Part IV. Britain, China, and the Irrelevance of Stage Theories

Yet one must take care. In the face of such wonderful activities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it is customary for Europeans, and especially British Europeans, to puff with pride, and start talking about how anciently exceptional the Europeans, and especially the British, have been. Alan Macfarlane has long argued, and persuasively, that English individualism was ancient, showing up for example in marriage patterns among the Anglo-Saxons, at any rate when they got to England, and in the non-collectivist notions of property in the Germanic law before they had. ⁴⁷ But the Chinese, after all, have their own exceptionality, which could plausibly have contributed to early industrialization. The people who managed to organize such astounding projects of collective engineering as the Great Wall and the Grand Canal and Admiral Zheng He’s expeditions to Africa are not obviously incapacitated for economic growth. The same could be said of the Egyptians, the Romans, the Inca, or for that matter the Mississippian mound builders. But in the event the northwest Europeans and especially the British started modern economic growth, and so they tend to congratulate themselves, and view themselves as the naturally Top Nations. The rhetoric of nationalism, not to speak of racism, rather easily slips in. It provides a nice, self-justifying warmth if you are European, and most especially if you are British.

But until the nineteenth century, as sociologists and historians and economists such as Jack Goldstone, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Robert Allen have argued, the rich areas of, say, China were comparable in income to those of Europe, such as Britain. ⁴⁸ The assertion has not been without challenge, from for example Broadberry and Bishnupriya (2005), who asserted that the rich areas of China looked more like the poor areas of Europe well before 1800. Hans-Joachim Voth and Nico Voigtländer (2008), building on the point, argue for a “first divergence,” that is, higher real wages in northwestern Europe than in the Yangstze Valley before 1800. Their argument is remarkable: the Black Death enticed people into towns, where they died (the Chinese cities were healthier), thus relieving Malthusian pressure and allowing real wages to rise. But no one disagrees that China was ahead in, say, 1500, and fell dramatically behind during the nineteenth century (the second and more important divergence). And that is the main point: European superiority was not ancient.

The group who in the past couple of decades have made the China-admiring discovery are called the “California School” (because many of its teachers are in California). ⁴⁹ The School has taught (after graduate work, so to speak, with Jack Goody and Joseph Needham) that many of the claims of deep-set European exceptionalism—such as the European marriage pattern, or the inventiveness of Europeans in water- and wind-mills and the like, or Europe’s long lead in riches, or Marx’s analysis of the shift from oriental despotism through feudalism to the triumph of the bourgeoisie (Marx’s theory is the grand-daddy of Eurocentrism)—are erroneous. ⁵⁰ “Some of the errors,” the historical sociologist Goldstone charitably suggests, “come simply from comparing a fairly detailed and learned understanding of change in Europe with a rather vague and over-simplified understanding of change in Asia.” ⁵¹ Thus Marx (1818-1883), for example, or the historian David Landes (1924- ).

Joseph Needham (1900-1995) and his sinologist colleagues inspiring the California School have shown in the past fifty years that the Chinese were in fact astoundingly inventive for millennia before the West caught the bug. (One awaits a similar demonstration for the South Asians: begin with cotton cloth and scientific grammar. Or the Arabs: begin with universities and astronomy and horticulture.) The West did not realize how much it owed to the Chinese, or in what ways it was anticipated—commonly by many hundreds of years, such as the blast furnace (which was thought to be Swedish) or thin castings of iron (thought to be Dutch). The Chinese had mapped their realm with gridded precision hundreds of years before Europeans cartographers were still inclined to fill empty places on maps with the equivalent of the proverbial “here be dragons.” Remarkably, until Needham’s scholarship the Chinese themselves, in the face of Western hubris, forgot their pioneering.

