Source Citations, part 2: White Character and Civilization, Compared to Chinese

Source citations of White-China essay 3/6/18, part 2

These are the second half of the source citations (first half is here; plain text version is here) for Frank Jamger’s essay, “White Character and Civilization, Compared to Chinese,” which was posted on Frank Jamger’s blog, here:

“White Character and Civilization, Compared to Chinese”
• https://fjamger.blogspot.com/2018/03/WCaCCtC.html

and also on National Vanguard, here:
• https://nationalvanguard.org/2018/03/white-character-and-civilization-compared-to-chinese/

and, in case of censorship, the article and its sources are archived at these locations:
• “White Character and Civilization, Compared to Chinese” on the author’s blog
• “White Character and Civilization, Compared to Chinese” on National Vanguard
• Source Citations, part 1 for “White Character and Civilization, Compared to Chinese” on National Vanguard (previous page)
• Source Citations, part 2 for “White Character and Civilization, Compared to Chinese” on National Vanguard (this page)
• Source Citations for “White Character and Civilization, Compared to Chinese” plain text

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Source Citations, continued:

B. Much of China’s best creative work was done in its ancient past, which indicates subsequent genetic change toward lower creativity.

Much of China’s best creative work was done in the ancient past and little of it during the last 600 years, indicating that the leading elements of its population dissipated and/or its average genotype changed over time, due to selective pressures. In section I, I discussed characteristics of China’s environment that would tend to render the Chinese less explorative and creative, and more morally conservative.

Most of China’s eminent philosophers lived in the last few centuries of first millennium BC [1], and China’s most scientifically promising schools of thought, the Mohists, Logicians, and Legalists, practically died out by 100 BC [2]. China’s rate of technological and institutional innovation steadily declined after the Song era (960-1279) [3]. Algebra developed in north China around 1300 was soon forgotten [4], along with various technologies such as their astronomical water clock [5] and ocean-going ships [6]. Some of China’s best art also came early, such as bronze castings of the Shang era (1600-1050BC) [7], and ceramic figurines and large stone Buddhist sculptures of the T’ang (618-907) [8]. China’s ancient education included various recreational arts and its civil service examinations originally included mathematics and law, but after the Song era its education became very formal and rigid, based on rote memory of literary classics [9]. Several physical/martial sports were popular in early China at least among aristocrats, such as a kick-ball game, tug-of-war, and polo, that died out by the Song era [10]. Physical sports have not been popular in China since [11].

There is also evidence that China has become increasingly morally restrictive, such as in its repression of women and individual freedom [12].

1. • Hundred Schools of Thought
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Schools_of_Thought
• China’s classical philophers have been almost slavishly deferred to throughout Chinese history (at least until the Communist takeover); see section IV-5.B and its sources. Chinese literature is loaded with often-unattributed quotations (copy-pastes) of these past writers; see section IV-2.A and its sources.

2. • “[T]he schools of Mohism, the Logicians, and the Legalists, which had flourished in the pre-Qin-Han era, were all left in oblivion for milleniums.” [Qian 85:24]
; “The nearest comparable works among early Chinese thinkers to Greek exact science were those of the Mohists (Mo Ti lived within the period 479 to 381 BC), and of the Logicians (Hui Shi lived during the fourth century BC, and Gong-sun Long, in the first half of the third century BC). The Mohists, a group of compassionate artisan-philosophers of the dynamic late Warring States period, had started to formulate logic, economics, mechanical engineering, geometrical optics, and mechanics in their philosophical argumentations. However, it was a great loss to Chinese science that in the long history of traditional China, Mohism, as a staunch rival school of Confucianism, was almost completely left in oblivion. The Logicians fared no better.” [50-1]
; “The only trouble about the Chinese five-element theories is that they went on too long. What was quite advanced for the +1st century was tolerable in the +11th century, and did not become scandalous until the +18th.”- Sinophile Needham quoted in [Qian 85:31]
; “After Mo Ti, Chinese geometrical optics vanished for more than a millenium until Shen Kua (1031-95) studied it, unaware of any conclusions made by the Mohists.” [59-60]
; “Mathematics had early glories in the recognition of the ‘Chinese Pythagorian Theorem’, the evaluation of pi, and the analysis of indeterminate equations. But the notion of rigorous proof never appeared, and the necessary notational innovations never occurred. In general, mathematics remained in an incomplete, pre-calculus stage. Magnetic study also enjoyed some early glories, but long stagnated.” [81-2]
• “Curiously, after the first century or more of the Han dynasty, literary references to the measuring instruments of the artists seem to fall off sharply—a fact possibly indicative of a declining intellectual interest in the idea of quantification.” [Bodde 91:137]
; “[T]he later Mohists were virtually the only intellectual school in Chinese history to make systematic definitions of their key terms, to be consciously and seriously interested in logic, and to deal analytically with such topics as optics, mechanics, biology, and military technology (the latter in the twenty Mohist chapters on defensive fortification techniques).
In the time of Mencius and later, Mohism was apparently as influencial as Confucianism. That it utterly disappeared after the second century BC just when Confucianism was becoming the official state ethic is due to many factors…” [168-9]
; “Among the schools of the Warring States, apart from “the arguers” themselves, it is only the later Mohists who (despite the authoritarianism of their founder) recognized the inherent value of argument or disputation (pien) as a means for arriving at truth. “To say there is no winner in argument (pien),” they wrote, “surely fails to fit the fact”. This somewhat touching confidence in the validity of dialectical process is another of the many features that make the Mohists—in this case the later Mohists—seem so familiar to Westerners and so “un-Chinese.” [182]
; “Not surprisingly, the embyronic beginning of “laws of nature” are particularly apparent among those relatively early thinkers—Mo Tzu, the Han Confucian Tung Chung-shu, alchemists such as Ko Hung—who thought in strongly theistic or animistic terms. On the popular level it is probable that such ideas long remained widespread. Remarkably, however, they failed to gain more than a temporary and minority position in the mainstream of Chinese philosophical speculation. Although traces of “laws of nature” may occur in philosophical writings after the time of Ko Hung [283—343], I have failed to come across them.” [344]

3. • “Among the cases of Chinese technology that were actually lost or forgotten, that of time measurement is the most interesting, because of the technological spillover effects that the mechanical clock is alleged to have brought to Europe. By the sixteenth century, the Chinese had no memory of Su Sung’s masterpiece [an astronomical clock]. Nor did they ever manage to develop anything close to the weight-driven mechanism of the European clocks. The Jesuits arriving in China in the 1580s reported that Chinese time measurement was primitive, and craftily used clocks as a bait to the Chinese authorities to gain entrance into China. The Chinese expressed joy and wonderment over the novel device, but regarded it as a toy rather than a useful instrument.
In ocean shipping, China’s decline relative to the West was abrupt. Less than a century after the great voyages of Cheng Ho, the Chinese shipyards were closed and seagoing junks with more than two masts were forbidden. The technology of building large, seaworthy junks capable of long-distance journeys disappeared from China. In the iron industry there is less direct evidence of technological decline. In 1690 there is some evidence of a cold blast being applied in steel making, a sort of proto-Bessemer converter. Yet even an admirer of Chinese technology like Needham is forced to concede that “in modern times the world has seen China as a culture of bamboo and wood”. Or consider the sao chhe, a silk-reeling machine that was used in China as early as 1090 A.D. Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century raw silk, which comprised about 35 percent of China’s export, was entirely hand reeled, yielding a product of uneven quality that had to be rereeled in Europe.’ Or consider coal, which had been mined in China since medieval times and was reported with some amazement by Marco Polo. By the nineteenth century Chinese coal mining was primitive, took place in shallow mines, and was devoid of any machinery for ventilation, pumping, or elevation. Between the medieval era and the modern age something was lost in China.
Equally striking is the inability of Chinese technology to press forward in areas in which they were very close to making a break-through. Moveable type, for instance, did not catch on in China, where wooden block printing continued to dominate. A likely explanation is that moveable type was less suitable to an ideographic script than to the simpler alphabet of the Western world. But how can we explain the failure of Chinese spinners to develop a proper spinning jenny? As Chao (1977) has pointed out, multispindle spinning, adopted for ramie, never found an application to cotton, where small spinning wheels spun three or four spindles, but never more. The critical element in Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, missing in Chinese cotton spinning technology, was the draw bar, a device that imitated the human hand in drawing out a large number of rovings at the same time. It seems hard to believe that such a relatively simple device never occurred to some ingenious Chinese, but if it did, there is no sign of it. Similarly, the Chinese developed a treadle loom in the Ming period (1368-1644), but after that weaving remained unchanged until the end of the nineteenth century. Something like the flying shuttle, a simple device that increased the productivity of weaving by a large factor, never seems to have occurred to them.
In many other areas, the Chinese were unable to press their advantage. Consider, for example, military technology. In the tenth century A.D. the Chinese used gunpowder in rockets and bombs. In spite of their knowledge of explosives and their superiority in siderurgy, they apparently had to learn to use cannon from the West (in the mid-fourteenth century) and they failed to develop Western military techniques any further. When the Portuguese reached China in 1514, the Chinese were deeply impressed by Portuguese muskets (“Frankish Devices”) and swiveling naval cannon and adopted them readily. Yet the Chinese were unable to keep up with the continuous progress made in firearm technology in the West…
In waterpower technology progress never quite stopped altogether, but their accomplishment “does not compare to the European accomplishment, particularly in the period from the eleventh to the sixteenth century”. In agriculture, the Chinese came into contact with new crops from the American continent through Portuguese traders and Chinese settlers in the Philippines. Their record in adopting these crops is mixed: some crops, such as sweet potatoes and peanuts, which thrive on marginal soils, were widely cultivated. But the major dryland staples, such as potatoes and com, were adopted only slowly, in spite of the advantages of these crops. A specialist in ecological history, (Jones, 1981, p. 171) judges that Chinese progress in agriculture “in no way compares with Europe’s record of technological achievements.” Another historian of Chinese agriculture (Chao, 1986, p. 195) states flatly that “the invention rate [in Chinese agriculture] declined sharply after 1300 and finally came to a complete halt after 1700.”…
Even in the dissemination of technical knowledge there appears to have been retrogression: the great technical encyclopedia, the Thien Kung Khai Wu (Exploitation of the Works of Nature), written in 1637 by Sung Ying Hsing, (“the Chinese Diderot”) provided an excellent summary of Chinese technology from weaving to hydraulics to jade working. The work was destroyed, probably because of the author’s political views, and has survived only thanks to a Japanese reprint. Wang Chen’s great Treatise on Agriculture was published in 1313, but by 1530 there was only one surviving copy.” [Mokyr 90:220-3]
• “Before 1800 there were also long periods in which technology [around the world] either showed no advance at all or even regressed…
Furthermore, there are signs of actual technological regression…
It is even claimed that China, which led the world in technological sophistication as late as 1400, also went into a technological decline. When Marco Polo visited China in the 1290s he found that the Chinese were far ahead of the Europeans in technical prowess. Their oceangoing junks, for example, were larger and stronger than European ships… Yet by the time the Portuguese reached China in 1514, the Chinese had lost the ability to build large oceangoing ships. Similarly Marco Polo had been impressed and surprised by the deep coal mines of China. Yet by the nineteenth century Chinese coal mines were primitive shallow affairs which relied completely on manual power. By the eleventh century AD the Chinese measured time accurately using water clocks, yet when the Jesuits arrived in China in the 1580s they found only the most primitive methods of time measurement in use, and amazed the Chinese by showing them mechanical clocks. The decline in technological abilities in China was not caused by any catastrophic social turmoil. Indeed in the period after 1400 China continued to expand by colonizing in the south, the population grew, and there was increased commercialization.” [Clark 07a:142-4]
• “Californians are rightly fond of calling attention to China’s high level of technology and its many inventions and innovations. Yet they tend to ignore that in this respect too, dynamism clearly abated. During the Qing dynasty, the number of discoveries in science and technology decreased very substantially, as Joseph Needham acknowledged and tried to explain… Not only was dynamism slacking in Mid-Qing China; there are various examples of technologies and knowledge that disappeared. In the production of silk and cotton, with the passing of time, fewer machines were used and they tended to become simpler.
One can find examples of changes over time and, more importantly, of relative or even absolute regress in other sectors of Chinese society too… Goldstone claims that, for the early modern era, the level of urbanisation is an excellent indicator of the strength of an economy… Urbanisation in China in 1800 was substantially lower than in Western Europe. Only three per cent of its population lived in cities of over 10,000 people. In Western Europe this was over ten per cent… China’s level of urbanisation between the Sung era and the beginning of the nineteenth century actually decreased…
In the 1300s, China’s government could indeed raise a fleet of 400,000 soldiers and sailors, as Goldstone points out. That of course is impressive. As is the fleet of Zheng He, which consisted of enormous ships manned by thousands of sailors and travelled half the globe in the beginning of the fifteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, there no longer existed a Chinese Navy to speak off… The contrast with Britain and its Royal Navy couldn’t be bigger. Between the beginning of Qing rule and the first half of the nineteenth century, China’s army tended to become smaller rather than bigger, in any case in comparison to total population. In comparison to what was the norm in European states, where the size of armies had increased enormously and permanent change in organisation and armaments had become the norm, it had become small and inefficient.
In revisionist literature it has become common usage to refer to China’s efficient bureaucratic rule. Over time, however, this bureaucracy, relatively speaking, became much smaller. From the beginning of Qing rule onwards, it never counted more than a mere 20,000 to 30,000 officials for China as a whole, whereas total population increased sharply. Considering the growing complaints about corruption towards the end of the eighteenth century, one may also query its supposed efficiency. Here too the direction of developments in Britain was different. The Chinese state did not become stronger over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in terms of ‘hard power’ at least. Important European states did.
Let me just give one final example of differing trends. Paper money was invented in China under the Sung rule. Under the Qing dynasty, the state no longer issued it. Neither did it coin any silver or gold currency. In the eighteenth century the importance of copper as currency increased. Again, developments in Britain went in an opposite direction. In the eighteenth century the country was on a gold standard and had a central bank. Overall, Qing China seems to have undergone far fewer institutional changes than Britain, which had its financial and military revolutions.” [Vries 10:12-14]
• For more on China’s late imperial decline, see section II-8.F and its sources.

4. • “The formulation of the mathematical problem was… generalized later in the thirteenth century by the great Chinese mathematician Qin Jiu-shao into ‘the Chinese theorem of remainder’. He systematically enunciated the general scheme of linear indeterminant analysis. Qing finished his Shu Shu Jiu Zhang (Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections) in 1247, during the last stage of the Southern Song. His achievements suggests that there were intellectual interests in theorising exact sciences at that time… [A]fter the Song and the Yuan mathematics declined. It must have been a rapid decline, since when ‘the Jesuits entered upon the scene (the sixteenth century), there was no one even able to tell them of China’s past mathematical glories. Why so rapid a decline? As we have said before, mathematics in traditional China was basically an official enterprise. There were not enough autonomous roots of mathematical scholarship among learned circles. Correspondingly, the best achievements in the field appear to have been isolated—both spatially and temporally—successes of mathematical wizards.” [Qian 85:63-4]
• “The great mathematician Chu Shih-chieh, trained in the northern school, migrated south to Yang-chou, where his books were printed but he could find no disciples. In consequence, the more sophisticated of his achievements became incomprehensible to following generations.” [Elvin 73:179-80]
; “The development of Chinese algebra in north China during Chin Tartar and Yuan times demonstrates another aspect of the medieval Chinese science: its dependence upon regional centres, and consequent vulnerability if these centres suffered disruption…
This catalog of lost works by forgotten authors is not exciting reading, but it proves the geographical isolation of this kind of mathematical activity. Even the greatest of the southern mathematicians… contented themselves with relatively practical problems…
By Ming times, there was no one left who could understand the more advanced positional algebra of the Chin Tartar and early Yuan periods…” [193-4]

5. • “This tradition [of Chinese water clock-making] reached its height at the end of the eleventh century when Su Sung (1020–1101), a Song Dynasty diplomat and civil servant, received a government commission to build a machine that would replicate celestial movements and correct embarrassing shortcomings in the official calendar then in use. The Jurchen Tartars moved Su Sung’s tower in 1129 after they captured Kaifeng from the Song. Finally, lightning struck it in 1195, and some years later, for want of skilled mechanics, Su Sung’s great machine fell into complete disrepair. With it, Chinese expertise in mechanical horology declined, to the point where officials expressed amazement at Western clocks when they came to China in the seventeenth century.” [McClellan 06:133-4]
• “By the eleventh century AD the Chinese measured time accurately using water clocks, yet when the Jesuits arrived in China in the 1580s they found only the most primitive methods of time measurement in use, and amazed the Chinese by showing them mechanical clocks.” [Clark 07a:143-4]
• “By the sixteenth century, the Chinese had no memory of Su Sung’s masterpiece [astronomical water clock]. Nor did they ever manage to develop anything close to the weight-driven mechanism of the European clocks.” [Mokyr 90:220]

6. • See section V-2.G.8 and its sources.

7. • “The third material in which the Chinese have done magnificent work is bronze, for their creations of three thousand years ago are unsurpassed not only in China, but anywhere else in the world. In the Shang period bronze was an aristocratic material…” [Dawson 78:230]

8. • “It is worth mentioning at this point that the T’ang [618-907] [ceramic] figurines are the high-water mark of the Chinese achievement in small-scale modelling, reached at the same time as they were doing their best work in large-scale stone sculpture, at the great Buddhist sites…[A]part from some of the sublime Buddhist monuments, the Chinese genius for modelling best expressed itself in small-scale work…” [Dawson 78:228]

9. • “It was [Hsun Tzu (300-230 BC)] who most firmly established the pattern of later Chinese education, with its bookishness and its concern with particular Classical texts. This curriculum was much less practical than the content of ancient education, which, in addition to ethical teaching, had consisted of the ‘six arts’—ritual, music, archery, chariot-driving, writing, and reckoning. For Hsun Tzu, ‘Learning begins with the recitation of the Classics and ends with the reading of ritual texts.” [Dawson 78:88]
; “The chief requirement for success in the examinations, apart from the technical mastery of the ‘eight-legged essay’ format, was a thorough knowledge of the Confucian Classics and the historical literature, and a mastery of several poetic styles. The more practical content of the examinations varied, but was much less important in the Ch’ing than it had been in the T’and and Sung, when the study of law had been also required.” [37]
• “The creation [in China] of such a broad educational curriculum in the seventh century was an extraordinary achievement, but its practical value was severely curtailed by the very small number of candidates who chose to take their doctorate in anything but the generalized chin shih or Doctor in Letters. Statistics for the T’ang dynasty [618–907] preserved in the Wen-hsien t’ung-k’ao encyclopedia… indicate, for each year the examinations were given, the number of awarded chin shih degrees as compared with degrees in “the several (other) fields”. Although no breakdown of the “several fields” is provided, they probably included the examinations on particular classics, mathematics, law, and writing, but not, for the reasons just indicated, on astronomy and medicine. The statistics in Table 3, gathered for three random decades from early, middle, and late T’ang, demonstrate the great preponderance of chin shih degrees.
Reluctance to specialize continued and if anything increased during the Sung dynasty, as shown by the dropping of mathematics and writing from the examinations.” [Bodde 91:214]
• “The judicial systems in the Ming and Qing dynasties also appeared to be weaker than the Song. The civil service examinations became increasingly dominated by rigid Confucian classics and stereotyped writings known as eight-legged essays (ba gu wen); the legal content disappeared altogether.” [Chen 12:56]
• On China’s civil service examinations being based on rote memory of literary classics, see section IV-5.B and its sources.

10. • Derk Bodde reviewed the decline of sports in ancient China in [Bodde 91:292-8]; Wrestling-like events called the “competitive games” were abolished in 44BC and largely forgotten. A Chinese kick-ball game called ts’u chu was popular up to the T’ang and early Sung dynasties, and then faded out. There was a similar decline with other sports such as a tug-of-war and polo.

11. • See section IV-1.B and its sources.

12. • “It is a major thesis in van Gulik’s 1961 study of Chinese sexual life that Confucian puritanism assumed prominence only from the thirteenth century (late Sung dynasty) onward and became an obsession only during the Ch’ing dynasty (1644-1911), when the Chinese “showed a nearly frantic desire to keep their sexual life secret from all outsiders.” Before the thirteenth century, he maintains, the ancient sex manuals continued to be widely studied, the separation of the sexes was not strictly enforced, and sexual relations were freely talked and written about…
I am very skeptical that a change in thinking of this magnitude, if indeed it was as great as van Gulik indicates, could have been sparked by such a relatively short-lived situation. Rather I believe that it was part of a much longer and slower process of social and intellectual change that had begun already in the late T’ang (618-906) or early Sung (960-1279) times and continued into and beyond the Mongol period. Van Gulik himself points to indications of change in sexual attitudes beginning long before the Mongol invasion. One was the growing practice of female footbinding (tenth century onward), which brought dancing by women to an end. Another was the change in feminine fashion that began during the Southern Sung, resulting in the formerly bare throats and lowcut bosoms of the ladies being covered by a short jacket worn under the outer robe and buttoned in front with a high tight collar.
Intellectually, the growth of prudishness can hardly be divorced from the rise of Neo-Confucianism (eleventh century onward)…” [Bodde 91:277-8]
; “More broadly, however, the decline of portraiture [most popular during the T’ang dynasty] may perhaps be seen as another indication of the posited shift from the allegedly greater freedom of T’ang and pre-T’ang China to the tightening controls of Neo-Confucian China.” [289]

————

C. Europe developed rapidly, surpassing China’s general technological level by 1500.

Modern European cities and nation-states began taking shape during the 11th and 12th centuries [1]. As there was now a surplus to trade, commercial and banking systems developed [2]. Grand castles and Gothic cathedrals began to rise, such as Wartburg (1067), Canterbury (1180), and Chartres (1220). Venerable universities were founded, such as Bologna (1088), Oxford (1096), and Paris (1150). These at first translated the works of the Classical Greco-Roman world, but were aggressively curious and soon breaking new ground, e.g. in astronomy, optics, and medicine [3]. By about 1200, Europe’s economy “had absorbed most of what Islam and the Orient had to offer” and began to pull ahead [4], exporting high-grade woolens, metal utensils, and weapons to the east [5]. In the 13th century, Europe’s cities began to rival those of Asia [6], as did its technology, with the inventions of eyeglasses, mechanical clocks, and heavy cannon at around 1300 [7]. Between 1400 and 1500 European surpassed the Chinese general technological level, especially in technologies based on creative design [8].

