Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

[46]Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , p. 11.

[47]Mark Elvin, ‘The Historian as Haruspex’, New Left Review , 52, July-August 2008, p. 101.

[48]Ibid., p. 10.

[49]David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (London: Little, Brown, 1998), p. 342.

[50]For a pessimistic view of China, see ibid., Chapter 21; Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[51]Kaoru Sugihara, ‘Agriculture and Industrialization: The Japanese Experience’, in Peter Mathias and John Davis, eds, Agriculture and Industrialization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 148- 52.

[52]Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007), p. 69.

[53]John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 102.

[54]Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 34-5, 43-6, 61-2, 70, 168.

[55]Mark Elvin, ‘The Historian as Haruspex’, New Left Review , 52, July-August 2008, pp. 96-7, 103.

[56]Pomeranz, The Great Divergence , pp. 36-9, 49.

[57]R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 27-8.

[58]Paul Bairoch, ‘The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities since the Industrial Revolution’, in Paul Bairoch and Maurice Levy-Leboyer, eds, Disparities in Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975), pp. 7, 13–14.

[59]Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2003), pp. 249- 51. In fact, the Yangzi Delta was one of Eurasia’s most developed regions over a very long historical period, from 1350 to at least 1750; Bin Wong, China Transformed , p. 29.

[60]Peter Perdue writes: ‘Recent research on late imperial China has demonstrated that in most measurable aspects of demographic structure, technology, economic productivity, commercial development, property rights, and ecological pressure, there were no substantial differences between China and western Europe up to around the year 1800.’ Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 536-7. See Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing , pp. 24–39, for an interesting discussion of these issues.

[61]‘In the light of this recent research, the Industrial Revolution is not a deep, slow evolution out of centuries of particular conditions unique to early modern Europe. It is a late, rapid, unexpected outcome of a fortuitous combination of circumstances in the late eighteenth century. In view of what we now know about imperial China, Japan, and India, among other places, acceptable explanations must invoke a global perspective and allow for a great deal of short-term change.’ Perdue, China Marches West , p. 537.

[62]Bin Wong, China Transformed , Chapter 5; Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), Chapters 1–4; Elvin, ‘The Historian as Haruspex’, p. 87.

[63]Bin Wong, China Transformed , p. 49.

[64]Robin Blackburn, ‘Enslavement and Industrialisation’, on www.bbc.co.uk/history; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence , Chapter 6, especially pp. 274-6.

[65]Pomeranz, The Great Divergence , pp. 7, 11.

[66]Ibid., p. 283; also pp. 206-7, 215, 264-5, 277, 285.

[67]C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 62–71, 92.

[68]Perdue, China Marches West , p. 538.

[69]‘The capabilities of the Qing to manage the economy were powerful enough that we might even call it a “developmental agrarian state”’: ibid., p. 541.

[70]Ibid., p. 540.

[71]Bin Wong, China Transformed , p. 138.

[72]Ibid., p. 149.

[73]Ibid., pp. 147-9.

[74]Elvin, ‘The Historian as Haruspex’, pp. 98-9; Fairbank and Goldman, China , pp. 180-81; William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 525-9.

[75]Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics , p. 249.

[76]‘The source of Chinese weakness, complacency, and rigidity, like the Industrial Revolution itself, was late and recent, not deeply rooted in China ’s traditional culture.’ Perdue, China Marches West , p. 551; also p. 541.

[77]Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing , p. 27.

[78]Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 79.

[79]Perdue, China Marches West , p. 538.

[80]Bin Wong, China Transformed , p. 47.

[81]Charlotte Higgins, It’s All Greek to Me (London: Short Books, 2008), pp.77-8.

[82]Ibid., p. 21. Also Deepak Lal, Unintended Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), p. 73.

[83]Lal, Unintended Consequences , p. 76; Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , p. 82.

[84]Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations , p. 201; Elvin, ‘The Historian as Haruspex’, pp. 85, 97, 102.

[85]Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , pp. 291-3.

[86]Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 343.

[87]Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , p. 469.

[88]Ibid., p. 12; Lal, Unintended Consequences , p. 177.

[89]Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1259, 1266-7, 1282-4.

[90]Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941 - 1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2004), p. 33.

[91]Göran Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societe: 1945–2000 (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 24, 68–70.

[92]Ibid., p. 68.

[93]Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics , p. 260.

[94]Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond , pp. 21-4.

[95]Not fundamentalism, however, which unusually originated in the United States.

[96]Ibid., pp. 21-4, 68, 356.

[97]Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 196, quoted by Lal, Unintended Consequences , p. 75.

[98]Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900 - 2000 (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 119-23; also pp. 108-12.

[99]The old white settler colonies enjoyed a very different relationship with Britain to that of the non-white colonies, and this was reflected in their far greater economic prosperity; Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2006), pp. 184-5.

[100]Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 48–53; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875 - 1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), Chapter 3.

[101]Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire , pp. 57-9, 70–73.

[102]Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , pp. 127-8.

[103]Niall Ferguson, ‘ Empire Falls ’, October 2006, posted on www.vanityfair.com, pp. 1–2.