Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

Living standards in the core regions of China and Western Europe appear to have been roughly comparable in 1800, with Japan perhaps slightly ahead, while the figures for life expectancy and calorie-intake were broadly similar. [56] [56] Pomeranz, The Great Divergence , pp. 36-9, 49. European life expectancy — an important measure of prosperity — did not surpass that of China until the end of the nineteenth century, except in its most affluent regions. [57] [57] R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 27-8. Paul Bairoch has calculated figures for per capita income which put China ahead of Western Europe in 1800, with Asia as a whole behind Western Europe but in advance of Europe. [58] [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. In referring to China and Europe, of course, we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with huge land masses populated by very large numbers of people: in 1820, China ’s population was 381 million while that of Western Europe was 133 million, and that of Europe as a whole 169 million. Levels of economic development and standards of living inevitably varied considerably from region to region, making comparisons between the two problematic. The key point is that the most advanced regions of China, notably the Yangzi Delta, seem to have been more or less on a par with the most prosperous parts of north-west Europe, in particular Britain, at the end of the eighteenth century. [59] [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. Given the crucial role played by the most advanced regions in pioneering industrial take-off, the decisive comparison must be that between Britain and the Yangzi Delta.

The general picture that emerges is that, far from Western Europe having established a decisive economic lead over China and Japan by 1800, there was, in fact, not that much to choose between them. [60] [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. In this light, the argument that industrialization was the product of a very long historical process that took place over several centuries, rather than a few decades, is dubious: instead, it would appear more likely that industrialization was, for the most part, a consequence of relatively contingent factors. [61] [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. This still begs the question, however, as to why Western Europe, rather than Japan or China, was able to turn its fortunes around so rapidly from around 1800 and then outdistance Japan, and especially China, by such a massive margin during the nineteenth century.

Here the fortuitous or chance factor, while by no means the sole reason, played a critical role. Around 1800 the most heavily populated regions of the Old World, including China and Europe, were finding it increasingly difficult to sustain rising populations. The basic problem was that food, fibre, fuel and building supplies were all competing for what was becoming increasingly scarce land and forest. This was particularly serious in China because its heartland, which lay between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, had always supported a very large population as a result of its fertility; now, however, it became increasingly exhausted through overuse. [62] [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. This, combined with the fact that new land brought under cultivation was not of a high quality, posed an increasingly acute problem. [63] [63] Bin Wong, China Transformed , p. 49. For two crucial reasons, Europe — or rather specifically Britain — was able to break this crucial land constraint in a way that was to elude China. First, Britain discovered large quantities of accessible coal that helped to ease the growing shortage of wood and fuel the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, although China also had very considerable deposits of coal, they lay a long way from its main centres of population, the largest being in the north-west, far from the textile industries and canals of the lower Yangzi Valley. Second, much more importantly, the colonization of the New World, namely the Caribbean and North America, was to provide huge tracts of land, a massive and very cheap source of labour in the form of slaves, and an abundant flow of food and raw materials: the early growth of Manchester, for example, would have been impossible without cheap and plentiful supplies of cotton from the slave plantations. Raising enough sheep to replace the yarn made with Britain ’s New World cotton imports would have required huge quantities of land (almost 9 million acres in 1815 and over 23 million acres by 1830). Overall, it is estimated that the land required in order to grow the cotton, sugar and timber imported by Britain from the New World in 1830 would have been between 25 and 30 million acres — or more than Britain ’s total arable and pasture land combined. [64] [64] Robin Blackburn, ‘Enslavement and Industrialisation’, on www.bbc.co.uk/history; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence , Chapter 6, especially pp. 274-6. The role played by colonization, in this context, is a reminder that European industrialization was far from an endogenous process. [65] [65] Pomeranz, The Great Divergence , pp. 7, 11. The New World — together with the discovery of large quantities of coal in Britain — removed the growing pressure on land that was endangering Britain ’s economic development. China was to enjoy no such good fortune. The consequences were to be far-reaching: ‘England avoided becoming the Yangzi Delta,’ argues the historian Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘and the two came to look so different that it became hard to see how recently they had been quite similar.’ [66] [66] Ibid., p. 283; also pp. 206-7, 215, 264-5, 277, 285.

The fact that the New World colonies proved a vital source of raw materials for Britain at such a critical time was a matter of chance, but there was nothing fortuitous about the way that Britain had colonized the New World over most of the two previous centuries. Colonization also provided Europe with other long-term advantages. Rivalry over colonies, as well as the many intra-European wars — combined with their obvious economic prowess — helped to hone European nation-states into veritable fighting machines, as a result of which, during the course of the nineteenth century, they were able to establish a huge military advantage over every other region in the world, which thereby became vulnerable to European imperial expansion. The scale of this military expenditure should not be underestimated. HMS Victory , commanded by Admiral Nelson during the Battle of Trafal gar in 1805, cost five times as much as Abraham Crowley’s steelworks, one of the flagship investments of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. [67] [67] C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 62–71, 92. Colonial trade also provided fertile ground for innovations in both company organization and systems of financing, with the Dutch, for example, inventing the joint-stock company for this purpose. Without the slave trade and colonization, Europe could never have made the kind of breakthrough it did. It is true that China also had colonies — newly acquired territories achieved by a process of imperial expansion from 1644 until the late eighteenth century — but these were in the interior of the Eurasian continent, bereft of either large arable lands or dense populations, and were unable to provide raw materials on anything like the scale of the New World. [68] [68] Perdue, China Marches West , p. 538. South-East Asia, which was abundant in resources, would have been a more likely candidate to play the role of China’s New World. Admiral Zheng’s exploits in the early fifteenth century, with ships far larger than anything that Europe could build at the time, show that China was not lacking the technical ability or financial means, but the attitude of the Chinese state towards overseas interests and possessions was quite different from that of Europe. Although large numbers of Chinese migrated to South-East Asia, the Chinese state, unlike the European nations, showed no interest in providing military or political backing for its subjects’ overseas endeavours: in contrast, the Qing dynasty displayed great concern for its continental lands in the north and west, reflecting the fact that China saw itself as a continental rather than maritime civilization.