1. • “[I]n the 11th and 12th centuries [cities] began to abandon their old roles of military headquarters and administrative centers as they filled with the life of commerce and industry. Some, like Genoa, once Roman villages, mushroomed, while others, like Venice, appeared out of nowhere.” [Gies 94:107]
• “The Dark Ages in Europe were giving way to the High Middle Ages. “Our modern states, literatures, laws, cities, and universities had begun by the twelfth century.”” [Deming 10:114-5]

2. • ““Our modern states, literatures, laws, cities, and universities had begun by the twelfth century.” There was now a surplus to trade, and commerce began to grow. Merchants emerged as a distinct class, and strove to take their place in society along with nobles and clergy.” [Deming 10:114-5]
• “From the eleventh century onward there was remarkable development in business techniques. The list of innovations is long: one need only consider the organization of the fairs, the appearance and spread of trading manuals, the evolution of new techniques of accounting, the check, the endorsement, insurance, and so on. From the eleventh to the sixteenth century Italy was the birthplace of most of these innovations. Even the monks took an interest in business: Father Luca Pacioli sent to press in 1494 a famous treatise on accounting, and Father Bernardino da Feltre thought up and organized the Monti di Pietà, later to become important credit institutions. ” [Cipolla 80:193-4]
; “[D]uring the Middle Ages, the Hanseatics in the north also made considerable progress in business techniques. The story of their forms of partnership—the sendeve, the vera societas, the contrapositio, and the complete partnership—parallels southern European developments. A great step forward was made toward the end of the thirteenth century by the institution of business registers whose entries were publicly authenticated. The recording by merchants of their debts and contracts with a municipal guarantee was a decisive factor in the development of credit and commerce in northern Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.” [197-8]
• Gimpel discusses early development of shareholding companies for mill ownership in 12th to 14th century France in [Gimpel 76:20-2].
; “By the beginning of the fourteenth century, commercial and banking techniques in Florence had reached a high level of proficiency. Italian merchant capitalists were introducing rational methods of business practice: letters of payment, which could be cashed abroad for the convenience of travelers, clergy, or merchants; nonnegationable bills of exchange; double-entry bookkeeping.” [102]
• “What follows from this interpretation of the decline in interest rates from 1350 to 1450 is that the most important institutional changes, which helped bring along the very low levels of interest rates characteristic of post 1450 Western Europe, may already have occurred before 1300. As Figure 2 suggests, the first phase of the decline in interest rates took place during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when rates fell from levels that were ‘normal’ in the world economy at the time (about 30% and more) to the 10–12% that was characteristic for pre-1300 Western Europe. It is to the medieval foundations of this development, which were laid during the centuries from 950 to 1300, that we now turn for an explanation of why Western Europe in the centuries before 1300 managed to develop a set of institutions that were more efficient than those found elsewhere.” [Zanden 09a:31]

3. • “[T]he legal revolution of the twelfth century and later, along with the communal movement that acknowledged the legitimate collective character of human associations, created the framework for legally autonomous entities—namely, universities. As these new educational institutions were founded all over Europe from this era onward, the leaders of the movement imported the great scientific and philosophical heritage of the Greeks, along with supplements by Arab commentators.
The Europeans refocused the curriculum of the universities on the three philosophies: natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysics. Then they placed at the center of this new curriculum the natural books of Aristotle. These included his Physics, On the Heavens,…[etc.]. It is with these books… that we find “the treatises that formed the foundation for the Medieval conception of the physical world and its operation.”… [T]he Europeans institutionalized the study of the natural world by making it the central core of the university curriculum.
Moreover, the universities developed a system for taking up and disputing all sorts of naturalistic questions… It was based on compilations of the summaries of major physical questions as well as original treatises. This literature and its use resulted in a concerted form of skeptical probing of a large set of questions in the natural sciences—physics, astronomy, cosmology, mechanics, and so forth. These probings included questions about the ultimate constitution of nature and the conditions of its transformation. Questions were asked about whether the world is singular or plural, whether the Earth turns on its axis or is stationary, “whether every effecting thing is a cause of that which it is effecting”, whether things can happen by chance, whether a vacuum is possible, whether the natural state of an object is stationary or in motion, whether luminous celestial bodies are hot, whether the sea has tides, and so on, for virtually every known field of inquiry. It is hard to imagine a more concentrated diet of scientific questions about the natural world and how it works. On the other had, there is no evidence that Muslim scholars in the madrasas, or Chinese scholars prepping for the Civil Examinations, indulged in such skeptical probing of the natural world.” [Huff 11:150-2]
• “In the universities some of the new eyeglasses were focused on rediscovered Aristotle, of whose works two thousand manuscript copies survive from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The other Greek “authorities” were likewise copied and recopied. The attraction of Greek knowledge lay in both quantity and form. “Arranged in neat compartments, it was presented in elegant, rational, and sophisticated fashion, and it contained an enormous amount of factual information about the natural world as well as highly developed methods of investigating that world” (Richard Dales). Investigating the world was a project with immense appeal. Much as they loved Aristotle, the university scholars did not hesitate to criticize him on the basis of what they learned from their own experience. “Natural science,” said Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280), one of the luminaries of the University of Paris, “is not simply receiving what one is told, but the investigation of causes of natural phenomena.” In line with this attitude was the thirteenth-century introduction of dissection at Salerno, Bologna, and other medical schools.” [Gies 94:227-9]
• “By the fourteenth century the major question facing scientific intellectuals of the European Middle Ages no longer concerned simply uncovering new texts or assimilating Aristotle’s natural philosophy to scripture or even of purging Aristotle of his anti-Christian elements, but rather building on the Aristotelian paradigm and breaking new ground. Under the general conceptual framework provided by Aristotle, scholastic natural philosophers actively and creatively pursued a wide range of scientific investigations. With two translations of Ptolemy’s Almagest appearing by 1175, for example, an indigenous tradition of observational and mathematical astronomy arose in western Europe. The Alfonsine Tables (ca. 1275), calculated in an extra-university setting by the astronomers of the king of Castile, was one result, as were pathbreaking though ineffectual calls for calendar reform. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe figures among the astronomical works of the fourteenth century, Chaucer being better known, of course, for his poetical writings. Translation in the 1130s of Ptolemy’s great work in astrology, the Tetrabiblos, actually preceded his purely astronomical text by half a century… Moreover, building on a strong Islamic tradition and propelled by the religious connotations associated with “light,” medieval investigators carried on research in optics, including improved understanding of vision and the rainbow. In the realm of mathematics, Leonard of Pisa (ca. 1170–1240), known as Fibonacci, introduced Europeans to “Arabic” (actually Indian) numerals and sophisticated algebraic problems in his Liber abaci of 1228. A number of works attributed to Jordanus de Nemore (ca. 1220) took up mechanical questions concerning statics and a “science of weight” in the thirteenth century. The translation and assimilation of the medical treatises of Galen, the great Roman physician of late antiquity, revitalized medical theory and practice after 1200, as did the creation of medical faculties, which became separate centers of science within the medieval university alongside the arts faculty. Closely associated with developments in medieval medicine and Aristotelian traditions in biology and natural history, a number of more narrowly scientific texts appeared which touched on the life sciences, notably in works by Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus, 1200–80), On Vegetables and On Animals… The men who undertook inquiries into nature in the Middle Ages were hardly monolithic in approach or slavishly Aristotelian in outlook. Rather, the record reveals a diversity of often conflicting points of view and approaches to studying nature…” [McClellan 06:188-9]
; “Considering its rise out of the impoverished institutional and intellectual circumstances of the early Middle Ages in Europe, late medieval science seems remarkably productive in the rational study of nature and in exploring the limits of Aristotelian natural philosophy. The European Middle Ages created a new institutional foundation in the European university and an intellectual foundation in bringing a critical review of Aristotelian science to Europe.” [191]
• Unlike Chinese schools, European universities had sufficient independence from the state to seek objective truths; see section II-8.C and its sources.
; “No other civilization conferred the privileges of a corporation to institutions of higher learning wherein reason could find a “neutral space” of free inquiry. Grant convincingly shows that medieval Europe was the first civilization to “institutionalize reason” within self-governing universities which offered a curriculum “overwhelmingly oriented toward analytical subjects: logic, science, mathematics, and natural philosophy”… In the numerous universities that flourished in Europe in the 12th century, the ethos of science and commitment to rational dialogue based on logic, evidence, and experimentation was nurtured… but once Europeans translated and elaborated Greek and Islamic texts, they went on to develop a uniquely quantitative conception of the world according to number, weight, and measure. From Roger Bacon (d. 1292) to Jean Buridan (1295–1358), from Nicolas d’Oresme (1325–82) to Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64)… medieval thinkers anticipated Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo.” [Duchesne 11a:276-7]
• Though Europe’s early scholars were largely Judeo-Christian, they believed that in studying nature’s laws they were studying God’s laws; see section IV-6.B and its sources.
; “Both astrology and alchemy remained sources of interest to intellectuals long after the Middle Ages, but the importance of the magical element in medieval science has been exaggerated. “The striking thing about the (twelfth) century,” in the words of Richard Dales, “is the attitudes of its scientists…daring, original, inventive, skeptical of traditional authorities…determined to discover purely rational explanations of natural phenomena,” in short, portending “a new age in the history of scientific thought.”” [Gies 94:164]

4. • “At some time around the twelfth century, Islam lost its momentum, and technological supremacy eventually passed to their Christian enemies north of the Pyrenees, who were equally capable of borrowing technology from others, and turned out to be better at creating their own. The West, initially far behind, was equally willing to learn from other cultures, but never lost its capacity to improve upon and refine others’ ideas, applying them in new combinations, adapting them to novel usages, and eventually surpassing the original ideas to the point where the original inventing society had to borrow their own ideas back, often unrecognizably altered and improved… By about 1200, the economies of Western Europe had absorbed most of what Islam and the Orient had to offer. From then on, they pulled ahead mostly on their own steam. Despite a temporary setback in the fourteenth century, a string of brilliant inventions between 1200 and 1500 prepared the way for Europe’s eventual technological leadership.” [Mokyr 90:43-4]

5. • “Where Europe had formerly exported “low-grade, backward-area” products such as slaves and furs, by Leif Ericsson’s time [1000 AD] it had begun shipping textiles and metal products to Africa and the Near East, and even to Asia. By 1200 it was sending high-grade woolens to Alexandria, Constantinople, and farther east, as well as bar iron, copper ingots, utensils, and arms and armor. Returning ships carried grain to Europe’s cities from Sicily and North Africa. A notable import was chemicals, especially alum, used by dyers to fix colors in the ever-expanding wool cloth industry.” [Gies 94:107]
• “[T]he composition of international trade between East and West seems to point to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the period when Europe asserted its superiority. In the twelfth century the West still exported to the East mostly raw materials (iron, timber, pitch) and slaves, and imported manufactures and raw materials. The Near East had, at the time, flourishing paper, soap, and textile manufactures. By the fourteenth century the situation had completely changed. In the second half of the thirteenth century the court of Byzantine, which had until then used paper imported from Arab countries, began to use paper imported from Italy; by the middle of fourteenth century the textiles and soaps of Syria and Egypt were no longer a match for the manufactures of the West. Soap, paper, and especially textiles were now transported in increasing quantities from the West to the East.
One of the main reasons for European success, at least in the paper and textile industry, was the mechanization of the productive process by the adoption of the water mill – a step that the Arabs failed to accomplish. According to Al-Makrizi, the imported European textiles were often of a cheaper sort than the traditional fine Oriental ones, but they cost much less and even the people belonging to the upper classes began to dress in garments made of the Western materials.
By the fifteen century, Western glass was also widely exported to the Near East…including mosque lamps…” [Cipolla 80:221-2]

6. • “In the prosperous thirteenth century, European cities began for the first time to rival in size and importance those of the classical world and contemporary Asia. Paris, London, Ghent, Bruges, Cologne, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, and others now sheltered behind their battlemented walls large and growing populations of craftsmen and merchants living lives free from feudal subjection, if not from modern tax oppression.” [Gies 94:186]
• “By 1300 the population of Europe to the Ural Mountains trebled to 79 million from a low of 26 million in 600. Paris increased in population by more than 10 times to 228,000 in 1300, and then to 280,000 in 1400.” [McClellan 06:179]

7. • “The thirteenth century saw the diffusion of the Universities and of the Gothic cathedrals, the aesthetic revolution brought about by Giotto and Cimabue, the voyages of the Polos to China and the first effort by Europeans to sail around the west coast of Africa, searching for a sea passage to the East; the second half of the century saw the making of the first cannon. It was not entirely by chance that the mechanical clock and the canon appeared at approximately the same time. Both were the product of a remarkable growth in the number and quality of metal workers, and as we shall see later, many of the early clockmakers were also gunfounders.” [Cipolla 78:39-40]
• On the European invention of eyeglasses, see section V-2.G.5 and its sources.
• On the European invention of mechanical clocks, see section V-2.G.3 and its sources.
• On the European invention of the first effective, heavy cannon, see section V-2.G.6 and its sources.

8. • “Europe 1400: The fourteenth century ended on a somber note, the Black Death paying one of its return visits to Europe that had not yet recovered from its earlier devastations… Yet under the surface, and despite calamities both substantive and superficial, Europe had advanced to a point where it at last rivaled Asia as a center of civilization. In power sources, industrial organization, architecture, shipbuilding, and weaponry, it had absorbed its many borrowings and synthesized them with its own inventions to create a technical apparatus far beyond that of the ancient civilizations that gave it birth.” [Gies 94:235]
; “[T]he fifteenth century has an unmistakably revolutionary demeanor, with its gunpowder artillery, its printed books, its transoceanic voyages, and its flowering of art. The manysided development at long last carried Europe past Asia to world leadership in technology, at a moment when one element of that advance, the full-rigged ship, was suddenly [bringing the world together].” [237-8]
• “In the summer of 1338 the cargo of a galley which set sail from Venice to the East included a mechanical clock, a symbolic beginning of the export of machinery reflecting the incipient technological supremacy of the West… A few decades [after 1500] the Byzantine Cardinal Bessarion wrote to Constantine Paleologus, urging him to send young Greeks to Italy to learn Western techniques in the fields of mechanics, iron metallurgy, and the manufacture of arms. Soon after the arrival of the Portuguese ships in Canton in 1517, the scholar-official Wang-Hong wrote that “the westerns are extremely dangerous because of their artillery. No weapon ever made since memorable antiquity is superior to their cannon.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the situation which had prevailed five centuries earlier was completely reversed: Western Europe had become the most developed area. As Lynn White wrote, “The Europe which rose to global dominance about 1500 had an industrial capacity and skill vastly greater than that of any of the cultures of Asia—not to mention Africa or America—which it challenged.”” [Cipolla 80:222-3]
• “By the later part of the fifteeth century, Europe was equipped not only with sources of power far more diversified than those known to any previous culture, but also with a arsenal of technical means for grasping, guiding, and utilizing such energies which was immeasurably more varied and skilful than any people of the past had possessed, or than was known to any contemporary society of the Old World or the New. The expansion of Europe from 1492 onward was based in great measure upon Europe’s high consumption of energy, with consequent productivity, economic weight, and military might. But mechanical power has no meaning apart from mechanisms to harness it. Beginning probably with the fulling mill on the Serchio in 983, the eleventh and twelfth centuries had applied the came to a great variety of operations. The thirteenth century discovered spring and tweadle; the fourteenth century developed gearing to levels of incredible complexity; the fifteenth century, by elaborating crank, connecting-rod, and governor, vastly facilitated the conversion of reciprocating into continuous rotary motion. Considering the generally slow tempo of human history, this revolution in machine design occurred with startling rapidity.” [White 62:128-9]
• “In 1500 AD, Western Europe has completed the transition and is the most advanced of the four great civilizations with an average overall [technological] adoption level of 0.94. China remains ahead of most countries with an overall adoption level of 0.88.” [Comin 10]
• “‘Northwest Europe [in the late Medieval period] led in the development of non-agricultural productivity concentrated in the capital-goods and knowledge-intensive sectors’, and had, in fact, an early comparative advantage in ‘high-tech’ products, which required large amounts of human and physical capital. This comparative advantage in high-tech and highly skilled work had important long-term consequences. For example, it meant enlarged capabilities for producing guns and ships and
other weaponry, and in this way formed the basis of the ‘military revolution’ of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which made it possible to conquer and rule increasingly large parts of the globe. It made possible the rapid adoption of a new ‘high-tech’ mode of producing and disseminating information: the printing press, ‘invented’ by Gutenberg in the 1450s, which laid the basis for a rapidly growing industry that was to transform the ‘knowledge economy’ of Western Europe.” [Zanden 08:22-3]
• “In early 1500, less than six months after da Gama’s triumphal return, the Portuguese sent out a second fleet to the Indies—thirteen ships this time and one thousand two hundred men, including soldiers—under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabrai. They sent him to make money and told him not to look for trouble; but if a hostile vessel should try to do him harm, he was not to let it come near, but rather to stand off and blow it out of the water…
The Asians, so much more numerous than the Portuguese, also richer and in many ways more civilized, would not have understood this, could not have imagined it. Yet there it was: Europe could now plant itself anywhere on the surface of the globe within reach of naval cannon.
This decisive superiority of European armament in 1500, along with other technological advantages already discussed, sticks in the craw of scholars who want to believe that European global hegemony was a lucky accident.” [Landes 98:89]
; “On the possibility of continued Chinese maritime expansion, for example, one has to consider the possibility of violence, of competition decided by force. On the surface, the Chinese were immeasurably stronger and richer. Who could stand up to them? Yet reality ran the other way. The Chinese had learned the secret of gunpowder before the Europeans, but the Europeans had better guns and greater fire­power, especially at a distance. The Chinese had bigger ships, but the Europeans were better navigators. If we compare the two sides around 1400, the Chinese might have come out on top, at least in the Indian Ocean or South China Sea. (Even a strong animal has trouble defeating his weaker prey close to home.) But fifty years later, even in Asian waters, the Europeans would have run circles around the Chinese vessels.” [98]

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D. The bases of Whites’ technological superiority: creative utilization and creative design.

Whites’ superior technological creativity, based in Whites’ greater explorative drive and creative/analytic intelligence (sections III-IV), manifests itself in two basic ways: 1) More extensive utilization and development of basic discoveries and inventions (synthesis), and 2) Superior design of apparatuses having variable structure that effectively yield a goal-type, such as *large and sturdy* buildings and *fast and accurate* projectiles (analysis).

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E. Basic devices are as good as the creative uses made of them; Whites developed and utilized key devices more robustly than did Chinese.

Basic discoveries and inventions are only as good as the uses made of them. In some cases a discovery, such as a lodestone or gunpowder, must be adapted to some useful purpose(s) before it has any real value. A new device must be creatively modified, innovated, and perfected before its full potential can be realized for maximum applications in a maximum range of contexts. A discovery or device that appears in one nation might be discarded or lie dormant because its people know not what to make of it, while the same discovery/device stimulates a boom of innovations in another nation capable of exploiting it [1]. There are only so many basic discoveries and core inventions that could have been made prior to Europe’s Scientific Revolution (~1600), and the old civilization of China had acquired or made most of them by the time Europe became an urban civilization. However, Europeans greatly increased the utility of many of them through creative adaptation, innovation, and precise crafting [2].

In medieval Europe, watermill and windmill power, in conjunction with mechanical devices such as the compound crank, camshaft, screw threads, and gearing, was extended to a wide variety of productive uses, making Europe “the first great civilization not to be run primarily by human muscle power” [3]. Clocks were made self-powered and portable, improving the way Europeans ordered and measured their work [4]. The compass was made into a compact, portable instrument that stimulated a revolution in navigation; it also spawned the science of magnetism that led to electrical power [5]. The printing press was made into a versatile mass production machine that stimulated a communications revolution [6]. Guns were made into effective and powerful weapons [7]. Ships were made that mastered the tempestuous oceans, discovered the world, and facilitated transcontinental trade [8]. Meanwhile, Chinese innovation with these devices and others stalled out or even regressed [9]. Early Chinese savants had knowledge of optics, but Europeans utilized optics to invent eyeglasses and quickly developed them into telescopes and microscopes. These instruments opened up new realms of knowledge and technology to Europeans, while the Chinese after receiving them barely used them [10].

1. • “The historical record is replete with inventions that have remained dormant in a society until at last—usually for reasons which remain mysterious—they ‘awaken’ and become active elements in the shaping of a culture to which they are not entirely novel…
As our understanding of the history of technology increases, it becomes clear that a new device merely opens a door; it does not compel one to enter. The acceptance or rejection of an invention, or the extent to which its implications are realized if it is accepted, depends quite as much upon the condition of a society, and upon the imagination of its leaders, as upon the nature of the technological item itself.” [White 62:28]

2. • “What Bacon could label in Jacobean times as the three greatest inventions known to man — compass, gunpowder and printing — all derived from China. Yet it was Europe that brought them to a high pitch, employed them productively on a wide scale, and generally in technology and science came to surpass its mentors.” [Jones 87:57-8]
• See the [Mokyr 03:22] citation, below.
• “Europe always proved extraordinarily receptive, and the enthusiastic curiosity of a Marco Polo is evidence of this open-minded attitude. But this is not the whole story. From the twelfth century onward, western Europe developed an original inventiveness which manifested itself in a rapid crescendo of new ideas. Spectacles, the mechanical clock, artillery, new types of sailing ships and new navigational techniques, together with a thousand other innovations big and small, were the original product of European experimental curiosity and imagination. It must also be noted that when Europe absorbed new ideas from outside, it did not do so in a purely passive and imitative manner, but often adapted them to local conditions or to new uses with distinct elements of originality.” Cipolla then reviews windmills, gunpowder, printing, and mechanics. [Cipolla 80:180]
• “One other question to raise about the reception of Asian techniques in Europe is not just the fact that they stimulated fresh innovation, resulting in the cannon and (if it is not an Islamic invention) the silk-throwing machine. Beyond that, one must enquire about the extraordinary vigour with which some inventions were developed. A partial explanation relates to social institutions. Europe was a collection of small states and self-governing cities. Some Italian towns not only recruited their own volunteer soldiers but commissioned improved types of weapon. What amounted to an ‘arms race’ in Italy after 1300 led to improvements in crossbows, plate armour and guns.
However, while an arms race and commercial competition may go a long way to explain the energetic inventive activity of the period, there was also a quality of imagination in what was achieved which suggests stimulus from other sources also, including perhaps cosmological and religious ideas. Some projects evidently had a strong appeal for the people working on them, possibly because they were tied up with ideas of that kind. In a previous generation, this had been very much the case for the people who built the great cathedrals of Europe, with the complex technical problems of construction which that involved. One can well understand how the cathedrals embodied ideas about the relationship of earth and heaven, and so became symbols expressive of the dreams of their builders.
Similarly, the very obvious symbolism of a clock as a direct representation of the sun and stars is related to the great appeal which these mechanisms had for some people. It helps to explain the immense effort devoted to the development of weight-driven clocks in Europe from about 1300.
The question which next arises is whether any of the same symbols and imaginative themes extended to the other great technological project of the period, the development of guns…” [Pacey 90:52]

3. • “European engineers developed a fascination for new machines and new sources of power, and they adopted and developed novel methods of generating and harnessing it. Indeed, medieval Europe became the first great civilization not to be run primarily by human muscle power. The most outstanding example concerns the development of water-powered machines and their incorporation into the fabric of village life and European society generally. The waterwheel became widely used to wring energy from the profusion of streams that run through many parts of Europe, and it powered a variety of other machines including sawmills, flour mills, and hammer mills. In some districts windmills increased cropland by reclaiming land from the sea…
Anonymous medieval engineers also used wind to turn windmills and tidal flow to drive tidal mills. In so doing they mastered older kinds of mechanical gearing and linkage and invented new ones. Europeans perfected water- and wind-driven mills, the spring catapult (or trebuchet), and a host of other devices, and in so doing they drew on new sources of nonhuman motive power. Their civilization was literally driven by comparatively more powerful “engines” of wind and water which tapped more energy of one sort or another than anywhere else in the world.” [McClellan 06:180-1]
• “By the later part of the fifteeth century, Europe was equipped not only with sources of power far more diversified than those known to any previous culture, but also with a arsenal of technical means for grasping, guiding, and utilizing such energies which was immeasurably more varied and skilful than any people of the past had possessed, or than was known to any contemporary society of the Old World or the New. The expansion of Europe from 1492 onward was based in great measure upon Europe’s high consumption of energy, with consequent productivity, economic weight, and military might. But mechanical power has no meaning apart from mechanisms to harness it. Beginning probably with the fulling mill on the Serchio in 983, the eleventh and twelfth centuries had applied the cam to a great variety of operations. The thirteenth century discovered spring and treadle; the fourteenth century developed gearing to levels of incredible complexity; the fifteenth century, by elaborating crank, connecting-rod, and governor, vastly facilitated the conversion of reciprocating into continuous rotary motion. Considering the generally slow tempo of human history, this revolution in machine design occurred with startling rapidity.” [White 62:128-9]
• “In waterpower, radical improvements came early. During the Merovingian and Carolingian eras (seventh to tenth centuries) better and bigger water-wheels spread through Europe. Medieval Europe not only produced the more efficient overshot wheel, but also adapted and improved the gearing of both horizontal and vertical waterwheels, making it possible to use wheels on both rapidly flowing and slower flowing streams… They applied cams, and later cranks, to convert the circular motion of waterwheels into the reciprocating motion needed for hammering, fulling, and crushing. The cam had been known in antiquity but had apparently not been combined with the waterwheel. The crank was in all likelihood a medieval invention. The result was that the waterwheel was transformed from an occasional device used for grinding flour into a ubiquitous source of energy operating on rivers of every type… The waterwheel may not have been invented in medieval Europe, but it was there that its use spread far beyond anything seen in earlier times.” [Mokyr 90:34-5]
• For more on Europe’s much greater development of the cam, see the [Gimpel 76:13-15] citation, below.
• “The water mill, along with the windmill and more efficient harnesses for horses, are said to have constituted a power revolution that set medieval civilization apart from all earlier ones. For the first time in history, a great civilization was built on nonhuman power. Slaves did not bear the burden of medieval economic and social life because new power sources were developed to take the place of slave labor.” [Basalla 88:147; see 146-9]
• “The Persian windmill was built with a vertical axis. The windmill that spread throughout Europe, the type we know today, with great sails and a horizontal axis, was a much more efficient machine than the original conceived by the Persians…
One of the original features of western technological development after the twelfth century was the increasing emphasis placed on the mechanical aspects of technology. There was a real passion for the mechanization of all productive processes. In the Forez by 1251, there existed a mill to grind mustard, and by the end of the Middle Ages mechanical clockwork had been successfully applied to the roasting of meats.” [Cipolla 80:180-1]
• On medieval European advances in power machinery and mechanics, see section V-2.G.2 and its sources.