Robert Temple wrote in 1986 an engaging popular exposition of Needham’s twenty-four stout volumes.⁵² He gives in the third, 2007 edition a table of 110 inventions anticipated by the Chinese, and often used on a large scale. (Simon Winchester’s popular biography of Needham has a fuller list of about 275, including such miracles as a wheelbarrow with sails from the sixth century C.E., and soil science or ecology from the fifth century B.C.E.).⁵³ We all know about paper, invented and in common use in China in the second century B.C.E. (even for clothing; though not used for writing until the first century C.E.). It was not manufactured in the West until the thirteenth century C.E., a lag of 1500 years. Or consider cardboard, invented two centuries before Europe caught on. Or the compass, invented and in common use in China in the fourth century B.C.E. (though not used for navigation at sea until the late first millennium C.E.), not adopted in the West until the twelfth century C.E., a lag again of 1500 years.⁵⁴ About the gun the Westerners were more urgently curious, and the lag was only 50 years after its invention in China in 1180 C.E. An economist would know of paper money, too, with a lag of 850 years until the desperate New Englanders thought to use it. An agricultural historian might have known that the iron-share, curved-moldboard plow, invented by the Chinese 500 years B.C.E., came from China to Holland in the seventeenth century, and thence to England. But few could have known before Needham that the Chinese invented the seed drill 1800 years before its use in the West, the crank handle 1100 years before, deep-drilling for natural gas 1900 years, the wheelbarrow 1300 years, a place for zero in a decimal system 1400 years, and knowledge of the circulation of the blood 1800 years before Harvey.

Needham’s work established the now-accepted truth that European technology was inferior to Chinese (or Japanese or Indian or Arab or Persian or Ottoman) until about 1500, and in many ways was inferior still in 1700 (by which time Europeans still had not yet reverse-engineered or mechanized thin-wall iron castings, thin-wall porcelain, japanning lacquers, or the making and printing of fine cotton cloth). Other research has shown that up until about 1800 the per capita real incomes of the more prosperous parts of the West and the East were all about the same. The recent lead of Europe was nothing like ancient. Needham and collaborators and followers have shown that the claim by the historians Lynn White and David Landes for unusual European innovativeness stretching back to the tenth century appears to be overstated. The windmill, for example, was Arabic. True, the Europeans in the Middle Ages invented all by themselves the fulling mill to thicken wool cloth, and perfected the mechanical clock (given special emphasis by White, but invented according to Needham in the eighth century C.E. in China, and not until 1310 by the Europeans, having heard of the Chinese machine), and invented eye glasses, and dubiously independently, if you insist on Euro-centrism worthy of the old Soviet regime, invented the blast furnace in Sweden—though long after the Chinese, and using, funnily enough, exactly the design of furnace pioneered in China in the century before.⁵⁵ Good for the Europeans. But by now most students of technology agree that the Europeans had to learn from the Chinese or others, starting in the late first millennium, the stirrup, horse collar, printing, multiple-masted fore-and-aft rigging, and literally hundreds of other inventions large and small. China ruled. Peter Perdue explains that the expenses of overland transport on the Silk Road required precisely “a mysterious fabric whose production technology China monopolized for two thousand years,” namely, that silk, finally stolen by the wily Italians, along with noodles.⁵⁶ In the early seventeenth century, Needham writes, “Francis Bacon had selected three inventions, paper and printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass, which had done more, he thought, than any religious conviction, or any astrological influence, or any conqueror’s achievement, to transform completely the modern world. . . . All of them were Chinese.”⁵⁷

But Needham’s work shows something else, too, which he emphasized and puzzled over and which is most relevant to our story here. From the seventeenth century on the Europeans in a rising wave of creativity stole, copied, adopted, improved, extended, reverse-engineered, and above all applied what they had learned from the Chinese, and from anybody else they chanced to meet on their fanatical and profitable peregrinations—coffee from the Ethiopians via the Ottomans, tobacco from the Native Americans. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) brought the Ottoman method of inoculation for smallpox back to England, using it with success on her own children.⁵⁸ Down to 1800, true, one can argue as Goldstone does that the Europeans were merely “catching up with the advanced civilizations of Asia, which already produced high-quality cotton, porcelain, and cast iron in vast quantities.”⁵⁹ But while catching up, the Europeans were coming to admire bourgeois virtues, such as a hopeful and courageous project of innovation . . . and innovation and innovation and innovation.

