didn’t.
Good point about the colonization. One thing I was surprised to learn when I researched the conquistadors stuff is that Muslim merchants, fleets, armies, and rulers had penetrated into India, Indonesia, all around the indian ocean, and even into China I think by the time the Portuguese showed up. Malacca was ruled by a Muslim for example. And yeah, no doubt this led to a lot of resources flowing back towards the middle east.
How much damage did the Mongols do to Muslim science? My vague guess would be, quite a lot? Perhaps this is also relevant.
Both the capture of Cordoba in 1236 and the capture of Baghdad in 1258 seem relevant to me; both were home to some of the aforementioned Muslim paragons of science, and we don’t see any further paragons after that period (until the Timurid Renaissance, which I view as mostly having regional paragons instead of global ones, and so was more akin to the Carolingian Renaissance in terms of broader historical impact than the European one).
This is perhaps more evidence for the “centralization decreases robustness to disruption” theory; the House of Wisdom in particular was an attempt to gather all of the intellectual wealth of the empire into one place, which then meant that if it’s burned down and the scholars murdered, there’s not much to start over from.