4. • “Medieval Europe gave new importance to reliable time. The Church first, with its seven daily prayer offices, one of which, matins, was in spite of its name a nocturnal rite and required an alarm arrangement to wake clerics before dawn… And then the new cities and towns had their temporal servitudes. Squeezed by their walls, they had to know and order time in order to organize collective activity and ration space. They set a time to wake, to go to work, to open the market, close the market, leave work, and finally a time to put out fires (couvre-feu gives us our word “curfew”) and go to sleep.
All of this was compatible with the older devices so long as there was only one authoritative timekeeper; but with urban growth and the multiplication of time signals, discrepancy brought discord and strife. Society needed a more dependable instrument of time measurement and found it in the mechanical clock…
The clock was the greatest achievement of medieval mechanical ingenuity. Revolutionary in conception, it was more radically new than its makers knew. This was the first example of a digital as opposed to an analog device: it counted a regular, repeating sequence of discrete actions (the swings of an oscillating controller) rather than tracked continuous, regular motion such as the moving shadow of a sundial or the flow of water. Today we know that such a repeating frequency can be more regular than any continuous phenomenon, and just about all high-precision devices are now based on the digital principle. But no one could have known that in the thirteenth century, which thought that because time was continuous, it ought to be tracked and measured by some other continuity.
The mechanical clock had to meet the unsparing standards of earth and sun; no blinking or hiding its failures. The result was relentless pressure to improve technique and design. At every stage, clockmakers led the way to accuracy and precision: masters of miniaturization, detectors and correctors of error, searchers for new and better. They remain the pioneers of mechanical engineering—examples and teachers to other branches.
Finally, the clock brought order and control, both collective and personal. Its public display and private possession laid the basis for temporal autonomy: people could now coordinate comings and goings without dictation from above. (Contrast the military, where only officers need know the time.) The clock provided the punctuation marks for group activity, while enabling individuals to order their own work (and that of others) so as to enhance productivity. Indeed, the very notion of productivity is a by-product of the clock: once one can relate performance to uniform time units, work is never the same. One moves from the task-oriented time consciousness of the peasant (one job after another, as time and light permit) and the time-filling busyness of the domestic servant (always something to do) to an effort to maximize product per unit of time (time is money). The invention of the mechanical clock anticipates in its effects the economic analysis of Adam Smith: increase in the wealth of nations derives directly from improvement of the productive powers of labor…
The Chinese built a few astronomical water clocks in the Tang and Sung eras—complicated and artful pieces that may have kept excellent time in the short run, before they started clogging. (Owing to sediment, water clocks keep a poor rate over time.) These monumental machines were imperial projects, done and reserved for the emperor and his astrologers. The Chinese treated time and knowledge of time as a confidential aspect of sovereignty, not to be shared with the people. This monopoly touched both daily and year-round time. In the cities, drums and other noisemakers signaled the hours (equal to two of our hours), and everywhere the imperial calendar defined the seasons and their activities. Nor was this calendar a uniform, objectively determinable datum. Each emperor in turn had his own calendar, placed his own seal on the passage of time. Private calendrical calculation would have been pointless.
These interval hour signals in large cities were no substitute for continuing knowledge and awareness. In particular, the noises were not numerical signifiers. The hours had names rather than numbers, and that in itself testifies to the absence of a temporal calculus. Without a basis in popular consumption, without a clock trade, Chinese horology regressed and stagnated. It never got beyond water clocks, and by the time China came to know the Western mechanical clock, it was badly placed to understand and copy it.” [Landes 98:48-50]
• On European advances in clock-making, see section V-2.G.3 and its sources.

5. • On medieval European advances in compass-making and navigation, see sections V-2.G.5,8 and their sources.
• On China’s primitive knowledge of magnetism and electricity compared to Europe’s, see section V-3.D and its sources.
• “[T]he Chinese in the Song period had discovered magnetism and developed a floating needle that served as a compass. They had figured out some fairly advanced properties of magnetism such as magnetic declination…, known as early as the ninth century A.D., and magnetic remanence (acquisition of magnetic properties due to cooling), known in the 11th century. Yet the understanding of electricity seems to have eluded them, let alone the connection between electricity and magnetism.” [Mokyr 03:20-1]

6. • “In the late 1430s Johannes Gutenberg, apparently independently of developments in Asia, invented printing with movable type, and the spread of this powerful new technology after 1450 likewise altered the cultural landscape of early modern Europe. The new medium created a “communications revolution” that increased the amount and accuracy of information available and made scribal copying of books obsolete. Producing some 13,000 works by 1500, printing presses spread rapidly throughout Europe and helped to break down the monopoly of learning in universities and to create a new lay intelligentsia. Indeed, the first print shops became something of intellectual centers themselves with authors, publishers, and workers rubbing shoulders in unprecedented ways in the production of new knowledge. Renaissance humanism, that renowned philosophical and literary movement emphasizing human values and the direct study of classical Greek and Latin texts, is hardly conceivable without the technology of printing that sustained the efforts of learned humanists. Regarding science, the advent of printing and humanist scholarship brought another wave in the recovery of ancient texts.” [McClellan 06:204]
• “Block printing [used predominantly in China] limits the range and diffusion of publication. It is well suited to the spread of classic and sacred texts, Buddhist mantras, and the like, but it increases the cost and risk of publishing newer work and tends to small printings. Some Chinese printers did use movable type, but given the character of the written language and the investment required, the technique never caught on as in the West. Indeed, like other Chinese inventions, it may well have been abandoned for a time, to be reintroduced later.
In general, for all that printing did for the preservation and diffusion of knowledge in China, it never “exploded” as in Europe. Much publication depended on government initiative, and the Confucian mandarinate discouraged dissent and new ideas. Even evidence of the falsity of conventional knowledge could be dismissed as appearance. As a result, intellectual activity segmented along personal and regional lines, and scientific achievement shows surprising discontinuities. “The great mathematician Chu Shih-chieh, trained in the northern school, migrated south to Yang-chou, where his books were printed but he could find no disciples. In consequence, the more sophisticated of his achievements became incomprehensible to following generations…
In spite of printing’s manifest advantages, it was not accepted everywhere. The Muslim countries long remained opposed, largely on religious grounds: the idea of a printed Koran was unacceptable. Jews and Christians had presses in Istanbul but not Muslims. The same in India: not until the early nineteenth century was the first press installed. In Europe, on the other hand, no one could put a lid on the new technology. Political authority was too fragmented. The Church had tried to curb vernacular translations of sacred writ and to forbid dissemination of both canonical and noncanonical texts. Now it was overwhelmed. The demons of heresy were out long before Luther, and printing made it impossible to get them back in the box.” [Landes 98:51-2]
• “In Europe, by contrast, there was an explosion of books printed by movable type the moment Gutenberg published the first printed book, the Bible in 1452–55… The estimated output of incunabula (books published before 1501) came to millions: 2 million in Italy alone”. Hobson counters Landes’s argument that printing never “exploded” in China as it did in Europe by arguing that “by the end of the fifteenth century, China probably published more books than all other countries combined”. This is misleading; the issue under debate is the printing revolution: China did not print more books. By 1480, twelve years after Gutenberg’s death, there were fifty printing towns in Italy, thirty in Germany, nine in France, eight in Spain, five in Belgium and Switzerland, and four in England. By 1500, Europe’s presses had printed eight million books (Eisenstein 1993: 13–17). Just between 1518 and 1520, the thirty tracts or so Luther wrote were distributed in 300,000 printed copies. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Venetian presses had produced some 20,000 titles, including maps, musical scores, medical manuals, and a flood of new secular learning.” [Duc4 179-81]
• “The newspaper itself appeared in 1666 (the first being the London Gazette). It was larger, printed on half sheets in two columns on both sides. Once the newspaper press emerged in the middle of the seventeenth century, it has not stopped since. As the historian of English newspapers, Joad Raymond, put it, the arrival of the newsbook (in 1640) set in motion an “avalanche, which, with no more than a few weeks of interruption,” continues rolling right up to this morning…
[I]n contrast to this, no newspapers emerged either in China or the Muslim world until the early or late nineteenth century, when British or other Western exemplars were taken as models… In China the first newspaper modeled on British exemplars did not appear until the 1840s. The long tradition of book printing using woodblock technology that had existed in China since the eighth century failed to give rise to the newspaper.” [Huff 11:306-7]
• On Europe’s vastly higher book production and literacy rates than China from the late medieval period on, see section V-3.G and its sources.
• “Paper was invented in China, and its manufacture spread to the Muslim Empire in the course of the eighth century, probably after the Arabs conquered the city of Samarkand in AD 753… The Byzantines, typically conservative, never learned how to manufacture paper. The Europeans learned the technique during the thirteenth century. The appearance of the first paper factories at Xátiva and at Fabriano represented the transplantation into Europe of an idea born elsewhere. But while the production of paper outside Europe remained at the level of manual production, it is typical that, in the West, the pulp was processed by machines driven by water mills. Printing was invented by the Chinese, but by the end of the twelfth century the Europeans had turned it into an extremely efficient mass production process.” [Cipolla 80:180]
• On medieval European advances in the printing press, see section V-2.G.4 and its sources.

7. • The Chinese apparently made the first “guns”, but they were too primitive to be effective weapons. European made the first effective cannon and hand guns; see section V-2.G.6 and its sources.
• “Though the Chinese invented gunpowder, they used it mostly for fireworks. The adoption of gunpowder by Europeans was accompanied by the manufacture of firearms, the construction of which rapidly improved, so much so that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the Europeans arrived in China aboard their galleons, the Chinese were astounded and terrified by western guns.” [Cipolla 80:180]
• “As to the facts: the Chinese long preceded the Europeans in the use of explosive powder, whether for display (fireworks) or use in weapons. Yet a study of their armament reveals a singular inability to enhance, by implication an indifference to, the destructive capacity of their bombards and cannon, to the point where they wreaked more fright than damage. Their very names bore witness to their inefficacy: thus we have the “nine-arrows, heart-penetrating, magically poisonous fire-thunderer,” a tube designed to blow a cluster of arrows in the direction of the enemy. Joseph Needham (1979) recognizes that these could not have gone very far, “since the gunpowder was not exerting its full propellant force.” But he conjectures that they might have some effect in close combat against lightly armored or unshielded personnel. Or the “eight-sided magical, awe-inspiring wind-and-fire cannon,” a vase-shaped bombard used to blow rubble and rubbish. Too bad those opposing these devices could not be told of their potent, magical, awe-inspiring names; they might have surrendered on the spot.” [Landes 06:19]

8. • The European Age of Discovery and mastery of the oceans since the mid-15th century is well known. On medieval European advances in ship-building and navigation, see section V-2.G.8 and its sources.

9. • A review of Chinese decline was given in section V-2.B; see particularly its source citations on China’s decline in technological innovation.
• “The mystery lies in China’s failure to realize its potential. One generally assumes that knowledge and know-how are cumulative; surely a superior technique, once known, will replace older methods. But Chinese industrial history offers examples of technological oblivion and regression. We saw that horology went backward. Similarly, the machine to spin hemp was never adapted to the manufacture of cotton, and cotton spinning was never mechanized. And coal/coke smelting was allowed to fall into disuse, along with the iron industry as a whole.” [Landes 98:55]
• “Perhaps this disinterest in theory helps explain why the Chinese failed to follow up several inventions or discoveries in which they had been pioneers. One is Chang Heng’s seismograph of AD 132, which was probably deemed more ominous than “practical” and therefore had no real successors. Another is Chu Tsai-yu’s discovery in 1584 of equal temperament in music, of which little subsequent use was made in China, whereas quite the opposite is true of the same discovery made by Simon Steven in Europe a couple of decades later… Something similar took place in the case of magnetism, of which the Chinese, with their organismic view of the universe, had long been aware. Perhaps as early as 1080, and possibly considerably earlier, they had applied the magnetic compass to navigation—a whole century or more before its first mention in Europe. Yet thereafter the Chinese made very little further progess in this field, in contrast to Gilbert’s book on magentism in 1600, and all the great consequences this entailed. Another much earlier product of Chinese organismic thinking was the “south-pointing chariot”, whose invention in the early third century AD made it the first example of a homoeostic or “constancy-maintaining” machine in any civilization. Yet this event brought with it no significant further consequences. Finally, there is Su Sung’s great astronomical clock of 1090, long predating anything comparable in the Western world. Despite this priority, Chinese clock making, unlike its European counterpart of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, never became a mass industry before the coming of the Jesuits to China.” [Bodde 91:362]
• “Although the Chinese operated trip-hammers for hulling rice as early as A.D. 290, the use of the cam evidently failed to spread to other industries in the following centuries. In fact, it is a feature of Chinese technology that its great inventions – printing, gunpowder, the compass – never played a major evolutionary role in Chinese history. The introduction of the cam into medieval industry, on the other hand, was to make a major contribution to the industrialization of the Western hemisphere.” [Gimpel 76:13-15]
• “[T]he first crank is in a Han-dynasty model (Fig. 4) from north-western Honan… which dates from not later than the end of the second Christian century… The crank in its simple rudimentary form we find in the [modern] Chinese windlass, which use of the device, however, has apparently not given the impulse to change reciprocating into circular motion in other contrivances. In China the crank was known, but remained dormant for at least nineteen centuries, its explosive potential for applied mechanics being unrecognized and unexploited.” [White 62:104]
• “The emergence of a minimum epistemic base is therefore a necessary but insufficient condition for a new technique to be made. Even with the knowledge, techniques could fail to emerge when this knowledge was confined to a small number of people who were uninterested in or ignorant of technical problems in production, and when the knowledge was inaccessible to those most in need of it. Expressions like “the Chinese had knowledge of…” are thus misleading. In the late eleventh century, someone in China could make the Su Sung clock, a model of enormous horological sophistication. Yet unlike Europe, no class of clock- and watchmakers emerged in China, the epistemic base of the waterclocks under the Song disappeared. Here, then, is a case in which a society was able to produce the knowledge, but the opportunity was lost. After 800 AD, cases in which knowledge in Europe is “lost” become rare. More typical is for an invention or insight to emerge somewhere and then spread throughout much of the continent. This is what happened with mechanical clocks, windmills, Arabic numerals, printing, and the new geography after 1450.” [Mokyr 03:22]

10. • On medieval European advances in eyeglasses-making, see section V-2.G.5 and its sources.
• On the Chinese lack of interest in the telescope and microscope, see section IV-1.A and its sources.
• “It was because traditional China did not provide the necessary intellectual zeal to sustain enduring systematic, rational, and causal inquiries about nature, that we encounter repeated instances where some topic was picked up by an interested scholar but then was subsequently disregarded. That is why Chinese geometrical optics, and physics in general, could never proceed beyond several elementary and imprecise statements.” [Qian 85:59-60]
• “[B]y 1630, Chinese specialists “had available to them a rich toolkit of computational techniques, and a view of the cosmos that modified the ‘spherical heavens’ system.” They also had “the latest precision instruments that went beyond those available to the Gregorian reformers in Europe a generation earlier. In addition to that, they now had Kepler’s new optical theory and, by the 1650s, the new trigonometry of Europe as well as logarithms. Beyond that, all those associated with the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy [trained by Europeans] had the practical experience of building and testing new instruments and then using those instruments to test two different theories of observational astronomy…
Given all these innovations and aids to understanding the new astronomy [by Whites], along with the telescopic discovery machine, one might have expected the presumed excellence of the Chinese in science to have propelled them forward in the seventeenth century, making significant discoveries and laying the foundations for a unified celestial and terrestrial physics. One might also have expected them to make innovations with regard to the telescope such as the invention of longer and more powerful telescopes produced by Europeans from the 1640s onward. Some Chinese scholars took a great interest in the new Western mathematics and astronomy, as historians have reported, Some minor celestial discoveries were made, but no significant astronomical innovations were forthcoming, nor were any innovations made regarding the telescope. The main drift of scholars close to the emperor was toward severely restricting the use of the new natural studies and attempting to prove that underneath the Western successes, there was really a Chinese past.” [Huff 11:97-8; see 110-1]

————

F. Whites surged ahead in technological fields based on creative design; China retained a lead in fields based on subtle knowledge and experience.

Whites excel at technologies for which a broad range of creative designs can be applied to optimize the attainment of a certain goal type. Such goals include *large and sturdy, yet elegant* buildings (architecture), *strong, efficient, and continuous* application of force (power machinery and mechanics), *precise and coordinated* shaping and fitting of parts (metal craftsmanship and instrument-making), *automated and regular* keeping of time (clock-making), *clear and expansive* magnification of vision (visual instruments), *fast and accurate* propulsion of projectiles (weaponry), and *deep and extensive* excavation of earth and water (mining). In these key industrial fields, Europe surpassed China by 1500. They are each reviewed in the next section.

While Europe surged ahead in technological fields based on creative design, a Chinese superiority lingered for a while in fields based on long experience and skill with sophisticated manufacturing processes [1]. These processes were typically based on knowledge of complex molecular interactions, such as organic growth in agriculture and material mixtures in ceramics and metallurgy; and/or privileged access to key materials, such as China’s native cotton, tea, and silkworm moths [2], and more arable soil [3]. The two principal fields in which China retained a lead were agriculture and ceramics. China also continued to lead in some aspects of metallurgy (i.e. ‘cooking recipes’ of metals and minerals) [4], and of textiles (weaving high-end fabrics). But Europeans gradually discovered China’s little ‘trade secrets’ or developed alternatives [5], and by 1770 on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, no really significant Chinese advantages remained. White science would soon thereafter penetrate deeply enough to allow creative design even in the organic and chemical technologies.

1. • “Europe unmistakably had a technological advantage in some sectors already before industrialization, for example, in mining, clock making, and the making of guns, but so had, overall, the East in, for example, irrigation, land management, and heating. That Europe had an advantage in some sectors of production that during industrialization proved to be of immense importance needs no comment.” [Vries 01:415-6]
; “[T]he Western lead emerged and developed in particular in sectors that had most potential for increasing productivity like energy, capital goods (iron, later on steel and building materials) and weaponry. I am certainly not claiming the existence of an overall and clear Western lead. Compared with China, for example, Britain’s agriculture produced much less per acre of land. China was rightly famous for its porcelain and silk production. In various respects its economy was much less wasteful.” [Vries 13:311]
; “China’s technology in various important industrial branches, for instance the production of various textiles, porcelain and lacquer-ware, was anything but lagging behind, on the contrary. Here Britain in the eighteenth century still had a lot of catching-up to do. The Britons on the other hand, clearly entered that century with an advantage when it came to making mechanical instruments, clocks and cannons and in mining and using coal… British technology and science at the time simply were much more preoccupied with energy and mechanics than Chinese technology and science. In these fields, the ones that would really matter in industry, they were more advanced.” [Vries 03:49-50]
• “Arguably, by 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines such as clocks, screws, levers, and pulleys that would be applied increasingly to the mechanization of agricultural and industrial production. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, Europeans still sought the technological secrets for silk production, textile weaving, porcelain making, and large-scale tea production from the Chinese. Chinese literati in turn, before 1800, borrowed from Europe new algebraic notations (of Hindu-Arabic origins), Tychonic cosmology, Euclidean geometry, spherical trigonometry, and arithmetic and trigonometric logarithms.” [Elman 05:xxxi-ii]

2. • “The key to understanding the great mystery and magic of silk, and China’s domination of its production and promotion, lies with one species: the blind, flightless moth, Bombyx mori. It lays 500 or more eggs in four to six days and dies soon after. The eggs are like pinpoints – one hundred of them weigh only one gram. From one ounce of eggs come about 30,000 worms which eat a ton of mulberry leaves and produce twelve pounds of raw silk. The original wild ancestor of this cultivated species is believed to be Bombyx mandarina Moore, a silk moth living on the white mulberry tree and unique to China. The silkworm of this particular moth produces a thread whose filament is smoother, finer and rounder than that of other silk moths…”
• www.silk-road.com/artl/silkhistory.shtml
• “Tea literally was a ‘manu-factured’ product (i.e. a hand-made product), the production of which required extensive expertise and experience but in which ‘advanced technology’, in the form of complex implements or ‘machines’ of any kind, played no role. China’s excellent export position was not so much caused by the sophistication of its productive technology – although tea-growing and -producing is anything but easy – as by the fact that at the time China had all but a monopoly on growing tea plants.” [Vries 15:371]

3. • See section V-1.C and its sources.