By contrast in the few centuries before 1800 the Chinese (and the Japanese and the Ottomans and the Mughals and Aztecs and Incas) became for various reasons fatally satisfied with their own panoplies. For the Ottomans, Metin Cosgel, Thomas Miceli, and Jared Rubin note the contrast between the nearly three-century delay after Gutenberg in allowing books to be printed in Arabic script, against the lightening fast adoption of gunpowder technology.⁶⁰ Sheer conservatism might well explain the hostility of the Qing regime at Beijing to innovation, but it evidently cannot explain the print-gun case at Istanbul. Cosgel, Miceli, and Rubin show that gunpowder, if monopolized, strengthened the state, but the printing press was seen as a potential threat to the monopoly of religious authorities—and these provided the non-violent half of the state’s support, by offering loyalty to its legitimacy. Needham had argued that the “relentless experimentation” that overcame Europe around 1700 was “like the merchant’s standard of value.” Precisely. Merchants in Europe—not state bureaucrats—came to rule, at any rate in matters of port improvements and glass making and trade to the Indian Ocean. In speaking to Western visitors Chairman Mao is supposed to have summarized the conventional regret about the three Baconian inventions: “Our fathers were indeed wise. They invented printing, but not newspapers. They invented gunpowder, but used it only for fireworks. Finally, they invented the compass, but took care not to use it to discover America.” His formulation (if indeed he said it) contains more than a little Orientalism, and the details are not exactly true. But there’s something in it.

Why the difference? One conventional argument is that the (often) unified Chinese state was bad for the bourgeoisie and their disruptive projects of innovation, at any rate by the eighteenth century. Owen Lattimore expressed the conventional explanation in 1940: “Europe changed in a way that led to a money economy [it did in fact not happen] and industrialism, while China changed in a way that created a centralized imperial bureaucracy, of which the personnel was recruited generation by generation from the landed gentry, whose combination of landed interest and administrative interest kept innovation well in check and prevented industrial development almost entirely. In Europe a varying landscape encouraged a number of different kinds of extensive farming and mixed farming. Even under feudalism there was a considerable need for trade.”⁶¹ Since then doubt has accumulated that such a picture is entirely correct, and it is certainly not correct to believe that Europeans were forward in the development of a “money economy.” After all, the Chinese had even paper money centuries earlier.

But again there’s something in it. True, the Chinese invention of an educated bureaucracy beginning with the First Emperor (unifying China with fire and sword 221 B.C.E.) was preceded by imperial administrations in the ancient Near East, and reinvented by the Europeans as the imperial notion of Alexander’s and Caesar’s descendents in the Mediterranean, and then re-re-reinvented by the European nation state in the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth centuries C.E. and later (the Prussians were to call their version of it the Beamptenstaat: the bureaucracy state). The point in any case was to subordinate everyone to the emperor/king by robbing a senatorial class or a feudal aristocracy of its separate power. Centralization on the scale of the whole of Europe had precursors in the bureaucracy of the Church, copied from that of the Roman Empire. Yet later and secular versions of the Europe-wide project could not be sustained—despite the earnest efforts of Charlemagne, Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler—at any rate until the peaceful conquests in our own times by the treaties of Rome and Maastricht.

The Chinese version, by contrast, was thorough and continuous—“a civil service unimaginable in extent and degree of organization to the petty kingdoms of Europe.”⁶² (Chinese economic history can therefore be investigated with a wealth of statistics unimaginable in Europe until its own bureaucratic and statistical era after 1800.⁶³ ) The Chinese bureaucracy, Needham argues, “in its early stages strongly helped science to grow,” albeit sometimes for such purposes as accurately casting the horoscopes of the emperor’s fourth son. But in its later stages, just as the Europeans learned to use such Chinese inventions as the belt drive, the suspension bridge, the spinning wheel, decimal fractions, the canal pound-lock, and sea mines, and indeed the examination bureaucracy itself, the bureaucracy “forcibly inhibit[ed] further growth, and in particularly prevented a break-through which has occurred in Europe.” ***is this Needham?? The Hungarian-French sinologist Étienne Balazs found deeper historical roots: writing of “China as a permanently bureaucratic society,” he claimed that the sprouts of capitalism were crushed by the Confucian mandarins.⁶⁴ The historical sociologist Michael Lessnoff summarizes the supposed results of neo-Confucianism under the Qing: “the Chinese state, which earlier [say, from the First Emperor through the Sung] frequently sponsored technological innovation and economic enterprise, became the disseminator and enforcer of an anti-technological, antiscientific and anti-mercantile culture.”⁶⁵ European-style centralized states have done similar work in the twentieth century, forcibly if often democratically inhibiting growth in a protectionist New Zealand or a populist Argentina or an authoritarian North Korea.