4. • An example of this is Chinese manufacture of bronze-iron composite cannon barrels, based on European design: “Although few in number there were some exceptions to the bronze and iron paradigm. Composite metal cannons were produced in the Ming and Qing dynasties during the 17th century. In China, the Ming dynasty started producing smoothbore breech loading cast-bronze cannons after the European fashion no later than 1620. However, in addition to European expertise and design, the Chinese had an advantage in their long history of metal casting practices. Two decades after the Ming started manufacturing Dutch style cannons known to the Chinese as red barbarian cannons, Ming foundries merged native casting technology with improved cannon designs to create a distinctive cannon known as the “Dingliao grand general.”… Unlike traditional iron and bronze cannons, the Dingliao grand general’rs inner barrel was made of iron, while the exterior of brass. Scholar Huang Yi-long describes the process:
‘They ingeniously took advantage of the fact that the melting temperature of copper (which is around 1000C) was lower than the casting temperature of iron (1150 to 1200C), so that just a bit after the iron core had cooled, they could then, using a clay or wax casting mold, add molten bronze to the iron core. In this way, the shrinkage that attended the cooling of the external brass would (reinforce the iron, which would) enable the tube to be able to resist intense firing pressure.'”
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder

5. • “China’s porcelain production indeed was impressive in terms of quantity as well as quality. We are talking here about a very ‘sophisticated’, one might even say ‘industrially’ produced, commodity. For a long time the Europeans, while trying fanatically, simply did not know how to produce it. The amounts imported by Westerners were so substantial that porcelain quickly lost its status as a ‘luxury’ product and became so cheap, that it began to be used as ballast in trading ships. From 1709 onwards, however, the secret of its production was unravelled and after a couple of decades Europe already made substantial amounts of it.” [Vries 15:369]
; “In ‘Californian’ publications one constantly comes across references to the huge amounts of porcelain the Chinese exported to the West, mostly with the comment that Westerners did not even know how to produce it. That is a correct observation, but this was no longer the case after 1750. Westerners by then had managed to produce porcelain and substitutes themselves, and imports from China would soon plummet.” [Vries 10:12]
• Wikipedia reviews Europe’s mastering of the secrets of porcelain production in the early 18th century:
Porcelain; European porcelain.
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcelain#European_porcelain
• In metallurgy, Europe had since medieval times led in metal craftsmanship (e.g. machine, instrument, clock, and gun making), but you’ll occasionally hear of some metal-mixing trick the Chinese knew; see the bronze-iron composite cannon barrels example, above. However, in the early- to mid-18th century, Europe forged a clear lead with the developments of coke smelting of iron and high quality crucible steel; see [Mokyr 90:93-5] and [Derry 60:140-7].
• “According to [Horesh], in the early modern era, mining and metallurgy were much better developed in Europe and its colonies. Better coinage was produced there, which in turn was exchanged in China at a premium. What Asians normally wanted was European silver coinage rather than silver. Even supposedly advanced non-European monies like those of the Mughal Empire never played a significant role outside India. He concludes that there were several ways in which ‘European coin production departed from the rest of the world, beginning as early as the thirteenth century.’” [Vries 15:265]
• “In the iron industry there is less direct evidence of [Chinese] technological decline. In 1690 there is some evidence of a cold blast being applied in steel making, a sort of proto-Bessemer converter. Yet even an admirer of Chinese technology like Needham is forced to concede that “in modern times the world has seen China as a culture of bamboo and wood” (Needham, 1964, p. 19).” [Mokyr 90:220]
• In textiles, the Chinese had a few manufacturing techniques lacked by Europe for a while, but Europe in the early 18th century produced a long series of inventions that gave them a clear lead, e.g. the flying shuttle (1733), the roller spinning (1733), the spinning jenny (1764), and the water frame (1769). [Vries 15:309]
• “The next step [in European textile manufacturing] was to mechanize spinning by somehow replicating the gestures of the hand spinner. This required simplifying by dividing: breaking up the task into a succession of repeatable processes. That seems logical enough, but it was not easy. Not until inventors applied their devices to a tough vegetable fiber, cotton, was success achieved. That took decades of trial and error, from the 1730s to the 1760s. When power spinning came to cotton, it turned industry upside down.” [Landes 98:191]
• “But how can we explain the failure of Chinese spinners to develop a proper spinning jenny? As Chao (1977) has pointed out, multispindle spinning, adopted for ramie, never found an application to cotton, where small spinning wheels spun three or four spindles, but never more. The critical element in Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, missing in Chinese cotton spinning technology, was the draw bar, a device that imitated the human hand in drawing out a large number of rovings at the same time. It seems hard to believe that such a relatively simple device never occurred to some ingenious Chinese, but if it did, there is no sign of it. Similarly, the Chinese developed a treadle loom in the Ming period (1368-1644), but after that weaving remained unchanged until the end of the nineteenth century. Something like the flying shuttle, a simple device that increased the productivity of weaving by a large factor, never seems to have occurred to them.” [Mokyr 90:221]
• “Another manufactured product from China that immediately comes to mind would be silk. Again, we are talking about a highly sophisticated commodity. The last thing that I would want to do here is belittle the craftsmanship of Chinese producers. But the silk that was exported by China increasingly was raw silk, not silk clothing. A closer look at China’s exports to the West in the late eighteenth century shows that, overall, exports of silk increased over the eighteenth century. Compared to total domestic production they never became massive. The exports of silken fabrics, however, actually declined. These exports did not generate fundamental changes in China’s textile sector as a whole, nor did they become a threat to the silk industry in Europe.” [Vries 15:369-70]
• Comparing agricultural technology is of course difficult because of highly varying geological and environmental conditions, but Europe surpassed China in this department as well:
• “In agriculture, the Chinese came into contact with new crops from the American continent through Portuguese traders and Chinese settlers in the Philippines… But the major dryland staples, such as potatoes and corn, were adopted only slowly, in spite of the advantages of these crops. A specialist in ecological history… judges that Chinese progress in agriculture “in no way compares with Europes record in technological achievements.” Another historian of Chinese agriculture… states flatly that “the invention rate [in Chinese agriculture] declined sharply after 1300 and finally came to a complete halt after 1700.”” [Mokyr 90:222]
• “Pomeranz repeatedly suggests that “Europe’s”
agriculture was more backward than agriculture in “Asia.” He makes much of his claim that it failed to use land intensively and that its yields per acre were comparatively low. In growing rice, the core of the Asian system, Asia’s agriculture was much more land- and labor-intensive while its systems of irrigation were without parallel. It produced yields per acre that overall were far higher than in Europe. On the other hand, overall, Europe’s grain agriculture was more animal-intensive, and, probably, also somewhat more capital-intensive, while it was less labor-intensive. To reach some kind of meaningful conclusion we would have to agree on what, in the discussion that is being waged here, really matters. To me the answer would be how much wealth the systems generate. Then what counts is, primarily, the labor productivity and, to a lesser extent, the total factor productivity of the systems compared. People produce to consume, and the higher their labor productivity, the more there is to consume per capita. In that light it is not very illuminating to say Europe’s agriculture was somehow backward. When it comes to this absolutely fundamental sector of every pre-industrial economy, I would have liked to see more comparisons of production per capita. In England already in the beginning of the eighteenth century some 45 percent of labor was employed outside agriculture. For China as a whole this definitely was lower. Regionally, of course, huge differences will have existed. Why call this “a failure” of Britain’s agriculture? Whether it never needed to take the labor intensive road, or never wanted to, Europe’s agriculture continued to be far less labor-intensive than Asia’s, minus Japan—and Europe got away with it.
Especially when it comes to the situation in Britain, I think Pomeranz heavily underestimates the relevance of the fact that already in the seventeenth century it had so many animals, especially horses and oxen, that could be used in agriculture, in transport, and in industry. In 1695, for example, for some six million Britons there were some 1.2 million horses. The power of these horses would be equal, depending on the ratio one uses, to that of six to twelve million adult men. This, of course, is a very rough estimate, fraught with uncertainties and ignoring, for example, that many horses were just used for pleasure. But still, such an extra stock of power must have given Britain an advantage over China that simply had nothing that could function as its substitute. Britain’s per capita energy fund—provided by animals, wind, water, and coal—must, already in the early modern period, have been substantially higher than China’s.” [Vries 01:413-4]
; “At the end of the eighteenth century at least 80 per cent of the Chinese population still worked in agriculture, almost without exception on small tracts of land, which they owned or leased. Reading about Britain at the beginning of its industrialisation, in the second half of the eighteenth century, we are confronted with a completely different picture. It is claimed that in 1750 only some 40 to 45 per cent of England’s labouring population still was agricultural.” [Vries 03:31-2]

————

G. Review of Europe’s technological prowess in 1500:

1. Architecture. The crowning achievement of medieval Europe was its magnificent architecture. From the 12th century on, Europe’s great castles and cathedrals—Romanesque, Gothic, then Renaissance, soared to the skies, their towering walls glistening with exquisite sculptures and brilliant stained-glass windows [1]. Whites innovated weight-bearing structures such as cross-rib vaults and flying buttresses [2], along with lifting machinery such as counterweighted pulley hoists [3]. On the inside, chimneys, windows, plaster, and other methods were developed to counter the harsh winters [4]. While the grand buildings of Whites in Europe and elsewhere stand in their majesty for long ages, they have no counterparts or rivals in China [5]. Despite the ready availability of stone, China’s venerable buildings were made mostly of ephemeral materials such as wood and mudbrick [6].

1. • “Stained glass, as an art form, reached its height in the Middle Ages when it became a major pictorial form used to illustrate the narratives of the Bible to a largely illiterate populace.
In the Romanesque and Early Gothic period, from about 950 to 1240, the untraceried windows demanded large expanses of glass which of necessity were supported by robust iron frames, such as may be seen at Chartres Cathedral and at the eastern end of Canterbury Cathedral. As Gothic architecture developed into a more ornate form, windows grew larger, affording greater illumination to the interiors, but were divided into sections by vertical shafts and tracery of stone. This elaboration of form reached its height of complexity in the Flamboyant style in Europe, and windows grew still larger with the development of the Perpendicular style in England.
Integrated with the lofty verticals of Gothic cathedrals and parish churches, glass designs became more daring. The circular form, or rose window, developed in France from relatively simple windows with openings pierced through slabs of thin stone to wheel windows, as exemplified by the west front of Chartres Cathedral, and ultimately to designs of enormous complexity, the tracery being drafted from hundreds of different points, such as those at Sainte-Chapelle, Paris and the “Bishop’s Eye” at Lincoln Cathedral.
While stained glass was widely manufactured, Chartres was the greatest centre of stained glass manufacture, producing glass of unrivalled quality.”
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stained_glass#Origins

2. • On these and other medieval European architectural advances, see [Gies 94:130-44], [Gimpel 76:121-6], and [Deming 10:120-3].

3. • “In civil engineering, Renaissance architecture created a building boom whose principal technical advances came in lifting machinery, such as the counterweighted pulley hoist devised by Brunelleschi which allowed a rope drum to reverse and set down a load without disturbing the motion of the winch or animal treadmill and which delivered stone blocks, brick, lime, sand, and water for the cupola of the Florentine Duomo. Two pinions, an upper and a lower, could be made to connect with a large wheel, lifting the load or the counterweight.” [Gies 94:271]

4. • “The invention of the fire-grate and the chimney, the use of coal, and the making of glass with which to glaze windows all made for greater indoor climatic control. Slowly these devices trickled down from the rich man in his castle towards the poor man at the gate. The first chimney in the world, or perhaps the claim is that it is the oldest dated survival, is probably in the King’s House, Southampton, and is of the twelfth century.” [Jones 87:55]
• “Changes in construction techniques, such as the use of shingles, the use of plaster for better insulation, the use of fossil fuels, and above all the development of chimneys, testify to the ability of medieval society to struggle against the harsh winters of northern Europe.” [Mokyr 90:39]

5. • “Many tourists who have fed their knowledge on vague ideas of Eastern splendors have failed to delimit the geographical applications, and expect to find in China the sort of man-made glories that belong to India. China has no temples to compare with those to be seen elsewhere in the Orient. The pagodas are a little better, but most of them are crumbly affairs, with no stonework or decoration of any special quality. They are simply towers in the Chinese manner.
The blending of intricacy with magnitude, as seen in India and North Africa, is nowhere in China satisfactorily evident. Their best structure, as a spectacle of art, would not rank fourth place compared to what India produced in the seventeenth century, or Europe before or after the Renaissance, or the Ottoman Empire before its final decline. The average Chinese temple, a mangy affair with low roof and wooden beams, has no art about it to speak of, and inside and out is less impressive than an ordinary chop suey joint. The walls of Peiping, built by conquerors of the Chinese, make a profound impression for somber, square-faced immensity.
But there the effect is perhaps as much from the spirit of history about them and from the setting as from the walls themselves. City walls at large in China were never anything impressive as works of art or architecture, being usually of roughly fitted stones for a frame with a dirt filter. I have never seen the ruins of Aztec or Mayan cities, but photographs and reading leave the conclusion that the Chinese apogee of architectural spirit did not exceed that of those peoples. Certainly it came nowhere near that of Angkor in what is now French Indo-China. One of the most surprising features of Chinese architecture is that outstanding permanent monuments of any kind are scarce. Their temples in their heyday were rarely built for permanence, and accordingly no very old ones are to be seen. Nothing in Chinese records indicates that any particularly fine ones ever existed. The traveler looking for signs of antiquity in China will not find many in their buildings. Where Rome and Greece abound with really noble edifices standing recognizable after more than two thousand years, China has none. For a land where building stone was plentiful in areas of foremost culture, this is a strange inconsistency. Possibly their veneration for the past banished all desire to memorialize themselves for posterity in architecture. But it is odd, with their respect for graves, that no notable mausoleums were built in the past, as in India and Egypt, despite an equal abundance of cheap or free labor.” [Townsend 33:40-1]

6. • See the [Townsend 33:40-1] citation, above.
• “But the great Chinese cities did not have the solid lasting qualities of our stone-built antiquities. They were made of more ephemeral materials—of wood and tiles, and mudbrick walls. Other great cities had come and gone where the T’ang capital stood, and indeed the ruins of the Han capital were within the walls of the imperial park as a sign of the transience of mortal power… When the dynasty finally collapsed, what remained of the palace buildings, public offices, and private buildings was made into rafts and floated down to Loyang…” [Dawson 78:61]
; “Unlike the Europeans, who built their great houses and castles for lasting strength, the Chinese used more ephemeral materials. These palaces are predominantly made of wood, and frequent fires have made replacements necessary, always rendered in the same style as the original, for imperial Chinese architecture was extremely conservative in its last few centuries. Nor do the great audience halls dominate the scene as a European palace or castle often does. They fit into a subtle and harmonious pattern of courtyards, which become smaller and more intimate at the rear, where the domestic quarters are situated, but are grander to the front, where the great audience courtyard which lies below the Hall of Supreme Harmony is some two hundred yards across. Nor, despite the concentration of the main buildings on the north-south axis, is it possible to enjoy the splendid vistas great European architecture often affords.” [67]

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2. Power machinery. Medieval Europeans developed power machinery, utilizing animal, water, wind, and fossil fuel energy sources, more extensively than any other civilization [1]. This machinery was based mainly in watermills and windmills. Early civilizations including Rome and China utilized the water wheel for various purposes, but medieval Europeans extended their use more creatively than anyone; for sawing, fulling, tanning, making paper and cordage, pumping water for mines and city supply, pumping air for ventilation and forge bellows, and for cutting, shaping, boring, rolling, and drawing metal [2]. These machines utilized devices such as complex gearing, camshafts, crankshafts that converted rotary to reciprocating motion [3], and flywheels [4]. Europeans had superior machine design and construction, evident in their precision screw-based devices that China lacked, including Gutenberg’s printing press [5]. Whites also innovated more efficient and powerful overshot waterwheels [6], and pivoting, horizontal-axis windmills [7].

1. • See section V-2.E and its sources.

2. • “There was a diffusion of water-mills over northern parts of Europe which represented a tapping of inanimate energy sources. Water-mills supplied more generous and reliable power, first for milling grain, in the ninth century for making mash for beer, in the tenth century for fulling cloth, and in the twelfth century century for the metal trades. This was more ample power than was available before (grain-mills were a real advance on pestle and mortar) or than what was to be had around the Mediterranean or in Asia. Thousands of water-mills were in use by the tenth century. Whereas 40 had been constructed in Picardy by the middle of the ninth century and 1080, 50 were added by 1125 and 165 more before 1200. In England, too, the numbers continued to rise after Domesday, especially in ‘under-developed’ areas like Devon. Some tide-mills were added during the eleventh century and in the thirteenth century there was a rapid spread of wind-mills. The complex machinery and gearing in mills presumably caught the attention of all who sought solutions to mechanical problems.” [Jones 87:54]
• “In waterpower, radical improvements came early. During the Merovingian and Carolingian eras (seventh to tenth centuries) better and bigger water-wheels spread through Europe. Medieval Europe not only produced the more efficient overshot wheel, but also adapted and improved the gearing of both horizontal and vertical waterwheels, making it possible to use wheels on both rapidly flowing and slower flowing streams. Medieval engineers made much progress in the construction of dams, allowing controlled usage of water power through storage, and diverted streams to mill races. They applied cams, and later cranks, to convert the circular motion of waterwheels into the reciprocating motion needed for hammering, fulling, and crushing. The cam had been known in antiquity but had apparently not been combined with the waterwheel. The crank was in all likelihood a medieval invention. The result was that the waterwheel was transformed from an occasional device used for grinding flour into a ubiquitous source of energy operating on rivers of every type. By about 1100, waterpower was used to drive fulling mills, breweries (to prepare beer mash), trip hammers, bellows, bark crushers, hemp treatment mills, cutlery grinders, wire drawers, and sawmills. In 1086, Domesday Book listed 5,624 watermills in England south of the Severn river, or roughly 1 for every 50 households… The waterwheel may not have been invented in medieval Europe, but it was there that its use spread far beyond anything seen in earlier times.” [Mokyr 90:34-5]
• “Even more impressive is the way waterpower technique advanced. Millwrights increased pressure and efficiency by building dams and ponds and by lining the wheels up to utilize the diminishing energy for a variety of tasks, beginning with those that needed the most power, and descending. At the same time, the invention or improvement of accessory devices —cranks, toothed gears—made it possible to use the power at a distance, change its direction, convert it from rotary to reciprocating motion, and apply it to an increasing variety of tasks: hence not only grinding grain, but fulling (pounding) cloth, thereby transforming the woolen manufacture; hammering metal; rolling and drawing sheet metal and wire; mashing hops for beer; pulping rags for paper. “Paper, which was manufactured by hand and foot for a thousand years or so following its invention by the Chinese and adoption by the Arabs, was manufactured mechanically as soon as it reached medieval Europe in the thirteenth century. . . .Paper had traveled nearly halfway around the world, but no culture or civilization on its route had tried to mechanize its manufacture.” Europe, as nowhere else, was a power-based civilization.” [Landes 98:45-6]
• “Medieval millwrights and hydraulic engineers improved on the design of waterwheels and of the power dams and canals needed to bring water to them. Although this was an impressive development in itself, of still greater significance were the new uses found for waterpower in medieval industry. The Romans used waterwheels to grind their flower and lift water for irrigation purposes. By contrast, there were few aspects of medieval life that were untouched by waterpower technology. Wood was sawn, drilled, and turned by waterpowered tools; grains were ground and olives pressed in water mills; the tanning of leather, the making of paper, and the finishing of cloth employed waterpowered equipment; and mining and metallurgy depended on hammers, lifts, pumps, and bellows driven by waterpower.” [Basalla 88:147]
• “The new Cistercian reform movement launched in 1098 at Cîteaux, in Burgundy, carried on the Benedictine tradition of promoting technology by founding water powered grain mills, cloth-fulling mills, cable-twisting machinery, iron forges and furnaces (where the wheels powered the bellows), winepresses, breweries, and glassworks. The edge-runner mill, long known to China, was adopted for more efficient pressing of olives, oak galls and bark for tannin, and other substances requiring crushing…
Hemp production required a similar pummeling action [as fulling cloth] to break up the woody tissues of the dried stalks and free the fibers for manufacture of ropes and cords. The existence of a waterpowered hemp mill is documented in the Dauphiné, in southeastern France, as early as 900. By the late eleventh century, waterpower was pounding, lifting, grinding, and pressing in locations from Spain to central Europe.” [Gies 94:114]
; “The other great prime mover [with the windmill], the waterwheel, continued to expand its functions [in the 15th century], creating lakes and streams (and sometimes impeding navigation) while powering industrial operations that now included smelting, forging, cutting, shaping, grinding, and polishing metals. It helped produce beer, olive oil, mustard, paper, coins, wire, and silk; it lent its powerful assistance to fulling cloth, sawing wood, boring pipes, and (by around 1500) ventilating mines. It supplied the power for an improvement in city water supply that began in south Germany with the introduction of piston pumps driven by undershot waterwheels.” [265]
• “In waterpower [Chinese] technology progress never quite stopped altogether, but their accomplishment “does not compare to the European accomplishment, particularly in the period from the eleventh to the sixteenth century.” [Mokyr 90:222]

3. • See the [Mokyr 90:34-5] citation, above.
• “Although the Chinese operated trip-hammers for hulling rice as early as A.D. 290, the use of the cam evidently failed to spread to other industries in the following centuries… The introduction of the cam into medieval industry, on the other hand, was to make a major contribution to the industrialization of the Western hemisphere. Today practically every automobile coming off the assembly line has a camshaft.
In Europe, from the end of the tenth century the cam enabled millwrights to mechanize a whole series of industries which up to then had been operated by hand or by foot… [reviews these industries].” [Gimpel 76:13-15]
• Lynn White reviews early European development of the compound crank and connecting rod during the early 15th century in [White 62:112-4].
; “While there is no early evidence of the compound crank in China, a single crank with connecting-rod is found there applied to a man-powered rice-hulling mill by 1462, if we may judge from the similiar illustrations of a Japanese edition of 1676 and a Chinese edition of 1696, both independently derived from an edition of that date.
Students of applied mechanics are agreed that ‘the technical advance which characterizes specifically the modern age is that from reciprocating motions to rotary motions’, and the crank is the presupposition of that change. The appearance [in Europe] of the bit-and-brace in the 1420’s and of the double compound crank and connecting-rod about 1430, marks the most significant single step in the late medieval revolution in machine design. With extraordinary rapidity these devices were absorbed into Europe’s technological thinking and used for the widest variety of operations.” [White 62:114-5]
; “The expansion of Europe from 1492 onward was based in great measure upon Europe’s high consumption of energy, with consequent productivity, economic weight, and military might. But mechanical power has no meaning apart from mechanisms to harness it. Beginning probably with the fulling mill on the Serchio in 983, the eleventh and twelfth centuries had applied the cam to a great variety of operations. The thirteenth century discovered spring and treadle; the fourteenth century developed gearing to levels of incredible complexity; the fifteenth century, by elaborating crank, connecting-rod, and governor, vastly facilitated the conversion of reciprocating into continuous rotary motion.” [129]

4. • Lynn White reviews early European development of the flywheel in the 14th and early 15th centuries in [White 62:115-6].

5. • “It is perhaps indicative of the differences between the two civilizations that two of the most important Hellenistic devices requiring great quantitative precision – the continuously winding screw thread, male and female (as in bolt and nut), and the cylindrical worm for engaging a gear wheel – are precisely the ones that were apparently unknown in China until the seventeenth century (Needham 1965a:119).” [Bodde 91:140]
• “There was some [European] technology available at this time [1800] that might have been used, but was not used. The best example is probably the failure to use the Archimedean screw and the cylinder-and-piston pump for draining mines. Either of these would have helped produce more coal and cheaper metals, and ease the pressure on accessible resources. The screw remained a demonstration curiosity…” [Elvin 0x:9]
• “John Man, in his book, The Gutenberg Revolution (2002), emphasizes as well the absence of other elements in Eastern cultures that could favor the invention of a Gutenberg-style press: ‘Chinese paper was suitable only for calligraphy or block-printing; there were no screw-based presses in the east…'” [Duchesne 11a:180]
• Due to the difficulty of cutting them precisely, India did not have precision screws either: “Note that just learning to make precision screws was a major achievement.” [Landes 98:204]; “He might also have noted that India had no screws: the metalworkers could not cut a proper thread.” [228]

6. • “[In the 12th century] increasingly the efficient vertical overshot wheel justified its initial cost when used to grind grain, and its superiority was persuasive in industrial applications. Modern calculations show that the ancient donkey-or slave-powered quern of Rome produced about one half horsepower, the horizontal wheel slightly more, the undershot vertical about three horsepower, and the medieval overshot wheel as much as forty to sixty.” [Gies 94:115]

7. • “The story of the water mill runs parallel to that of the windmill. When the windmill first appeared in Persia, possibly in the seventh century AD, it was mounted on a vertical axle and appears to have been used mostly for irrigation purposes. The Chinese became acquainted with the Persian mill in the course of the thirteenth century AD and soon adopted it. As far as we know, the windmill first appeared in Europe at the end of the twelfth century in Normandy and in England. Windmills are mentioned in 1204 in Picardy, in 1237 in Tuscany, in 1269 in Burgundy, in 1259 in Denmark, in 1274 in Holland. The tradition persists that the windmill was brought back to Europe by the Crusaders. The European windmill, however, displays some originality. While the oriental mill had sails mounted on a vertical axis, the European mill had sails mounted on a horizontal one. It appears that someone brought back from the Middle East not a description of the local windmills, but the idea of harnessing wind energy and that the European craftsmen then devised a totally new contraption. Originally the western windmill was mounted on a heavy post and the mill had to be turned to face into the wind. This limited the size of the mills. By the fourteenth century, however, the tower mill had been developed; in this type of mill the building and the machinery remain stationary; only the top rotates to face the sails into the wind. This innovation allowed the erection of much larger and more powerful units. The sails had to be turned into the wind manually, but this job was later made easier by the introduction of cranks and gears…
Many tower mills could generate as much as 20 or 30 horsepower. Thus the windmill was a more powerful motor than the water mill. But its spread was severely restricted by geography and climate. This explains why, although windmills became characteristic landmarks in some areas, they never became as numerous or as widespread as water mills. But like water mills, windmills, originally built for grinding grains, were later employed in an increasing variety of productive processes. In Amsterdam in 1578, there were windmills used in throwing silk, printing ribbons, fulling and calendering cloth, dressing leather, extracting oil, making gunpowder, and rolling copper plates.” [Cipolla 80:173-4]
; “The Persian windmill was built with a vertical axis. The windmill that spread throughout Europe, the type we know today, with great sails and a horizontal axis, was a much more efficient machine than the original conceived by the Persians.” [180]
• “In power technology, the most important invention of the later middle ages was the windmill. The windmill combined the ideas of the water mill and the sail. It, too, may have been imported to Europe by Moslems (from central Asia) but in spite of its apparent advantages in arid climates, it was not used widely in the Islamic world. The first windmills that can be documented with certainty were in Yorkshire in 1185. Whatever their exact place of origin, within a few years windmills were used throughout Europe, and in 1195 the pope imposed a tithe on them. Because of the variability of the wind direction in Europe, engineers had to mount the windmills on a pivot so that they could be turned to face the wind at an optimal angle. Later, brakes and inclined sail beams were introduced to increase stability and efficiency. The windmill owed much to the water mill, from which it adopted its horizontal axle, gearing, and transmission machinery.” [Mokyr 90:44-5]
• “In the last twenty years of the twelfth century, an entirely new prime mover appeared simultaneously on both sides of the English Channel and the North Sea. Nothing like the windmill in its vertical European form had ever been seen. Though some scholars believe it to have derived from the horizontal windmill of Persia, perhaps diffused through Muslim Spain, the weight of evidence favors an independent origin, possibly in East Anglia, where it replaced unsatisfactory tidal mills and supplemented the scanty waterwheels. Reversing the waterwheel’s arrangement, the windmill placed the horizontal axle at the top of the structure, to be turned by sails, gearing it to the millstones below. The immediate problem of keeping the sails faced into the wind (or out of it in a gale) was solved by balancing the mill on a stout upright post, on which it could be turned, none too easily, by several sturdy peasants gripping a large boom.” [Gies 94:117]
• More detailed discussions of the advantages of medieval European-type windmills in [Derry 60:254-8] and [Mokyr 90:45-6]. On their economic value, see [Gimpel 76:25-7].

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3. Mechanical clocks. A keystone of European mechanical prowess was its invention of mechanical clocks in the late 13th century, which required brilliant design and precision-crafted machinery [1]. The clocks were often integrated with astronomical indicators, musical chimes, moving figurines, and other entertaining automations [2]. The first spring-driven watches controlled by stackfreed or fusee, came in the late fifteenth century [3]. The proliferation of public and private mechanical clocks, including portable watches, revolutionized Whites’ sense of order and their ability to coordinate activities [4]. The Chinese never advanced beyond water clocks (which the Romans had), with their obvious shortcomings [5]. In fact, the Chinese had discarded even their water clock technology by the time visiting Europeans amazed them with clocks and other mechanical devices in the 16th century [6].

1. • “Of equal technical brilliance [as Gutenberg’s printing press] was the weight-driven mechanical clock. Its inventor is unknown, but its first appearance can be dated to the end of the thirteenth century… Around the year 1300 the verge-and-foliot escapement mechanism appeared, which succeeded in converting the continuous but variable force exerted by a falling object into the regular oscillating motion required for the accurate operation of a clock.” [Mokyr 90:49]
• On Europe’s original invention of the clock likely being at between 1277 to 1300, see [Gimpel 76:153-4]
• “The origin of the European escapement is almost surely lost forever, but consensus today places it in the second half of the thirteenth century, and its emergence in the historical record signals its provenance as northern Italy. [Sinophile] Joseph Needham believes in the possibility of stimulus diffusion of the idea of an escapement in the form of travelers’ tales from China, but this hypothesis seems farfetched. As Carlo Cipolla says, “The Chinese escapement…had nothing in common with the European verge-and-foliot device.” What is certain is that the verge-and-foliot (or crown wheel and foliot) escapement is one of the most elegant solutions ever devised to a problem in mechanical engineering. ” [Gies 94:211-2]
• “Before the invention of this machine, people told time by sun (shadow sticks or dials) and water clocks. Sun clocks worked of course only on clear days; water clocks misbehaved when the temperature fell toward freezing, to say nothing of long-run drift as a result of sedimentation and clogging. Both of these devices served reasonably well in sunny climes; but north of the Alps one can go weeks without seeing the sun, while temperatures vary not only seasonally but from day to night. Medieval Europe gave new importance to reliable time.” [Landes 98:48]
• “Chinese horology never got beyond the principle called clepsydra, which is the measurement of time by the continuous flow of water. The Sung Chinese brought to its culmination the water clock line of horological development. The Europeans, on the other hand, started a whole new line of clock technology based on a true mechanical or kinematic principle of measurement. The “escapement mechanism” by itself is not the key. Since there is so much confusion about this difference, and not just from Hobson, it is worth citing Landes’s explanation of the different principles of operation as explained in his Revolution in Time: ‘Both techniques used escapements, but these have only the name in common. The Chinese one worked intermittently; the European, in discrete but continuous beats. Both systems used gravity as the prime mover, but the action was very different. In the mechanical clock, the falling weight exerted a continuous and even force on the train, which the escapement alternately held back and released at a rhythm constrained by the controller. Ingeniously, the very force that turned the scape wheel then slowed it and pushed it part of the way back…In other words, a unidirectional force produced a self-reversing action: about one step back for three steps forward.'” [Duchesne 11a:175]

2. • “The men of the thirteenth century thought of measuring time in mechanical terms because they had developed a mechanical outlook of which mills and bell ringing mechanisms were clear evidence. Clocks spread rapidly throughout Europe, but production was not limited to clock faces, hands, and motors. On public buildings, as in Basel and Bologna, or inside churches, as in Strasbourg and Lund, extremely complicated clocks were constructed. Often, telling the time was almost incidental, accompanied as it was by the revolutions of the stars, and by the movements and pirouettes of angels, saints, and Madonnas. These contraptions were both the result and the evidence of an irrepressible taste for mechanical achievements…” [Cipolla 80:182]
• “Suddenly, towards the middle of the fourteenth century, the mechanical clock seized the imagination of our ancestors. Something of the civic pride which earlier had expended itself in cathedral-building was diverted to the construction of astronomical clocks of astounding intricacy and elaboration. No European community felt able to hold up its head unless in its midst the planets wheeled in cycles and epicycles, while angels trumpeted, cocks crew, and apostles, kings, and prophets marched and countermarched at the booming of the hours.
It was not only in their diversity, their scale, and their wide diffusion that these automata were unlike those of earlier times… These new great astronomical clocks were presented frankly as mechanical marvels, and the public delighted in them as such…
Giovanni’s clock [of 1364] was only incidentally a timepiece: it included celestial wanderings of sun, moon, and five planets, and provided a perpetual calendar of all religious feasts…” [White 62:124-6]

3. • “In the middle of the fifteenth century spring-driven clocks and watches appeared, as new devices to regulate the uneven force of an uncoiling spring were discovered. The best solution was found to be the fusee, which used a conical axle to equalize the uneven force. The first fusee-driven watches were made around 1430, and watches became a popular consumer good among the better-off. The advances in clockmaking made the miniaturization of clocks feasible, and led to the democratization of time measurement.” [Mokyr 90:50]
• On Whites’ brilliant inventions of the stackfreed and fusee in the fifteenth century to moderate the force exerted by an unwinding spring in a watch, see [White 62:126-8].
• “The mechanical clock spread rapidly in the fifteenth century, becoming a feature of private houses as well as royal palaces and communal towers. A late-fifteenth-century invention, the mainspring, second in importance only to the escapement, made timepieces not only portable but cheap. The pocket version got its name “watch” from the town watchmen who took to carrying it.” [Gies 94:273]

4. • On the revolutionary effects of the mechanical clock on European society, see the [Landes 98:48-50] citation in section V-2.E.

5. • See the [Duchesne 11a:175] citation, above.
• “The mechanical clock remained a European (Western) monopoly for some three hundred years; in its higher forms, right into the twentieth century. Other civilizations admired and coveted clocks, or more accurately, their rulers and elites did; but none could make them to European standard.
The Chinese built a few astronomical water clocks in the Tang and Sung eras—complicated and artful pieces that may have kept excellent time in the short run, before they started clogging. (Owing to sediment, water clocks keep a poor rate over time.) These monumental machines were imperial projects, done and reserved for the emperor and his astrologers. The Chinese treated time and knowledge of time as a confidential aspect of sovereignty, not to be shared with the people. This monopoly touched both daily and year-round time. In the cities, drums and other noisemakers signaled the hours (equal to two of our hours), and everywhere the imperial calendar defined the seasons and their activities. Nor was this calendar a uniform, objectively determinable datum. Each emperor in turn had his own calendar, placed his own seal on the passage of time. Private calendrical calculation would have been pointless.
These interval hour signals in large cities were no substitute for continuing knowledge and awareness. In particular, the noises were not numerical signifiers. The hours had names rather than numbers, and that in itself testifies to the absence of a temporal calculus. Without a basis in popular consumption, without a clock trade, Chinese horology regressed and stagnated. It never got beyond water clocks, and by the time China came to know the Western mechanical clock, it was badly placed to understand and copy it. Not for want of interest: the Chinese imperial court and wealthy elites were wild about these machines; but because they were reluctant to acknowledge European technological superiority, they sought to trivialize them as toys.” [Landes 98:49-50]
• The main shortcoming of water clocks is of course that you can’t carry one around with you.

6. • See the [Landes 98:49-50] citation, above.
• “By the sixteenth century, the Chinese had no memory of Su Sung’s masterpiece [an astronomical water clock]. Nor did they ever manage to develop anything close to the weight-driven mechanism of the European clocks.” [Mokyr 90:220]
• “By the eleventh century AD the Chinese measured time accurately using water clocks, yet when the Jesuits arrived in China in the 1580s they found only the most primitive methods of time measurement in use, and amazed the Chinese by showing them mechanical clocks.” [Clark 07a:143-4]
• “Ironically, those first Portuguese visitors and Catholic missionaries used the wonders of Western technology to charm their way into China. The mechanical clock was the key that unlocked the gates. This, we saw, was a European mega-invention of the late thirteenth century, crucial for its contribution to discipline and productivity, but also for its susceptibility of improvement and its role at the frontier of instrumentation and mechanical technique. The water clock is a dunce by comparison.
For China’s sixteenth-century officials, the mechanical clock came as a wonder machine that not only kept time but amused and entertained.” [Landes 98:336]

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4. Movable type printing. Europe invented the printing press with movable type in 1430, likely independently of China [1]. Gutenberg’s machine, based on a screw press and precision metal craftsmanship, was more flexible and efficient than that of the Chinese [2], who used mainly a rubbing technique [3]. In China, movable type was applied almost exclusively to government-funded projects [4], while Europe’s printing press was a commercial success that greatly expanded book production and literacy [5].

1. • “In the late 1430s Johannes Gutenberg, apparently independently of developments in Asia, invented printing with movable type, and the spread of this powerful new technology after 1450 likewise altered the cultural landscape of early modern Europe.” [McClellan 06:204]
• “What we cannot doubt is that when metal type was first used in Europe about 1450, this was an independent invention. The different script used in Europe required a different approach to casting type, with greater emphasis on quantity production of rather small pieces. The Koreans were able to cast their bronze type in small sand moulds, but the European innovators had to develop a metal matrix for the purpose.” [Pacey 90:56]
• “[T]here is no evidence that the invention of metal type spread from Korea all the way to Germany in less than fifty years to be copied by Gutenberg. John Man, in his book, The Gutenberg Revolution (2002), emphasizes as well the absence of other elements in Eastern cultures that could favor the invention of a Gutenberg-style press: “Chinese paper was suitable only for calligraphy or block-printing; there were no screw-based presses in the east…” [Duchesne 06:82-3]

2. • “Printing itself was not unknown in Europe by the early fifteenth century. Even before 1400 playing cards were stamped in Europe, and coins had been stamped for two millennia by this time. Yet Johann Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type (1453) was an achievement of profound brilliance, made possible inter alia by his knowledge of metallurgy (his father had been goldsmith to the Archbishop of Mainz). Casting the moveable type was a difficult problem: all letter units had to be of equal length and thickness but of varying width. The mechanical solution Gutenberg found—a mold consisting of two overlapping L-shaped parts—was ingenious. The type was made of an alloy of tin, zinc, and lead, while the molds were made of iron and copper. Like the windmill, the printing press spread with dazzling speed. By 1480, there were over 380 working presses in Europe, and in the 50 years following the invention more books were produced than in the preceding thousand years.” [Mokyr 90:49]
• “The German, Gutenberg (d. 1468), synthesised a number of known devices to produce movable type, and the printing press itself, and hence the replicated book. Block printing had long been used in China and so had paper-making, which Islam learned from Chinese prisoners in the eighth century, and Europe learned from Islam. A press to flatten the paper was derived from the winepress. Gutenberg added the use of cast-metal print and a system of interchangeable parts by fitting shanks to individual letters so that they might be picked out and slotted in again to compose different words. The prospective multiplication of the printed word was at once evident, though the initial advantage over hand-copying was not quite such a foregone conclusion as may now appear. Hand-copying was an established trade with an organised market for its products. There was one entrepreneur who carried out crash commissions to copy manuscripts by employing 45 copyists. In a single 22 month period he was responsible for turning out two hundred works in an unreported number of copies. The copyist gilds were so strong in France that the effort to undercut them was at first mostly made in the feudal units of Germany where central control was lacking. Within fifteen years of Gutenberg’s death, however, the effort was sufficiently successful for there to be printing presses in every European country except Russia. By 1500 there were 1,700 at work in a total of 300 towns.” [Jones 87:60-1]
; “The contrast with China is marked. Although as many as one-third of the books in the Imperial palace library were printed volumes by the start of the fifteenth century, the printing technique used was not as flexible as Gutenberg’s so that, even had more Chinese been literate, mass production would have been difficult.” [61-2]
• “Along with type and ink, Gutenberg had another flash of insight, that the ancient wine-and-oil press, already modified for paper manufacture, required only a slight further change to assume a function in printing (Chinese printing did not employ a press, relying on the rubbing technique used for woodblocks). Once its configuration was worked out, the wooden screw press, consisting of a sliding flat bed and an upper platen, could be operated rapidly to produce a sharp impression. Its steeply pitched screw required only a quarter turn of the lever, and the sliding bed allowed easy inking. Two-color and multicolor printing were introduced in the very first printed works, the celebrated forty-two-line Bible of Gutenberg and the Psalter which Fust and Schoeffer, after winning their lawsuit against the inventor, produced with his equipment. The red second color of the Bible and the multiple colors of the Psalter were achieved by the simple process of removing from the composed page characters or passages to appear in color, inking them separately, and returning them to the press, so that all colors were produced in a single impression. Problems of register (overlapping of colors) were thus avoided at the cost of some production time. Engraving was quickly absorbed into the printing process, though a number of early printed works in small editions employed hand illumination, copy by copy, for their decoration.
Two years after the appearance of Gutenberg’s Bible in 1455, the first printing press in Italy went into operation, followed by others in Paris and London (Caxton’s), and by 1480 nearly every city in Europe had at least one press. The economics of the invention were irresistible. A Florentine scribe could produce a copy of Plato’s Dialogues for one florin; a press charged three florins per quinterno (five sheets, or eighty pages of octavo) for typesetting and printing, and could produce an unlimited number at the cost of paper and ink.” [Gies 94:244-5]
• Details of Europe’s improvements in printing, including oil-bound inks, the screw-press, the tympan frame, engraving, and punching the matrix, are given in [Derry 60:235-9].

3. • See the [Gies 94:244-5] citation, above.
• “Most famous is perhaps the different choice of technique in printing. Although the Chinese had invented the printing press, commercial printers preferred to use a more labour-intensive technology, woodblock printing. Since the middle of the 15th century, Western Europe concentrated on moveable type printing as the most important technology, which was a very capital-intensive process, with high levels of labour productivity. Figures 3 and 4 illustrate the difference in capital-labour ratio between the two technologies; typically, the pressing in China is done by humans, in Europe by a machine.” [Zanden 11]

4. • “In China factor costs were different: labour was much cheaper and capital more expensive. This made the advantages of moveable type much less; after its invention in the tenth or eleventh century, it was almost exclusively applied to government-funded projects, such as an encyclopaedia, for which costs were irrelevant. Moreover, the fact that as many as 5000 characters were required to produce a Chinese text, whereas 26 characters sufficed for European books, had a major impact on the necessary initial investment in fonts. Thus, in China several techniques for the reproduction of information – hand-copying, woodblock-printing, and moveable type – continued to coexist after the invention of different forms of printing under the Sung (960–1279).” [Zanden 09a:180]
• “Moveable type, for instance, did not catch on in China, where wooden black printing continued to dominate.” [Mokyr 90:221]

5. • See the [Jones 87:60-1] and [Mokyr 90:49] citations, above.
• On Europe’s printing press being a mass production machine that stimulated a communications revolution, see section V-2.E and its sources.

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5. Instrument-making. By 1500, European metal craftsmen, including the mechanics, clock-makers, and gunsmiths discussed elsewhere, had no equal. Europeans developed precision crafting skills that applied to a broad range of devices [1]. Around 1300, Europe invented eyeglasses, correcting human vision and greatly increasing the effective lifespans of workers [2]. The first spectacles were concave and aided the far-sighted; shortly before 1500, the vision of smart, near-sighted people was revived as well with the development of concave lenses [3]. Also around 1300, Europe developed the compass as a self-contained device, with a dry needle rotating on a vertical pin around a directional card [4]. Europeans produced other cutting edge astronomical and navigational instruments, such as astrolabes, cross-staffs, and quadrants [5]. White craftsmen would soon thereafter (~1600) invent microscopes and telescopes, opening up new worlds of discovery [6].

1. • “Above all, the age of discoveries was one of instruments. Instruments in Western technology came before machines. The affinity of Europeans for gadgets derived to a large extent from the clockmaking industry. Clockmakers revealed the wonders that precision-built spring-driven gears and cogs could achieve. By the middle of the fifteenth century the German town of Nuremberg had become the world’s center for gadgets… Astronomical instruments and compasses were crucial to the worldwide navigation in which Europeans became involved. Military technology required precision for the calibration and sighting of guns. Commerce required precision scales, real estate required odometers. A special branch of the instrument-making industry was optics. The earliest spectacle lenses were convex and could only aid the far-sighted. A little before 1500, concave lenses were developed that corrected shortsightedness as well… Technical ideas and gadgets that worked, and worked well regardless of the environment, spread more rapidly than ever before.” [Mokyr 90:70-1]
• “Growing skill in the working of metals is further exemplified by
the development of the instrument-maker’s craft. To many of the
early products of this we make reference elsewhere — for example,
clocks, navigational instruments, and balances — and here we can consider only the general line of develop
ment…
The modern tradition of instrument-making dates from ap
proximately the middle of the fifteenth century, when Nuremberg
became the first great centre of instrument-making for western
Europe: craftsmen there inherited little from the Middle Ages, but
the influence of Alexandria was still felt… The making of
astronomical instruments enjoyed a temporary revival at Oxford
and Paris in the fourteenth century, but it was not until
about 1440 that the craft became permanently established; three
astronomical instruments purchased at Nuremberg in 1444 still
exist… Within a short time Augsburg, too, had a famous school of instrument-makers. Many of the instruments made in these two cities are
of such exquisite workmanship that they are prized today not only
for their technical interest but as works of art…
The earliest products of the instrument-makers were made mainly
for astronomical purposes or to apply astronomical methods in
navigation: they included astrolabes, cross-staffs, quadrants, sun
dials, and orreries, as well as basic geometrical instruments such as
compasses and rules.” [Derry 60:153-5]
• “The Europeans did invent eyeglasses, which doubled the working life of skilled craftsmen, and made it possible for them to do fine work and use fine instruments, and also encouraged them to go beyond the astrolabe used by the Muslims to originate gauges, micrometers, fine wheel cutters, all of which were the beginnings of precision tools, replication, and the principle of standardization. Europe had monopoly on corrective lenses for 300–400 years.” [Duchesne 11a:174]

2. • “Mathematics was essential to the pursuit of the study of optics, one of the favored sciences of the universities, whose clerical intellectuals were inspired or justified by Biblical citations… The Oxford master most noted for his interest in “the metaphysics of light” was Roger Bacon’s mentor and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253), in his later years bishop of Lincoln. Grosseteste perceived light as the cause of motion and the principle of intelligibility in the universe and strove to answer questions such as how the sun produces heat and how the moon influences the tides. On the practical level, the invention of eyeglasses occurred in Italy sometime before 1292, facilitated by the glassmakers’ mastery of the art of making clear glass.” [Gies 94:227]
• “We think we know where and when the first spectacles appeared. Crude magnifying glasses and crystals (lapides ad legendum) had been found earlier and used for reading. The trick was to improve them so as to reduce distortion and connect a pair into a wearable device, thus
leaving the hands free. This apparently first happened in Pisa toward the end of the thirteenth century. We have a contemporary witness (1306) who says he knew the inventor:
‘Not all the arts [in the sense of arts and crafts] have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Every day one could discover a new art. … It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles that help one to see well, an art that is one of the best and most necessary in the world. And that is such a short time ago that a new art that never before existed was invented. … I myself saw the man who discovered and practiced it and I talked with him.’…
By the middle of the fifteenth century, Italy, particularly Florence and Venice, was making thousands of spectacles, fitted with concave as well as convex lenses, for myopes as well as presbyopes. Also, the Florentines at least (and presumably others) understood that visual acuity declines with age and so made the convex lenses in five-year strengths and the concave in two, enabling users to buy in batches and change with time.
Eyeglasses made it possible to do fine work and use fine instruments. But also the converse: eyeglasses encouraged the invention of fine instruments, indeed pushed Europe in a direction found nowhere else. The Muslims knew the astrolabe, but that was it. The Europeans went on to invent gauges, micrometers, fine wheel cutters—a battery of tools linked to precision measurement and control. They thereby laid the basis for articulated machines with fitted parts…
Europe enjoyed a monopoly of corrective lenses for three to four hundred years. In effect they doubled the skilled craft workforce, and more than doubled it if one takes into account the value of experience.” [Landes 98:47]

3. • See the [Mokyr 90:70-1] citation, above.