What Lessnoff calls “the second Weber thesis” (the first and more famous being the erroneous one that Calvinism accounts for modern economic growth) is that “compared with their Islamic, Chinese, and Indian counterparts, European cities, not only in antiquity but in the Middle Ages, enjoyed much greater independence.”⁶⁶ According to Weber, Lessnoff points out, “the concept and reality of citizenship were unique to the West. . . . The cities of China and Islam were amalgamations of clan and tribal groups, not unified communities.” This might well be true, and is amplified in fact by Balazs.⁶⁷ But we must again be wary of falling into the habit that Goldstone points out of starting with our detailed knowledge of our own West and contrasting it with a mythological picture of a Mysterious East. At its center, for example, the Roman Empire looked like the Eastern sultanate vivid in the Western imagination, Nero burning the city of Rome for seven days on a whim. But its bureaucracy and even its army was always small, and its cities governed themselves within the Empire. The city states of early Greece find answer in the free cities like Lübeck of the Holy Roman Empire, at any rate by the time in the European Middle Age it had become neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.

The dignity of cities in the West surely presages the Revaluation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It may have been new. Many Englishmen were taught by the astounding successes of the Dutch city states to turn away from the projects of honorable display characteristic of an aristocratic society. Joyce Appleby observed that “envy and wonder stimulated a great deal of economic thinking in England during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. . . . The sustained demonstration of . . . Dutch commercial prowess acted more forcefully upon the English imagination than any other economic development.”⁶⁸ Not all of the English abandoned aristocratic values: many Englishmen continued to charge nobly for the guns, or to stake their wealth on the turn of a card. By the eighteenth century, however, many of them, especially the bourgeois among them and a surprisingly large number of embourgeoisfied noblemen and gentry, were launched on careers of generating a wave of gadgets that has not yet ceased sweeping over us (to use the unconsciously brilliant phrase of an English schoolboy on an exam paper in economic history long ago).⁶⁹ An original accumulation of habits of free publication and vigorous discussion created, as Mokyr argues in The Gifts of Athena (2002), “a world in which ‘useful’ knowledge was indeed used with an aggressiveness and a single-mindedness that no other society had experienced before. . . . It was the unique Western way.”⁷⁰ Well, perhaps not unique until the explosion of the nineteenth century—China in the second century B.C.E. looks pretty good at such using, as did fifth-century B.C.E. Greece, or first-century C.E. Rome. And not so incidentally the criterion of “usefulness” is not intrinsic in the invention itself, but is economically determined by consumer valuations.⁷¹ Casting horoscopes about the coming battle will seem more “useful” in some systems of value than inventing another siege engine. But anyway the West kept going, and going, to all our gain.

We do not yet know for sure why the using of knowledge kept going in northwestern Europe, though many economic historians suspect that Europe’s political fragmentation, “the ancient clotted continent,” led to comparative liberty for enterprise.⁷² Yet against this the German lands, fragmented thoroughly up to 1871, were not until the nineteenth century places of much innovation in machinery (though very much so by the eighteenth century in music and philosophy). And India was at many times fragmented, with hundreds of rajas and languages, without a great deal of innovation coming out of it. And again, second-century B.C.E. China was unusually centralized but unusually inventive, too. Goldstone notes that being a part of a fragmented Europe sometimes helped and sometimes hurt.⁷³ Portugal, the very soul of entrepreneurial exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, emerged from its union with Spain in 1640 without recapturing the spirit of “we must sail,” and became one of the least literate and least entrepreneurial of Western European nations.