4. • “The Europeans also developed better navigational tools than existed before… Marine charts and navigating tables of unprecedented accuracy covering the entire Mediterranean and Black seas came into use in the thirteenth century. The compass, probably an independent European invention that was also known in China, was first mentioned… in about 1180. It took until about 1300 befor this crude instrument was turned into a self-contained unit we would call a compass today, complete with the 16-point wind rose. One specialist… believes that it was only after 1410 that anyone really steered by compass.” [Mokyr 90:47]
• “A Chinese reference to a magnetic pointer floating in a bowl of water dates from about AD 1040. In the late twelfth century an English Augustinian monk described a magnetized needle which he said sailors used for locating the North Star in bad weather. Somewhere in the Mediterranean region, in about 1300, the transition was made from the primitive needle-and-bowl to a self-contained instrument, the compass. The perfecting of the [magnetic] compass,…[etc.] made possible instrumental or mathematical navigation…” [Cipolla 80:175]
• “In its earliest European form, the compass followed the Chinese prototype, a magnetized needle transfixed on a straw, reed, or chip of wood floated in a bowl of water. The Chinese also produced a dry suspension, with the needle pivoted on a bamboo pin set in a hole on a small board; a European version, perhaps independently developed, consisted of a circular box with the needle rotating on a vertical pin.
The first Western textual reference to the mariner’s compass occurs, in the twelfth-century English scholar Alexander Neckam’s book De naturis rerum (On the natures of things).” [Gies 94:157]
; “The maturing of the compass as a navigation instrument took place in the Mediterranean, partly because this narrow but deep sea did not permit navigation by sounding and partly because its seafarers were the most sophisticated navigators and thus were able to supply important complementary devices. The first of these was the compass card, contributed by the sailors of Amalfi and based on the ancient Rosa Ventorum or “Rose of the Winds.” A circular card furnished with the thirty-two points of the compass and positioned directly beneath the free-swinging magnetized needle fixed on a dry pivot, it allowed the helmsman to read the ship’s course—in points, not degrees, since the thirty-two-point scale was incompatible with the 360 degrees of the astronomer’s circle.” [222-3]
• “Compasses had already been used by navigators in Europe, occasionally in the telfth century, and fairly widely in the thirteenth. Thanks to Peter Maricourt, magnetic compasses now reached a higher level of perfection than even those used in China, where the properties of the magnetic needle had originally been discovered, or other early compasses in Islam. It was the Europeans of the thirteenth century who, with the perfection of such instruments, led the way to the conquest of the seas, the circumnavigation of the African continent, and the discovery of America.” [Gimpel 76:195]
• “Although the European compass-card in box frame and dry pivot needle was adopted in China after its use was taken by Japanese pirates in the 16th century (who had in turn learned of it from Europeans), the Chinese design of the suspended dry compass persisted in use well into the 18th century. However, according to Kreutz there is only a single Chinese reference to a dry-mounted needle (built into a pivoted wooden tortoise) which is dated to between 1150 and 1250, and claims that there is no clear indication that Chinese mariners ever used anything but the floating needle in a bowl until the 16th century…
Alexander Neckam reported the use of a magnetic compass for the region of the English Channel in the texts De utensilibus and De naturis rerum, written between 1187 and 1202, after he returned to England from France and prior to entering the Augustinian abbey at Cirencester. In his 1863 edition of Neckam’s De naturis rerum, Thomas Wright provides a translation of the passage in which Neckam mentions sailors being guided by a compass’ needle…
Neckam’s clear understanding of the mariner’s compass in the late twelfth-century, and his description of its use in marine navigation, has cast doubt on whether the compass was, as Professor Derk Bodde has argued, one of ‘China’s gifts to the West’. From Neckam’s description, some scholars have suggested it not unlikely that the compass was also ‘invented’ in Europe, independently of Eastern technologies. This is further supported by Jacques de Vitry’s mention of the compass being used at sea in 1218, which indicates a broader knowledge of the compass and its uses in Medieval Northern Europe:
‘An iron needle, after having been in contact with the loadstone, turns itself always toward the northern star, which, like the axis of the firmament, remains immoveable, while the others follow their course, so that it is very necessary to those who navigate the sea.'”
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_compass

5. • See the [Mokyr 90:70-1] and [Derry 60:153-5] citations, above.
• “The essence of the problem was how to adapt astronomical instruments, which in such forms as the astrolabe were already highly developed, for use by seamen under shipboard conditions, thus enabling latitude to be determined. Dates of inventions are very uncertain, since seamen were seldom writers, but there is good evidence that the sea-quadrant came first; the earliest account is dated 1456-7. From the engraved plate the sailor measured the angle of elevation of the pole star, observed through the pin-holes, by a plumb-line passing over an engraved scale. The measurement was corrected by reference to the changing position of the Guards, two stars in the Lesser Bear. The circling of the Guards had long been used for time-keeping, and early in the sixteenth century this was facilitated by an instrument called the Nocturlabe or Nocturnal, which was set to indicate the number of hours before or after midnight. Latitude was also determined by observing the height of the sun at noon and taking the necessary reading from a printed table of daily solar altitudes.
Two other instruments which seem to have come next after the quadrant were the sea-astrolabe, a modification of the astronomer’s instrument and difficult for unskilled observers to handle, and the cross-staff; both were used for taking an altitude. The cross-staff was the simpler and cheaper instrument, particularly useful in rather low latitudes, and more apt for determining stellar altitudes than solar ones.” [Derry 60:205-6]

6. • “This knowledge of lenses, moreover, was a school for further optical advances, and not only in Italy. Both telescope and microscope were invented in the Low Countries around 1600 and spread quickly from there.” [Landes 98:47]
; “Scientists had to see better and could do so once the telescope and microscope were invented (c. 1600), opening new worlds comparable for wonder and power to the earlier geographical discoveries.” [204]
• On Whites’ exploration of the outer and inner worlds with telescopes, microscopes, etc., see section IV-1.A and its sources.

————

6. Weaponry. European weaponry was the best in the world by 1500 [1]. The Chinese, having discovered the secret of gunpowder centuries earlier, invented the first, crude firearms (hand cannon), but these were little more effective than tossed explosives [2]. Europeans developed both the first effective cannon in the early 14th century [3] and the first effective hand-held guns in the late 15th, as the arquebus evolved into the matchlock musket [4]. They improved gunpowder composition [5], firing mechanisms, casting techniques, and ballistic design, e.g. length-to-bore ratio, projectile fit, and rifling [6]. The Chinese were thereafter obliged to imitate White gun technology, sometimes requiring the assistance of European technicians to manage the guns they obtained [7]. European naval ships with their superior cannon and maneuverability quickly took control of the oceans [8]. White military superiority was also due to excellence in training, discipline, and management [9].

1. • “Note 13: As Chase establishes in his insightful geo-political comparative study, Europeans assumed a military superiority in training, tactics, logistics, and firearms from the early 1500s, and this advantage widened rather than narrowed over time. Contrary to Goldstone’s suggestion that the Chinese and Japanese enjoyed a military edge until the mid-1800s, Chase notes that “Chinese sources from the 1500s and the 1600s are full of comments on the superior quality of foreign firearms, and foreign observers likewise commented on the inferior quality of Chinese ones. It was clear to all that the Chinese were far behind” (Firearms: A Global History to 1700). Similarly, all talk about formidable “coastal defenses” and “shore batteries” would appear to be belied by the fact that Ming and Manchu China experienced recurring difficulties in protecting coastal cities from piratical raids and assaults, with futility reaching such levels that the massive coastal population was forcibly evacuated inland, from 1662–69, for security purposes. The severe inadequacies of later Manchu coastal defenses are tellingly exposed in Antony (2006).” [Bryant 08:163]
; “In the arena of war, European knowledge of mathematics, chemistry, and physics — the science factor that Goldstone himself privileges — proved decisive, as it translated directly into pronounced martial superiority in metallurgy, ballistics, and explosives.” [164]
• “In many other areas, the Chinese were unable to press their advantage. Consider, for example, military technology. In the tenth century A.D. the Chinese used gunpowder in rockets and bombs. In spite of their knowledge of explosives and their superiority in siderurgy, they apparently had to learn to use cannon from the West (in the mid-fourteenth century) and they failed to develop Western military techniques any further. When the Portuguese reached China in 1514, the Chinese were deeply impressed by Portuguese muskets (“Frankish Devices”) and swiveling naval cannon and adopted them readily. Yet the Chinese were unable to keep up with the continuous progress made in firearm technology in the West…” [Mokyr 90:221]
• “The adoption of gunpowder by Europeans was accompanied by the manufacture of firearms, the construction of which rapidly improved, so much so that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the Europeans arrived in China aboard their galleons, the Chinese were astounded and terrified by western guns.” [Cipolla 80:180]
; “Soon after the arrival of Portuguese ships in Canton in 1517, the scholar-official Wang Hong wrote that “the westerners are extremely dangerous because of their artillery. No weapon ever made since memorable antiquity is superior to their cannon.”” [223]
; “Yet, at the very time [~1470] when the Turks seemed poised to strike at the very heart of Europe, a sudden and revolutionary change took place. Outflanking the Turkish blockade, some European countries launched a wave of attacks over the oceans. Their advance was as rapid as it was unexpected. In little more than a century, first the Portuguese and the Spaniards, then the Dutch and the English, laid the basis of worldwide European predominance.
It was the gun-carrying ocean-going sailing ship developed by Atlantic Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries that made the European saga possible. The ships of Atlantic Europe carried all before them. In 1513 the great Portuguese navigator Albuquerque proudly wrote to his king that “at the rumor of our coming, the native ships all vanished, and even the birds ceased to skim over the water.” The prose was rhetorical, but the substance of the statement reflected truth. Within fifteen years of their first arrival in Indian waters, the Portuguese had completely destroyed Arab navigation.
While Atlantic Europe expanded overseas, European Russia launched its expansion to the east across the steppes and to the south against the Turks. Russian expansion also was the result of European technological superiority. As G.F.Hudson wrote of the Russian attack against the Hordes of the Kasaks,
The collapse of the power of the nomads with so slight a resistance after they had again and again turned the course of history with their military powers, is to be attributed not to any degeneracy of the nomads themselves but to the evolution of the art of war beyond their capacity of adaptation. The Tartars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had lost none of the qualities which had made so terrible the armies of Attila and Baian, of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. But the increasing use in war of artillery and musketry was fatal to a power which depended on cavalry and had not the economic resources for the new equipment.
The European eastward expansion did not occur with the dramatic speed of the overseas expansion of Atlantic Europe, essentially because the technological superiority of the Europeans was not as marked on land as it was on the sea. On the open sea, a small band of men exploiting wind and gunpowder in combination were practically invulnerable. But on land the Asians could compensate for their technological inferiority with weight of numbers. The eastward advance became inexorable only after the middle of the seventeenth century, when European technology succeeded in developing more mobile and rapid-firing guns. In the face of a technological gap which constantly widened, numbers counted less and less, and the oriental masses suffered one defeat after another.” [Cipolla 80:224-5]
• “This focus on delivery [of firearm projectiles], when combined with experience in bell founding (bell metal was convertible into gun metal, and the techniques of casting were interchangeable), gave Europe the world’s best cannon and military supremacy. As these cases make clear, other societies were falling behind Europe even before the opening of the world (fifteenth century on) and the great confrontation.” [Landes 98:53-4]
• “[B]y 1500, the iron and bronze guns of Western industry were superior to those of East Asia, which the Asians themselves recognized as they started adopting Western gunnery during the seventeenth century.” [Duchesne 11a:212-3]
• Nonsensical claims have been made that China had a superior military post-1500 due to having successes against small, outnumbered Asian countries and against small, outnumbered European expeditionary forces fighting on the opposite side of the world. For refutation, see [Vries 15:305-6] and [Vries 17].
; “During the First Opium War the Chinese army still included swordsmen and archers, its guns were much less efficient than those of the British and it had no gunboats. Lord John William Napier, appointed as Superintendent of British trade in China in 1833, in a letter to Earl Grey of India in 1834 wondered: ‘What can an army of bows, and arrows, and pikes, and shields do against a handful of veterans.” Britain’s tiny force far from home defeated China. “Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) thought Britain and France would be able to colonize China within 45–50 days.” [Vries 15:310]

2. • See Wikipedia’s review of early Chinese firearms:
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder#Hand_cannon

3. • “While gunpowder and early firearms technology originated in China, large cannon seem to have originated in Europe in the decade 1310–20. The technology then spread quickly back to the Middle East and Asia, cannon finding their way to Islam by the 1330s and to China by 1356.” [McClellan 06:193-4]
• “Not only the miniature of 1327 but our next secure reference to a gun, at Rouen in 1338, shows how long it took for the cannon ball to develop. However, iron shot appear at Lucca in 1341, in 1346 in England there were two calibres of guns firing lead-shot; and balls appear at Toulouse in 1347. Thereafter the evidence of guns of very large calibre, as well as of rudimentary hand-guns, becomes common.
The earliest indication of cannon in China is extant examples clearly dated 1356, 1357, and 1377. It is not necessary to assume the miracle of an almost contemporary Asian development. Enough Europeans were wandering the Yuan realm to have carried the new technology eastward.” [White 62:99-100]
• “The earliest documented use of cannon in Europe was by two German knights at the siege of Cividale in northern Italy in 1331. Edward III brought at least twenty guns and large quantities of sulfur and saltpeter to the siege of Calais in 1346. Noteworthy is the fact that whatever the history of diffusion from China, Europeans had at this point not only overtaken the Chinese in firearms but surpassed them, since guns large enough to call cannon had not yet been manufactured in China, where cannon first appeared in the anti-Mongol revolution of 1356–1368.” [Gies 94:208]
; “Similarly, gunpowder artillery crossed a threshold. Fabrication was made easier by a new technique, casting in a mold to form a hollow cylinder around a mandrel (core); using the same mold guaranteed identical calibers. In the closing stage of the Hundred Years War, the royal French artillery under the command of the Bureau brothers, a pair of talented smiths, used iron cannonballs to batter down one English-held castle and town wall after another and even performed effectively in the field, as at Castillon, the war’s last battle, in 1453…
The Turks’ old-fashioned stone-shooting big cannon were the wave of the past. That of the future lay in the smaller, more maneuverable, more numerous iron-shooting European artillery. The Bureau brothers improvised a primitive version of the gun carriage, which was improved in the second half of the century with spoked and dished wheels, and finally by the introduction of trunnions, forming a cradle that permitted the muzzle of the gun to be raised or lowered and also absorbed some of the recoil. Thenceforward cannon were a regular feature of battle as well as siege. The famous condottiere Bartolommeo Colleoni (1400–1475) introduced a new tactic, training his infantry to open gaps through which the artillery, stationed behind it, could fire.” [248-9]
• European cannon technology culminated late in the fifteenth century as the “Classic Gun”. Wikipedia’s review: “Gun development and design in Europe reached its “classic” form in the 1480s. The so-called Classic Gun is referred to thus for its longer, lighter, more efficient, and more accurate design compared to its predecessors only three decades prior… The early classical European guns are exemplified by two cannons from 1488 now preserved in a plaza in Neuchâtel, Switzerland… Classical guns such as these are differentiated from older firearms by an assortment of improvements. Their longer length-to-bore ratio imparts more energy into the shot, enabling the projectile to shoot further. Not only longer, they were also lighter as the barrel walls were made thinner to allow for faster dissipation of heat. Classical guns also no longer needed the help of a wooden plug to load since they offered a tighter fit between projectile and barrel, further increasing the accuracy of gunpowder warfare. Classical guns were deadlier due to the combination of new weapon developments such as gunpowder corning and the iron shot, which had been gradually adopted in Europe during the 1400s. When these guns reached China in the 1510s, the Chinese were highly impressed by them, primarily for their longer and thinner barrels.”
Development of the Classic Gun.
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder#Development_of_the_Classic_Gun

4. • “The hot-wire ignition was replaced by the slow match, a cord soaked in niter and alcohol, dried, and set aglow in preparation for combat. The touchhole of the hand weapon was moved to the side and a priming pan added. In about 1425 an S-shaped device called a “serpentine” was provided to hold the slow match; pressing one end brought the match into contact with the priming powder, making the gun an effective one-man weapon…
Late in the century, the firing mechanism was enclosed and given a spring trigger; when a wooden stock was added to absorb the recoil, the matchlock musket was complete. Its successors, the wheel lock and the flintlock, appear in some fifteenth-century sketches, including those of Leonardo da Vinci, but were not employed on the battlefield for another century. The new weapon had its shortcomings compared with the bow or crossbow, including mechanical failure, problems with wet weather, and reloading, which took several minutes during which the musketeers had to be protected by pikemen interspersed among their formations. Nevertheless, by 1500 the musket, or arquebus, was making its presence felt on the battlefield, and over the next few decades it succeeded in supplanting the powerful steel crossbow.” [Gies 94:247-8]
• “[T]o produce a successful hand-gun required the means of form
ing a reasonably true barrel and the device of the lock to fire the
charge. The barrel was commonly made from strips of iron: either
a single strip was bent round a cylinder and then welded at the edge,
or a number of short strips were rolled into tubes and welded endp
end, one advantage of the second method being that the metal could
then easily be tapered towards the muzzle, where relatively less
strength was needed… How the
value of spiral grooving of the barrel was discovered is uncertain:
experience would show that the spinning projectile has both a longer
and more accurate flight… At all events, rifles were well known by 1525 and may have
come into existence half a century earlier, to judge by armoury
records at Turin and Nuremberg… The difficulty of loading a
rifled barrel from the muzzle was met by using a lead bullet a little
large for the bore; this, when hammered home with a ram-rod,
would fit the rifling exactly.” [Derry 60:148]

5. • “The chief difficulty of the gun-masters of the later Middle Ages was that their gunpowder was a loose mixture of carbon, sulphur, and saltpetre: any shaking during transport sent the heavier saltpetre to the bottom and the light carbon to the top. Likewise, the lack of sufficient air-spaces between the particles retarded the explosion. Slow and relatively inefficient combustion forced gunners to pack the powder into the gun with a wooden block, and then to pack the shot with rags or clay to contain the gas until enough had been generated to reach shooting pressure. This exasperating problem was largely solved in the 1420’s by the invention of corned gun-powder. By holding the three components in even relationship throughout the mass of the powder, and by providing an equal distribution of larger air-spaces, corned powder made the explosion uniform and practically instantaneous. The cannon became an efficient engine of war, and the fact that packing could be less elaborate raised the hand-gun from the level of a psychological weapon to that of an instrument of slaughter.” [White 62:100-1]
• “Erratic black powder was tamed to consistency by the invention in the 1420s of “corning,” or granulation, by which the powder, dampened by vinegar, brandy, or “the urine of a wine-drinking man,” was passed through a sieve, forming coarse granules, not only safer to handle but more reliable in action. Experimentation with mixtures improved explosive power, and consequently range and accuracy. Gradually the weight of the projectile diminished in proportion to the weight of the gun, and the weight of powder rose in proportion to the projectile.” [Gies 94:247]

6. • See the [Gies 94:247-8], [Derry 60:148] and Wikipedia Development of the Classic Gun citations, above.

7. • “In the seventeenth century, the Ming emperors had to ask the Jesuits in China to aid them in purchasing cannon from Macao to defend their country against the Manchu Mongolians. In the 1620s, Chinese officials repeatedly advised the adoption of Western cannon by the Chinese army. As late as 1850 the Chinese army still used weapons of sixteenth-century vintage, and only the pressing need of civil war during the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) compelled them to buy modern firearms in the West.” [Mokyr 90:221]
• “Indeed, in cases where Asian powers did temporarily reclaim lost positions or stage prolonged resistance, they commonly did so through the partial adoption of western weaponry, tactics, and organization (see Ralston, 1990). Goldstone refers to the famed rebel-pirate Coxinga, “who controlled the south China seas, not Europeans” (p. 127), but fails to mention that the war junks he deployed had been upgraded along western lines and carried European cannons, courtesy of previous alliances and trade with the Dutch. When the Manchus were threatened by the “Three Feudatories” rebellion (1673–81), they turned to a Jesuit, Ferdinand Verbiest, who directed the casting of mobile artillery pieces of his own design. Indeed, as European military superiority was difficult for contemporaries to miss, it became commonplace for vulnerable dynasts or aspiring potentates to seek the services and skills of European advisors, commanders, gunners, engineers, and technicians, whose contributions were often crucial in deciding local power struggles.” [Bryant 08:163]
• “So it was that in 1621, when the Portuguese in Macao offered four cannon to the emperor by way of gaining favor, they had to send four cannoneers along with them. In 1630, the Chinese hired a detachment of Portuguese musketeers and artillerymen to fight for them, but gave up on the idea before they could put it into action. Probably a wise decision, because mercenaries have been the death or usurpation of more than one regime. But the Mings did use some Portuguese as teachers, and later on they got their Jesuit theologian-mechanicians to build them a foundry and cast cannon.
These Jesuit cannon seem to have been among the best China had. Some still found use in the nineteenth century, two hundred fifty years later. Most Chinese guns saw short service, however, being notoriously unreliable, more dangerous to the men who fired them than to the enemy. (We even hear of Chinese cannonballs made of dried mud, but these at least allowed the force of the explosion to exit by the mouth of the tube.)” [Landes 98:340]

8. • See the [Cipolla 80:224-5] citation, above.
• “The ruler of Calicut, the first Indian port reached by Vasco da Gama in 1498, soon recognized the danger, and the Islamic world quickly saw that its trade was threatened. In 1507, a large fleet set out from ports on the Red Sea to confront the intruders. In the next year, with Indian allies, they forced the withdrawal of some Portuguese ships, but in 1509 were disastrously defeated by a small group of Portuguese vessels off the west coast of India.
Although the Red Sea force was equipped with guns, its commanders had not rethought their tactics to take account of these weapons. Thus they were still using galleys with the aim of ramming and boarding enemy vessels. The Portuguese had some galleys also, but chiefly depended on the manoeuvrability of their sailing ships to keep their distance whilst using gunfire to destroy the attacking vessels…
Arab or Asian ships on long voyages were soon being forced to pay what amounted to protection money or risk having their cargo seized. Alfonso de Albuquerque captured the port of Goa in 1509-10 and made it the main Portuguese base on the west coast of India, and then in the following year took the independent Malay port of Malacca.” [Pacey 90:63-4]
• “On the possibility of continued Chinese maritime expansion [in the mid 15th century], for example, one has to consider the possibility of violence, of competition decided by force. On the surface, the Chinese were immeasurably stronger and richer. Who could stand up to them? Yet reality ran the other way. The Chinese had learned the secret of gunpowder before the Europeans, but the Europeans had better guns and greater fire­power, especially at a distance. The Chinese had bigger ships, but the Europeans were better navigators. If we compare the two sides around 1400, the Chinese might have come out on top, at least in the Indian Ocean or South China Sea. (Even a strong animal has trouble defeating his weaker prey close to home.) But fifty years later, even in Asian waters, the Europeans would have run circles around the Chinese vessels.” [Landes 98:98]

9. • “This increased use of firearms was one of the main reasons for changes in tactics and strategy. These, in turn, could only be implemented by an army with a strong infantry and artillery that was much more professional and, which is very important, much more disciplined than had been the case with most medieval armies. In that respect we clearly see a ‘downgrading [of] the centrality of technology’ in recent literature, whereas the role of training and discipline now is often highlighted. Many scholars now consider Western successes as inconceivable without the superior discipline that is epitomized by its trained and drilled soldiers fighting in organized units. Or as Kenneth chase succinctly puts it: ‘What set the Europeans apart were training and discipline’ and ‘there was more to European military superiority than just hardware’.” [Vries 15:302]
• “The Chinese did improve on their own close-order drill for infantry, but not to the point of achieving the advantages of what McNeill phrased as “keeping together in time”.” [Duchesne 11a:213]

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7. Mining. By 1500, Europeans—Germans in particular—led the world in mining technology. They developed gunpowder blasting, hauling systems including horse-operated treadmills for windlasses, railed transport systems, powerful pumps and vertical transmission of water power, and ventilation systems [1]. Georgius Agricola’s famous treatise, De Re Metallica, published in 1556 after his death, detailed the German methods. Chinese mining, on the other hand, declined over time and as late as the 19th century relied completely on manual power [2].