Perhaps the fragmentation of Europe worked instead by way of a free press (remember Mao’s formula), acquainting more people with the new idea of applying new ideas. Such an argument would date the unusual creativity of European conversations properly, beginning small in the late fifteenth century and becoming cacophonous by the eighteenth century. On August 18, 1520 the press of Melchior Lotther at Wittenberg issued 4000 copies, as Luther put it, of a “broadside to [the Emperor] Charles and the nobility of Germany against the tyranny and baseness of the Roman curia,” To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, and the next week the press was preparing over 4000 more of a longer version.⁷⁴ Perhaps had the Emperor Charles V or Pope Leo X been able to exercise the sort of control over the presses of Germany that Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottomans or the Qianlong Emperor of China could, the outcome would have been different.

The improved rhetoric permitted by a free press was slow in coming. Until the late seventeenth century, indeed, the press was doubtfully free even in England. In 1579 Queen Elizabeth, outraged by a pamphlet written by the Puritan John Stubbs attacking her negotiations for marriage into the French royal family, had his right hand struck off by a cleaver hammered home by a croquet mallet—after which he removed his hat with his left hand and shouted “God save the Queen!” But Cyndia Clegg has argued about this and other Elizabethan cases that the censorship was unsystematic—in the Stubbs case, for example, the law evoked was an arguably obsolete one referring to the former Queen Mary’s husband, not a claim to a routine right to censor all publications.⁷⁵ Stubbs, his publisher, and his printer were prosecuted for libel, not treason (had it been treason the punishment would not have been mere maiming but a slow death worthy of a Mel Gibson movie; Elizabeth in fact disingenuously claimed to seek a charge of treason in order to impress her French allies against the Spanish). Grave matters of national survival, Clegg argues, hung on the long dalliance of Elizabeth with the heir to the French throne. The time was, after all, before the defeat of the Armada. Censorship in China was much more thorough, such as in the eighteenth century executing a man and enslaving his family for printing the character for the Emperor’s name. Later censorships in Europe, such as the Index of Forbidden Books, were routinely undermined by publication in other jurisdictions, first Venice and then Holland, and smuggling. Remember the Chatterley ban, or The Tropic of Cancer.

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47. [back] Macfarlane 1978.
48. [back] Goldstone 2003, Pomeranz 2000, Allen 2008.
49. [back] Goldstone 2002; he names R. Bin Wong, Kenneth Pomeranz, Richard von Glahn, Wang Feng, Cameron Campbell, Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giraldez, James Z. Lee, Robert Marks, and himself (all at the time residents of the Golden State); and Andre Gunder Frank, Jack Goody, James Blaut, and Janet Abu-Lughod. To which I would add Robert Allen and Francesca Bray. I myself was a spectator at some early conferences on the matter, and declare now that besides joining tardily the Cambridge/Johns Hopkins School of intellectual history I am an adjunct member of the California School of world history.
50. [back] Goody 1996.
51. [back] Goldstone 2009, p. 19; compare p. 47.
52. [back] Temple 1986 (2007).
53. [back] Winchester 2008, pp. 267-277.
54. [back] Temple 1986 (2007): paper, pp. 92-95, compass, pp. 162-166.
55. [back] Needham himself makes the point about the blast furnace, in his introduction to Temple 1986 (2007), p. 10.
56. [back] Perdue 2003, p. 491.
57. [back] In Temple 1986 (2007), p. 10.
58. [back] Jacob 2001, p. 23.
59. [back] Goldstone 2009, p. 32.
60. [back] Cosgel, Miceli, and Rubin 2009.
61. [back] Lattimore 1940, p. 393.
62. [back] Needham in Temple 1986 (2007), p. 10.
63. [back] Rawski 1996 and Rawski and Li 1992.
64. [back] Balazs 1964
65. [back] Lessnoff 2003, p. 363
66. [back] Lessnoff 2003, p. 362.
67. [back] It is sharply criticized by Goody 2006, Chp. 8.
68. [back] Appleby 1978, p. 73.
69. [back] Ashton 1948, p. 59.
70. [back] Mokyr 2002, p. 297.
71. [back] A point made to me by Pete Boettke of George Mason University.
72. [back] O'Neill 2009, p. 46. On the history see for instance Baechler 1971; McNeill 1982; Jones 1988; Tilly 1990; Macfarlane 2000, p. 274-275.
73. [back] Goldstone 2009, p. 45.
74. [back] Lehmann 1970, p. 4.
75. [back] Clegg 1997, Chp. 6.

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