1. • “But what was probably the most important development [in Europe ~1150-1350] was a new prowess in the mining, extraction, and working of metals. A great development of silver-mines took place in Hungary, Bohemia, Saxony, and the Harz, and widespread communities of free miners also worked the baser metals: Cologne and Dinant, for instance, became famous for bells and other wares of copper and bronze and the Meuse valley for its cutlery, hardware, and weapons.” [Derry 60:33-5]
• “From about 1450, mining, especially in central Europe, entered an age of progress unlike anything ever seen before. Here, too, we have no famous inventors, just an endless succession of anonymous improvements on the margins. We do have, however, a hero of sorts, namely Georg Bauer, who, under his latinized name of Georgius Agricola, wrote De Re Metallica, published posthumously in 1556. De Re Metallica is one of the finest and most detailed books on mining engineering ever written. From it we can infer the improvements introduced into mining after 1450. Agricola describes the machines used for drainage and ventilation, the cranes used for hauling the ore, the construction of shafts, even the sampling of ore quality. The technical problems in mining appear to be universal: flooding, explosions, and vertical haulage lead the list. Germans led Europe and the world in mining technology, developing the transmission of waterpower to high-elevation mines from waterwheels in the valleys by means of overland rod systems; applying gunpowder for blasting rocks; pioneering the use of rails for underground transport; using horse-operated treadmills to run windlasses; and above all developing a variety of pumping devices (that were subsequently applied to firefighting and other uses)… It is with only a little exaggeration that one historian refers to this period as “the age of the pump.” [Mokyr 90:63-4]

2. • “Or consider coal, which had been mined in China in medieval times and was reported with some amazement by Marco Polo. By the nineteenth century Chinese coal mining was primitive, took place in shallow mines, and was devoid of any machinery for ventiliation, pumping or elevation.” [Mokyr 90:220]
• “Similarly Marco Polo [1290] had been impressed and surprised by the deep coal mines of China. Yet by the nineteenth century Chinese coal mines were primitive shallow affairs which relied completely on manual power.” [Clark 07a:143-4]
• “According to Horesh, ‘Yunnan copper mining [in 18th century China] does not seem to have incorporated waterpower devices, horsepower, or mechanized intervention.’…” [Vries 15:257]

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8. Ship-building. In the 15th century, Europeans made major ship design innovations and became the world’s leading ocean voyagers. Prioritizing maneuverability and durability, Europeans designed full-rigged ships with carvel plank construction, called *carracks* and *caravels*, that could sail briskly under any weather conditions and endure long journeys far from home [1]. Europe also developed the finest navigational and cartographic technology [2]. Meanwhile, China was permanently shelving its own ocean-going fleet—even wiping out the records of it [3]. Some claim that Chinese ships, prior to be being scrapped in 1435, were superior to European because they were larger [4] and had some nice features. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating: how well did the ships carry out their principal purpose: to traverse the oceans and conduct far-reaching explorative, commercial, and military expeditions? Europeans rounded Africa in 1488, discovered America in 1492, and circled the globe in 1522. Thereafter, Whites dominated transoceanic trade and ‘ruled the waves’.

1. • “By far the most important new element in navigation was the full-rigged ship, “the great invention of European ship designers in the Middle Ages” (Richard Unger), which “enabled Europeans to harness the energy of the wind over the seas to an extent inconceivable to previous
times” (Carlo Cipolla). Its principal fifteenth-century form, the carrack, represented the final step in the centuries-long evolution of the round ship: essentially the northern cog, as modified by Mediterranean builders, with further refinements added by Basque shipbuilders of the Bay of Biscay. A large, heavy tub with a big spread of canvas, the carrack had a stout length-to-breadth ratio of three and a half to one or less. The massive skeleton ribs that framed its hull, now carvel-built in northern as in southern yards, supported two or even three decks. A majestic sterncastle rose aft of the mainmast, balanced by a smaller but higher forecastle. Its edge-to-edge planking was tightly caulked with oakum (shredded hemp) and tar or pitch and given an outer protection of wales and skids to cushion the collision with the quay. Few hatches and no companionway helped make it watertight in heavy weather. The tiller that operated its sternpost rudder passed through a port in the stern to a whipstaff.
Of its three masts, the main and foremast were square-rigged and supplied most of the power. The mizzen, rising from the sterncastle, was lateen, for control. The huge mainsail hung from a yard as long as the ship itself, below a much smaller topsail; the foremast carried a single square sail. By the end of the century another small sail, the spritsail, on the bowsprit, assisted the lateen in control. Genoa and Marseilles were reputed sources of the best sailcloth (cotton or linen canvas). The square sails were now easier to handle, thanks to improvements in the ropes. The mainsail could even be used to assist the tacking maneuver; as the ship came into the wind, it was raised momentarily to swing the bow over to the new tack. The multiplicity of sails proved invaluable when it came to navigating narrow waters, and did not demand more crew, since the sails were worked one at a time.
The best bulk carrier yet built anywhere, the carrack could take up to a thousand tons of wheat, salt, and timber in its capacious hold. Ranging freely and securely from the Baltic to the eastern Mediterranean, entirely supplanting the sail-and-oar galley on the Italy to Flanders run, it supplied the critical means for implementing the new interdependence of the economies of northern and southern Europe.
Columbus’s Santa Maria was a carrack, though one of quite modest proportions, probably not much more than a hundred tons. His two smaller ships; the Niña and Pinta, were products of a second, parallel line of development that began about 1440. The caravel was a shipbuilder’s solution to a very specific navigation problem: that encountered by Portuguese mariners groping their way down the west coast of Africa in search of the passage eastward to Asia. Carrying mixed or lateen rig and weighted with a cargo of no more than fifty tons, the slim caravel (the name a reminder of its carvel construction) had excellent sailing characteristics, including an ability to sail close to the wind that greatly facilitated the return voyage north to Portugal. Before the wind it was capable of a speed of up to eleven knots. Columbus’s Niña and Pinta, returning from America in 1493, made a day’s run of 198 miles. The caravel’s small crew and minimum supply requirements suited it to exploration of unknown and distant waters, and its maneuverability allowed it to fight off a lee shore even better than could the carrack.” [Gies 94:275-8]
; “The stern rudder, also long known in China, probably had an independent European provenance, either in Byzantium or, more probably, in the Baltic. At least in Europe, its adoption was apparently not motivated by the need for better steering apparatus, since the age-old steering oar still gave satisfactory service. However, the new, larger cog now rose so high in the water that it required an extremely long steering oar when heeled over, presenting serious problems for the steersman. The cog’s straight sternpost offered a likely place to hang a rudder, manipulated at first by a tiller outside the hull, later through a square port cut in the stern. No marked improvement in steering was gained; a ship still depended on shifting sails to execute a radical change in direction. But the new device saved time and effort by reducing drift and holding the vessel on course.” [157]
• “In only fifty years sea-going sailing vessels progressed from single-masters into three-masters carrying five or six sails. The easily handled caravel then produced was indipensable during the voyages of discovery. Parry sums up his meticulous discussion of the evolution of boat-building by reporting that ‘the vital marriage between square-rig and lateen, between Atlantic and Mediterranean, occurred in the short space of about twenty years in the middle of the fifteenth century’. Ships became sturdier, better at catching the wind, easier to steer. Navigation became easier and by 1500 good portolan maps (sailing directions) were to be had.” [Jones 87:59]
• “In the course of the fifteenth century the full-rigged ship was developed. This type of ship combined the best of both the northern and the southern European traditions. The hull was carvel-built, but the greatest innovation was in the rigging. By the ninth century the problem of shifting the sail spar over the mast during tacking, which had prevented the Romans from building larger ships using fore-and-aft rigging, had been solved, and larger merchant ships were fitted with lateen sails. Thus equipped, a ship could sail 60–65 degrees off the wind. This marked a major advance in ship performance. A full-rigged ship carried three masts, the fore- and mainmasts with square sails and the mizzenmast with a lateen (triangular) sail. With this combination, the square sails could be made large, while the lateen sail made sailing close to the wind possible. As time went on, more sails were added, and the big, bulging mainsail which was characteristic of the early caracks was divided into several smaller square sails—a change that made the canvas stand flatter and the ship better able to beat to windward. To understand fully the importance of these developments, one must see them against the background of the chronic shortage of energy which thwarted the activity of preindustrial people. The full-rigged ship enabled the Europeans to harness the energy of the wind over the seas to an extent inconceivable in previous times.
The economic consequences were immediately felt. Full-rigged ships no longer had to wait for only the most favorable breeze, and consequently the elapsed time of voyages diminished. Since the sail area could be increased and more energy exploited, the size of vessels grew and their carrying capacity rose until the middle of the sixteenth century, and costs were correspondingly reduced.” [Cipolla 80:176-7]
• “Wind power was also exploited more efficiently in shipping as a result of substantial changes in the design of ships. In northern Europe, the gradual adoption of the lateen sail was complemented by the addition of a foremast and a mizzenmast to produce an entirely new type of ship known as a “carrack.” Full three-masted rigging combined the advantages of the lateen and the square sails, namely, maneuverability in sailing against the wind and speed in sailing with it. The fully rigged ship has been termed “the Great Invention,” not because of its revolutionary nature, but simply because “it could do more than any of its predecessors and could do so with considerably less risk”. The mainmast and foremast carried square sails that drove the ship forward. The mizzenmast had a lateen sail rigged fore and aft, which helped in beating against the wind and maneuvering ships in narrow waters. It was first developed around 1400 in the Basque region around the Bay of Biscay and spread rapidly to northern Europe and the Mediterranean. During this time horizontal treadle looms produced higher quality and stronger sails…
Ship construction also improved. By about 1300 the so-called carvel construction technique was adopted by northern European ship-builders. This technique placed boards edge to edge along a skeleton of beams, with caulking between the planks to preserve watertightness. Carvel-built ships such as carracks did not entirely replace ships built by the age-old “clinker-planking” technology, in which the construction was based on overlapping planking… Carvel construction saved on wood and could make much lighter and larger ships than clinker planking; by 1400, ships of 1,000 tons were already in existence. Larger ships meant cheaper and faster transportation and improved seaworthiness… By the middle of the fifteenth century the Portuguese caravel had emerged. It is this type of ship that was used by Da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan. It was of a carvel construction, lateen rigged, had two or three masts, and a sternpost rudder. It measured a burden of perhaps 100-200 tons; and required a crew of about 20. It was a flexible ship, designed primarily for coastal shipping but sufficiently seaworthy to enable the Portuguese to lead the effort to discover the non-European world.” [Mokyr 90:46]
; “One of the most amazing features of the great Chinese decline was that despite continuous contact with European civilization, it was difficult for them to admit how much they were falling behind Europe… Yet from the middle of the sixteenth century on, the Chinese knew that Dutch and Portuguese guns, clocks, and instruments outperformed theirs. Even Western ships were regarded by the Chinese and Japanese as superior.” [219 (note 5)]

2. • “The Europeans also developed better navigational tools than existed before… Marine charts and navigating tables of unprecedented accuracy covering the entire Mediterranean and Black seas came into use in the thirteenth century. The compass, probably an independent European invention that was also known in China, was first mentioned… in about 1180. It took until about 1300 befor this crude instrument was turned into a self-contained unit we would call a compass today, complete with the 16-point wind rose. One specialist… believes that it was only after 1410 that anyone really steered by compass.” [Mokyr 90:47]
• “Somewhere in the Mediterranean region, in about 1300, the transition was made from the primitive needle-and-bowl to a self-contained instrument, the compass. The perfecting of the [magnetic] compass, the adoption of the waterclock for measuring the movement of the ship, the drawing up of naval charts with related instructions, the compilation of trigonometric tables for navigation… made possible instrumental or mathematical navigation, which in turn made possible a greater utilization of the ship as capital.” [Cipolla 80:175]
; “While naval construction was progressing, more sophisticated techniques of open-seas navigation were being developed. By 1434, the Portuguese, who had succeeded in rounding the formidable and feared Cape Bojador on the west coast of Africa, had developed systematic knowledge of the winds in the Atlantic. Before 1480 they learned to calculate latitude by converting, with the help of declination tables, the heights of the sun or the North Star over the horizon. The quadrant for measuring latitude must have come into use in about 1450, and by 1480 the astrolabe was also in use.” [177]
• “While now thought of more as a late medieval crusader and less as the great humanist patron of scientific exploration, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) was responsible for the historic series of fifteenth-century Portuguese voyages of exploration along the coasts of West Africa. He did much to promote navigation and to launch Portugal’s maritime empire and, driven by the spice trade, Lisbon soon became the world’s center of navigational and cartographical expertise. The ruling Portuguese court patronized various royal mathematicians, cosmographers, and professors of mathematics and astronomy, and it created two government offices charged to administer Portuguese trade and to prepare maps. Expert Portuguese cartographers obtained employment internationally. ” [McClellan 06:201]
• “The second auxiliary device [after the European compass] was the “portolan” (port-finding) chart, the world’s first navigational chart. Experienced Italian sailors felt their way on repeat voyages by sailing from one island or headland to the next, setting their course by compass and estimating the distance traveled on each bearing. A natural advance was to compile sailing directions that described coastlines and specified bearings and distances between points so that skippers unfamiliar with a given shipping route could benefit. In the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, someone had an insight: such information could be represented geometrically with two large circles superimposed on the whole Mediterranean, one with a center just west of Sardinia, the other with a center on the Ionian coast north of Rhodes.
Besides compass and charts, Mediterranean ships took to carrying hourglasses to aid in calculating ship speed and distance traveled. The astrolabe also made its appearance on board ship, again in the vanguard Mediterranean, where its value—determining latitude—was marginal…
By the mid-fourteenth century, the new navigation and the new ship rigging were in general use in the northern and southern seas and in the Atlantic. In 1354 Pedro IV of Aragon ordered all his ships to carry charts. By this time too, trigonometry, developed in the universities, was being applied to navigation. The possibility now arose of global voyages, the unlimited exploration of all the fabled seven seas.” [Gies 94:223-5]
; “The magnetic compass was now [15th century] a mature navigation instrument. The fact that the needle did not point exactly north had been duly noted and allowed for; since no one knew why it pointed north in the first place, the discovery made little difference. Simplified versions of the astrolabe and its variant, the quadrant, measured the angles of the two Guardians in relation to the North Star; the resulting data used in conjunction with tables gave latitude within about twenty-five miles. As the Portuguese African ventures reached further and further south, they proved the earth’s sphericity beyond a cavil by sighting new constellations, including the spectacular Southern Cross, but lost their ancient guiding light, the North Star. In 1484 King John II appointed a commission of mathematicians to study the problem and draw up tables of declination of the sun to be used at sea in conjunction with the astrolabe or quadrant; by determining the sun’s height at midday and consulting the tables, sailors could ascertain latitude. A new navigation technique was born: the skipper first sought the correct latitude for a certain port or point of land, then ran along the line of latitude to his target destination. To the tables of declination were added charts of known coasts and pilotage information. Arab and Chinese pilots of the Indian Ocean already knew how to find latitude, but they never adopted the European custom of carrying charts on board that made it easy to repeat an exploratory voyage with high accuracy.” [278-9]
• “[W]hen the Jesuits arrived in the sixteenth century, it was obvious that Western cartography was in advance of that of the Chinese. Needham did not analyse the reasons, which by an educated guess should be the inadequacy of indigenous Chinese geometry and mathematics, together with the lack of knowledge that the Earth was a globe.” [Qian 85:73]
• For more on European improvements in the compass, see section V-2.G.5 and its sources.

3. • “In ocean shipping, China’s decline relative to the West was abrupt. Less than a century after the great voyages of Cheng Ho, the Chinese shipyards were closed and seagoing junks with more than two masts were forbidden. The technology of building large, seaworthy junks capable of long-distance journeys disappeared from China.” [Mokyr 90:220]
• “After 1415, shipbuilding resources were diverted into the construction of canal boats, and then in 1419 official shipbuilding stopped completely. Finally, in 1435, overseas voyages and all but a minimum of naval activity ceased, so there was no further incentive for technical innovation in shipbuilding.” [Pacey 90:55]
• “So, after some decades of tugging and hauling… the decision was taken not only to cease from maritime exploration but to erase the very memory of what had gone before lest later generations be tempted to renew the folly. From 1436, requests for the assignment of new craftsmen to the shipyards were refused, while conversely, foreigners asking for the renewal of customary gifts were turned down, presumably for reasons of economy. For want of construction and repair, public and private fleets shrank. Pirates flourished in unguarded waters (the Japanese were particularly active), and China placed ever more reliance on inland canal transport…
Hence the decision to turn from the sea. In 1477, a powerful eunuch named Wang Zhi, head of the secret police, asked for the logs of the great voyages by way of renewing interest in naval expeditions. In response, the vice-president of the Ministry of War confiscated the documents and either hid or burned them.” [Landes 98:96-7]
• “[B]y the time the Portuguese reached China in 1514, the Chinese had lost the ability to build large oceangoing ships.” [Clark 07a:143]

4. • The evidence shows that the size of Zheng He’s famous ships are greatly exaggerated: “There are many problems with Fernández-Armesto’s analysis, starting with his overestimation of the size and capacity of Zheng He’s ships. Not long ago, it was an oft-repeated statistic among Chinese scholars that the dimensions of Zheng He’s flagships were 138.4 meters long and 56 meters wide, but in recent decades these numbers have been lowered. In her popular When China Ruled the Seas, Louise Levathes points to early Chinese calculations, stating that “a wooden ship of this length [138.4 meters] would be very difficult to manoeuvre,” adding that “most scholars now believe that the [largest of the] treasure ships…were 309 and 408 ft long and 160 to 166 ft wide,” that is, 118.9 to 124.4 meters long and 48.8 to 50.6 meters wide.
Fernández-Armesto does not offer any numbers on length and width, but adopts the tonnage displacement figure of 3,000, and says that this was ten times the size of the largest ships in Europe. However, in contrast to all these estimations, Sally Church points out that in 2001, Xin Yuanou, a shipbuilding engineer and professor of the history of science at Shanghai Jiaotong University, proposed the modest measurements of 59.1 meters long by 14 meters wide as the actual size of the ships—in others words, he reduced their size to less than half of what they were formerly thought to be. I cannot help having greater confidence in Church’s expertise and Xin Yuanou’s estimations than in the popularly accepted estimations.” [Duchesne 12:78-9]
; Duchesne also explains that Zheng He’s famous voyages to east Africa never really discovered or explored any place, in [Duchesne 12:79-81].

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H. White science and technology merged in Europe’s Industrial Revolutions.

Europe’s Scientific Revolution of the 17th century was followed by its Enlightenment of the 18th. Early European scientists, motivated primarily by explorative urges, pioneered our understanding of the world, even though for a long while their findings remained too limited to drive technological advance. A major theme of the Enlightenment was the belief that expansion of knowledge and application of science could ultimately solve humanity’s problems [1]. During the 18th century, scientific and technical knowledge increased at such a rate, and was so widely disseminated (via books, journals, lectures, and letters) [2], that it began contributing to technological innovation at an accelerating pace [3]. Scientific methods were increasingly applied to technology itself: experimentation, quantification with accurate measurement, modeling, mathematical analysis, and publication of results [4]. Various fields of science and technology became increasingly integrated and mutually reinforcing [5]. The upshot was Europe’s Industrial Revolution(s) of the late 18th and 19th centuries, that created the modern world [6].

China not only had inferior science, but less dissemination of what scientific and technical knowledge it did have [7]. Kaozheng, an 18th century “evidentiary” movement that called for examining the original sources of China’s ancient sages, was no Enlightenment [8].

1. • “The age preceding the Industrial Revolution was characterized by a well-organized intellectual community that more and more rewarded and encouraged thinking outside the box and proposing new ways to harness natural laws and regularities ‘for the relief of Man’s estate’ as Francis Bacon, its intellectual founding parent, famously put it. This community… was clearly at least as important as any nation state… They called it the Respublic Litteraria, and thought of themselves as ‘citizens’. In 1751, Voltaire (ever Francocentric) wrote in his Age of Louis XIV that ‘During the Age of Louis XIV, a Republic of Letters was established, almost unnoticed, despite the wars and despite the difference in religions . . . all the sciences and arts received mutual assistance this way.” [Mokyr 16:35-6]
• “[T]he age [of the Enlightenment] became more and more enchanted with the term ‘useful knowledge’, which was increasingly interpreted in a literal sense. This concept became the basis for the ‘Baconian program’, and increasingly served as the key to the agenda of researchers. The idea, in summary, was that knowledge was supposed to be ‘useful’ – morally, socially, and increasingly, materially. Society was improvable through knowledge, and the purpose of the study of nature and experimentation was to help solve practical problems just as much and eventually more so than to satisfy human curiosity or to demonstrate the wisdom of the creator. Many, if not most of the natural philosophers of the age of enlightenment agreed with Bacon’s notions and acknowledged their intellectual debt to his ideas.
The knowledge accumulated by natural philosophers in the eighteenth century could only rarely be applied directly to production, and a straight link between the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution cannot be defended. It is telling, however, that many scholars used their rigor and training to attack practical problems. Among them were the greatest minds of the scientific enlightenment. A shift in the agenda had occurred. Rather than just gazing at the stars, dabbling in the ‘occult,’ or making metaphysical points about the wisdom of the creator, a new, practical, and down-to-earth natural philosophy emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, produced by people who felt that the world could be improved by their knowledge. This knowledge was increasingly derived from and applied to the mundane world of crafts, farming, and services. Thus, intellectuals were attracted to technology and its mysteries more than ever before, as embodied in the early work of the Royal Society.” [Mokyr 07b:10-1]
; “The idea of turning research into useful knowledge was larger than the discovery of underlying general laws. Description and organization mattered as much. Much of the investigations of the eighteenth century were in the style of the ‘three C’s’: counting, cataloguing and classifying. Taxonomy, often dismissed as a form of knowledge, was quite central to the market for ideas in the eighteenth century. In that regard, the great figures were the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and his French rival Georges-Louis Buffon, but many contemporaries followed them in attempts to gather more information about living beings so that farming and husbandry could be improved. In Britain the paradigmatic figures were Erasmus Darwin and JosephBanks, the authors of voluminous books on plants and animals, and Arthur Young and John Sinclair, who wrote extensively on agriculture. These writings did not have immediate results: agricultural productivity increased only slowly in the period of the classical Industrial Revolution, and insofar that it did, it was probably not much due to agricultural writings. And yet, the demand side of the market for ideas was there, and the supply was on the way. The market was supported by the belief that more and better knowledge would eventually lead to human progress.
The Baconian program, then, became the dominant force in determining the agenda of intellectual activities of Enlightenment philosophes… The efforts made by Europe’s most eminent learned men to improve practical techniques demonstrates that by the second half of the eighteenth century most scientists felt an acute responsibility to the material world, and made a sincere effort to learn which problems bothered people in the workshops and the fields. These efforts were enforced by commercial interests that created a literal market in knowledge. An increasing number of British natural philosophers and learned persons found it remunerative to rent out their services to manufacturers as consultants.” [14-5]
; “There was a growing belief that the discovery of general scientific principles would help in some way in the design and operation of mechanical devices, chemical processes, navigation, medicine, and other areas in which material progress was envisaged…
How such principles would be discovered was itself a mater of debate, but the growth of an experimentalist-quantitative approach, based on careful observation, was widely believed to hold the key to progress of knowledge. Some of that work turned after 1720 into the “gentrified experimentation of the Royal Society”…and remained rather aloof from the day-to-day needs of the economy. But engineers from Smeaton and Watts to the hundreds of anonymous craftsmen in Britain’s mines, mills, and forges performed experiments to see what worked and what did not, and then told the world about it. Such a concerted effort was not entirely novel in the eighteenth century, but its degree and extent were far larger than anything seen before and while it was not limited to Britain, the British excelled at it.
The Industrial Enlightment project enjoyed support from the authorities in some European countries, but it was by and large a movement of individuals in the private sector, who communicated and cooperated across national boundaries in what they thought of as a “Republic of Letters”…” [Mokyr 09:44-5]
• “The “Industrial Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century was the “missing link” which formed the “historical bridge” between the world of Galileo and the world of James Watt. This enlightenment involved the rise of numerous societies “dedicated to the diffusion of useful knowledge” and the creation of information networks between engineers, natural philosophers, and businessmen; the opening of artillery schools, mining schools, informal scientific societies, as well as numerous micro-inventions that turned insights into “successful business propositions.” It also included “the emergence of experts, consulting engineers, accountants, and other professionals,” standardization of information, scientific notation, improved standards for weights and measures, and specialist collections of technical and engineering data. Finally, it included a wide range of institutional changes that affected economic behavior, commercial relations, resource allocation, savings and investment.” [Duchesne 11a:198-9]
• See the citations below on the profuse dissemination of scientific knowledge inspired by the Enlightenment.

2. • “In some ways, the Industrial Enlightment was the logical continuation of the Scientific Revolution by other means. Behind the scenes, was the growing conviction that the purpose of natural philosophy, beyond satisfying curiosity and illustrating the greatness of the Creator, was to advance the useful arts and the improvement of material conditions. In other words, useful knowledge had pragmatic as well as epistemic objectives… Thus, practical handbooks, technical dictionaries, encyclopedias, descriptions of how to manufacture items, of what worked best, and of how natural philosophy could be applied to technology accumulated in the eighteenth century at a dazzling rate. In Britain a true rage for writing such books had emerged by the 1780s, and books in foreign languages were translated almost as soon as they appeared overseas…
Engineers and skilled technicians learned from scientists about about careful and detailed reporting of experiments and observations. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Enlightenment culture glorified and codified the arts and crafts of artisans, farmers, chemists, instrument makers, surveyors, navigators, and others as never before. Of course, a few felt that such reporting would endanger the source of their income and tried to keep their knowledge private. But the eighteenth century witnessed a veritable explosion of scientific and technical dictionaries, compendia, and periodicals, publishing articles on diverse topics in medicine, farming, manufuacturing implements, pumps, water mills, electricity, bleaching and such.” [Mokyr 09:46]
; “In the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment spawned a proliferation of provincial “philosophical” societies, which, their name notwithstanding, spent much of their meetings discussing practical and technical issues, listening to lectures discussing pumps, textile machines, chemistry, crop yields, and similar matters.” [48]
; “Scientific societies were complemented by the profusion of provincial libraries, which spread rapidly in the early years of George III’s reign [1760-1820]. Thus leads acquired one in 1768, Bradford in 1774, and Hull in 1775. The libraries were supplemented by school and church libraries and so-called book clubs. Those who wanted access to existing knowledge they might find useful discovered that it was becoming easier and easier to find.” There were also many informal and social meetings between upper class people/ businessmen and men of knowledge, including some who toured to give lectures far and wide.” [50-1]
; “There was a general increase in useful knowledge, a decline in access costs for it. “The Industrial Revolution then created a set of bridges between intellectuals and producers, between the savants and the fabricants. All in all, these channels of communication were the most obvious way in which “culture” affected technology and, in the long run, economic progress.” [53-4]
; “The Enlightenment began a process that dramatically lowered these access costs [to useful knowledge]. The knowledge revolution of the eighteenth century… made… superior techniques spread faster because the ways they became known and could be tested improved… After all, a substantial portion of invention consists of recombination, the application of a sometimes remote and disjoint sections of [general, scientific knowledge] together to form something novel…[Gives examples]…It may be an exaggeration to say with François Jacob that “to create is to recombine”, because some elements were truly novel, but it surely is true that much of technological innovation consists of precisely such activities. Hence the importance of efficient and accessible sources of useful knowledge in which one could check what was known about a particular natural phenomenon or process, or about techniques in use, and transfer them to novel applications.” [Mokyr 02a:72-3]
; More detail on the explosion of scientific and technical information during Europe’s Enlightenment in [Mokyr 02a:65-70]
; “In addition to what the eighteenth century called “natural philosophy,” [useful knowledge] consisted of catalogs of facts, based on experience and experiment rather than on understanding or careful analysis and testing. Many of these facts were organized compilations about what worked: the right mixture of materials, the right temperature or pressure in a vessel, the correct fertilizer in a given type of soil, the optimal viscosity of a lubricant, the correct tension on a piece of fabric, the shortest way to sail across the sea while using the right trade winds and avoiding reefs, and not-so-basic facts of nature used in productive activities from medicinal herbs to cattle breeding to glass blowing to marling. It involved not only the work of people whom we regard today as scientists but also those who collected data and practices—botanists, zoologists, geographers, mineralogists, instrument-makers, and other highly skilled artisans—and placed this knowledge in the public realm. For that reason I prefer the much wider category of propositional knowledge.” [Mokyr 05a:290]
; “Secondly, technological progress depended on the knowledge of other techniques already in use. As has often been noted, much invention took the form of the “recombination” of existing techniques. Moreover, technological progress often depended on “analogical” thinking, in which inventors, consciously or subconsciously, transform an idea they have already seen into something novel. Furthermore, knowledge of what techniques exists will alert original and creative individuals to gaps and opportunities in the existing set of techniques, and prevent potential inventors from misspending their resources by reinventing the wheel. Thirdly, as I have stressed in my Gifts of Athena, lower access costs made it possible for inventors to tap the propositional knowledge on which the new technique rests—insofar as such knowledge was available and effective. Understanding why and how a technique works at some level of generality made it easier to clean up bugs, adapt it to new uses and different environments, and unleashed the cumulative stream of microinventions on which nineteenth-century productivity growth rested.” [295-6]
; “The eighteenth century also witnessed the improvement of the transfer of formerly tacit knowledge. Part of it was simply the improvement of the language of technology: mathematical symbols, standardized measures, and more universal scales and notation added a great deal to the ease of communication of codified technological information. Diagrams and illustrations became more sophisticated.” [298]
; “Encyclopedias and “dictionaries” were supplemented by a variety of textbooks, manuals, compendia, gazettes, and compilations of techniques and devices that were in use somewhere, none more detailed than the over 13,000 pages of the 80 volumes of the Descriptions des Arts et Métiers compiled in France before the Revolution—in Gillispie’s judgment the “largest body of technological literature ever produced.” Much more modest and affordable were the multitudinous “dictionaries” of useful arts published all over Europe. In agriculture, meticulously compiled data collections looking at such topics as yields, crops, and cultivation methods were common. Engineering manuals, meticulous descriptions of various “useful arts” were published, translated, pirated, and—one presumes—read on a wider scale than ever before.” [308]
• “More people participated in a ‘scientific-technological’ culture there than anywhere else. In comparison to other parts of the world, knowledge in Europe was more a public and traded ‘commodity’. There existed fewer barriers to its exchange. Contacts between ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘engineers’ were closer there than anywhere else. In 1790, there were already 220 academies for the promotion of useful knowledge in Britain. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the country counted 1,020 associations for technical and scientific knowledge with a membership of roughly 200,000.” [Vries 13:224-5]

3. • “On the whole, up to 1750 science probably gained more from technology than vice-versa. Among the notable exceptions, which we shall consider in later chapters, were the navigational instruments that played so important a part in the great voyages of exploration and in surveying and cartography; the application of the principle of the pendulum to time-measurement; and, particularly, the growing exploitation of chemistry.” [Derry 60:42]
• “Despite its apparent shortcomings, eighteenth-century propositional knowledge did provide implicit theoretical underpinnings to what empirically minded technicians did, even if the epistemic base was still narrow. Without certain elements in [general or scientific knowledge], many of the new techniques would not have come into existence at all or would not have worked as well. Thus the steam engine depended both on the understanding of atmospheric pressure, discovered by continental scientists such as Evangelista Torricelli and Otto von Guericke, and on the early seventeenth-century notion that steam was evaporated water and its condensation created a vacuum. The discovery led to the idea that this pressure could be used for moving a piston in a cylinder, which could then be made to do work. The proto-idea of an engine filtered down to Thomas Newcomen despite the fact that his world was the local blacksmith’s rather than the cosmopolitan academic scientist’s. Improvements in mathematics, especially the calculus invented by Leibniz and Newton, became increasingly important to improvements in the design and perfection of certain types of machinery, although in many areas its importance did not become apparent until much later. The advances in water power in the eighteenth century depended increasingly on a scientific base of hydraulic theory and experimentation despite a number of errors, disputes, and confusions. The importance of water power in the Industrial Revolution is still not given its due recognition because steam was more spectacular and in some sense more revolutionary. The technique of chlorine bleaching depended on the prior discovery of chlorine by the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1774. Even the invention of the Leblanc soda-making process, often described as a purely “empirical” discovery, has been shown to depend on an epistemic base that contained the nature of salt, first worked out by Henri-Louis Duhamel in 1737, and the discovery of carbonic acid gas by Joseph Black and its recognition as a constituent of chalk and soda. Phlogiston theory, the ruling physical paradigm of the eighteenth century, was eventually rejected in favor of the new chemistry of Lavoisier, but some of its insights (e.g., the Swede Tobern Bergman’s contributions to metallurgy) were valuable, even if their scientific basis seems flawed and their terminology quaint to modern readers. Cardwell has shown that the idea of a measurable quantity of “work” or “energy” derived directly from Galileo’s work on mechanics and deeply influenced the theories and lectures of engineers such as John Desaguliers. John Harrison’s great marine chronometer was conceivable only in the context in which [Europeans knew] that longitude could be determined by comparing local time with time at some fixed point. Another good example is the knowledge of the properties of materials, one of the cornerstones of all techniques. By the early nineteenth century, this part of material science was being analyzed by scientists who learned to distinguish between elastic strength and rupture strength. But until then, this entire body of knowledge was controlled by old-fashioned engineers and carpenters who “limited themselves to instinctively measuring the influence of the differences in buildings which appear to serve a similar function”. An informal, intuitive and instinctive knowledge of natural regularities and of what could and could not be done is [mostly what was known] before modern science formalized substantial portions of it. The mechanical inventors who made the breakthroughs in spinning and weaving of cotton could not and did not have to rely on formal mechanics, but had access as never before to mechanical and other engineering feats. Knowing what works and what does not elsewhere directs inventive activity into channels more likely to succeed.” [Mokyr 02a:44-6]
• “Eighteenth century manufacturers needed to possess the skills of Newtonian mechanics (or be able to hire and converse with those who did)… The degree to which the new science permeated British society and was used by innovators and entrepreneurs, such as the Watts and the Boultons, separated England from all other European countries… It was in the air and practical engineers and inventors breathed it every day.
Smeaton is a case in point, his “…work was outstanding as an example of experimental method in science, and how it could be used to shed light on engineering problems” (Pacey: 208). Smeaton actively employed Newton’s ‘laws of reasoning by induction’ to study the properties of the waterwheel. Smeaton’s work demonstrated the superiority of the over-shot wheel to the under-shot, and the superiority of the breast-wheel to both the under- and over-shot wheels. Many of Smeaton’s results were published by the Royal Society, ultimately proving to be widely influential. According to Pacey (209) Smeaton ‘…clearly saw that the comparison of his maxims with experimental measurements involved the same methodological problem as Newton’s comparison of theory and observation in astronomy.”
Mechanical science influenced technological change, not just in machinery, but in canals, harbours, mines, and a host of other applications. It did this not through general laws from which specific applications were deduced, but by permeating thoughts and attitudes and providing people with the theoretical mechanics and the mathematics that facilitated technological change. This illustrates the fusion of theoretical and applied science, as well as engineering, that characterized the scientific world until well into the 19th century.” [Bekar 02:5-6]
; “The story of the steam engine is a story of the interrelationship of the new piecemeal scientific knowledge and practical engineering. Engineers frequently made use of scientific principles only recently understood. Technicians strove to develop designs that would exploit the principles effectively. Thus, as Thurston (1878: 37) puts it: ‘At the beginning of the eighteenth century every element of the modern type of steam-engine had been separately invented and practically applied. The character of atmospheric pressure, and of the pressure of gases, had become understood. The nature of a vacuum was known, and the method of obtaining it by the displacement of the air by steam, and by the condensation of the vapor, was understood. The importance of utilizing the power of steam, and the application of condensation in the removal of atmospheric pressure, was not only recognized, but had been actually and successfully attempted by Morland, Papin, and Savery. Mechanicians had succeeded in making steamboilers capable of sustaining any desired or any useful pressure, and Papin had shown how to make them comparatively safe by the attachment of the safety-valve. They had made steam-cylinders fitted with pistons, and had used such a combination in the development of power. It now only remained for the engineer to combine known forms of mechanism in a practical machine which should be capable of economically and conveniently utilizing the power of steam through the application of now well-understood principles, and by the intelligent combination of physical phenomena already familiar to scientific investigators.
This idea is also shared by Musson who argued that: ‘[A] great deal of experimentation of that time [16th and 17th centuries] had utilitarian applications, and there is no doubt that the underlying principles of the steam engine—the creation of a vacuum by condensation of steam in a closed vessel and the utilization of atmospheric and steam pressure—were originally discovered by natural philosophers, or scientists as we would now call them, in the seventeenth century.'” [10-1]
• “[Britain’s] advantage was in the fusion of theoretical and applied-industrial science. The continental countries, however, were not far behind. Newtonian mechanics was a necessary precondition of the development of working steam machines. There was a positive feedback relation running from scientific understanding to technological improvements in the development of Newcomen’s engine. The theoretical-technological elements that made possible Watt’s solution to the problem of rotary motion—the principles underlying the suction pump, the nature of a vacuum, the theory of atmospheric pressure, the first workable airtight cylinder and piston driven by atmospheric pressure, the understanding of the nature of steam and the realization that air and steam were different—were the joint achievement of Europeans. The question “Why in Britain?” inevitably leads to the question “Why modern science arose only in Europe and not in the civilizations of Islam and China?” [Duchesne 05:3]
• “[Science and especially scientific thinking] were essential for several inventions during Britain’s take-off, first of all the most important one, the steam engine, but they mattered also in other sectors, for example the production of ceramics, and they clearly became increasingly important over time in preventing innovation from simply drying up.” [Vries 13:313]
• Basalla discusses the interaction between science and technology in various fields in [Basalla 88:92-102].

4. • “[M]any eighteenth century scholars better-known for their contributions to science used their analytical rigor and formal training to attack practical problems of production even if the direct connection of their discoveries to science is not always apparent. Among them were the greatest minds of the scientific enlightenment. Leonhard Euler was concerned with ship design, lenses, the buckling of beams, and (with his less famous son Johann) contributed a great deal to theoretical hydraulics. The great Lavoisier worked on assorted applied problems as a young man, including the chemistry of gypsum and the problems of street lighting. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, William Cullen, Joseph Black, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, Humphry Davy, Tobern Bergman, count Rumford, and Johann Tobias Mayer were among the many first-rate minds who unabashedly devoted some of their efforts to solve mundane problems of technology: how to design calculating machines, how to make better and cheaper steel, increase agricultural productivity and improve livestock, how to build better pumps and mills, how to determine longitude at sea, how to heat and light homes and cities safer and better, how to prevent smallpox, and similar questions.” [Mokyr 07c:6]
; “The legitimization of systematic experiment as a scientific method carried over to the realm of technology. Experimentation is, of course, necessary because it is a way of accumulating an empirical body of knowledge and inferring regularities in a deductive fashion, without necessarily understanding the underlying mechanism. Yet the accumulation of such knowledge was at the heart of technological change in the period 1700-1850.
The eighteenth century thus spent an enormous amount of intellectual energy on describing what it could not understand. We tend to think of science as more “analytic” than descriptive. The three C’s–counting, classifying, cataloguing–were central to the Baconian program that guided much of the growth of the useful knowledge in the century before the Industrial Revolution. Heat, energy, chemical affinities, electrical tension, capacitance, resistivity and many other properties of materials from iron to bricks to mollases were measured and tabulated before they were “understood”. Measurement itself was not novel in the eighteenth century, but the accuracy, thoroughness, reliability, the scope of phenomena and quantities being measure, and the diffusion of this knowledge surely were (Heilbron 1990). [Gives examples of this related to steam power.] Neither Beighton nor Besaguliers (nor, for that matter, Watt or Smeaton) fully “understood” (whatever that exactly means) the science behind the steam engine, but they all knew that in order to utilize it better they had to measure and quantify it. The great effort of naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus to find a classificatory scheme was very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment: minute description and measurement.” [Mokyr 09:42-3]
; “Metrology was thus of considerable importance. The uniform organization of measurement and standards is a critical property of [scientific knowledge] if marginal access costs are to be kept low. Many systems of codifying technical knowledge and providing standards were devised or improved during the Enlightenment. Headrick mentions two of the most important ones: the Linnaean system of classifying and taxonomizing living species, and the new chemical nomenclature designed by John Dalton and simplified and improved into its current form by Jöns Berzelius in 1813–14. But other useful concepts were also standardized. In 1784 James Watt set the horsepower as the amount of energy necessary to raise 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute…
[T]he eighteenth century witnessed a great deal of progress in “technical representation,” and by the middle of the eighteenth century technical draftsmanship was being taught systematically. In addition, between 1768 and 1780 the French mathematician Gaspard Monge developed descriptive geometry, which made graphical presentations of buildings and machine design mathematically rigorous. In Alder’s words, “It marks a first step toward understanding how the way things are made has been transformed by the way they are represented”. The impact of Monge’s sophisticated diagrams on the practice ofengineering was probably modest at first, and technical drawings and orthographic projections were used by other engineers independently and long before Monge’s work. My argument is simply that “the way things are represented” is a way of organizing [knowledge] and that the visual organization of technical knowledge made enormous progress in the age of Enlightenment.” [Mokyr 02a:59-60]
; “The growth of a machine culture in the eighteenth century involved a close collaboration and interaction between natural philosophy and highly skilled craftsmen, grappling with difficult mechanical issues such as heat, power, inertia, and friction, recently described by Larry Stewart. The same is true in many other key industries, especially chemical and engineering, and although it is not nearly as obvious in textiles, access to developments in one industry inspired and stimulated inventors elsewhere. Nothing of the sort, I submit, can be detected at this time in the Ottoman Empire, Japan, India, Africa, or China…
With the success of the Enlightenment program came rising living standards, power, comfort, and wealth in the societies in which it was victorious. The stationary state was replaced by the steady state. It is Europe’s intellectual development rather than its coal or its colonial ghost acreage that answers Pomeranz’s query of why Chinese science and technology— which did not “stagnate”—“did not revolutionize the Chinese economy.”
The Industrial Enlightenment insisted on asking not just “which techniques work” but also “why techniques work” (that is, what natural regularities explain their success). The search for higher levels of generality and encompassing natural regularities were inherent in the massive intellectual heritage of Isaac Newton…
The men and women of the Industrial Enlightenment increasingly felt that a research program based on an empirical-experimentalist approach held the key to continuing economic and social progress. Physicists, engineers, chemists, botanists, medical doctors, and agricultural improvers made sincere efforts to generalize from the observations they made, to fit observed facts and regularities (including successful techniques) to the formal propositional knowledge of the time. The bewildering complexity and diversity of the world of techniques in use was to be reduced to a finite set of general principles governing them…
Once such knowledge had been established and found to be helpful, it needed to be made available to the men in the workshops. From the widely felt need to rationalize and standardize weights and measures, to the insistence on writing in vernacular languages, to the launching of scientific societies and academies, to the construction of botanical gardens by enthusiasts such as Georges-Louis Buffon and Joseph Banks to teach the knowledge of plants, to that most paradigmatic Enlightenment triumph, the Grande Encyclopédie, the notion of the diffusion and accessibility of shared knowledge found itself at the center of attention among intellectuals. Taxonomies and classifications were invented to organize and systematize the new facts gathered, and new forms of mathematical and chemical notation were proposed to standardize the languages of science and make propositional knowledge more accessible. To understand these languages, it was realized that increased technical and mathematical education was required, and mathematics teaching and research expanded from the establishment of chairs in mathematics in the Scottish universities in the late seventeenth century to the founding of the école polytechnique in 1794.” [Mokyr 05a:323-6]
• “To evaluate [Chinese stagnation], we need to be clear about ways in which the ‘scientific revolution’ may have contributed to the technological advantage which the West subsequently gained as compared with other cultures. The argument of this chapter is that what mattered was not any particular discovery or invention, but rather a series of new methods for handling technical information and formulating technological (and managerial) ideas by analysis based on measurement, tabulation of data, classification or subdivision, or even the use of drawings and physical models.” [Pacey 90:94]
; “[W]ith many techniques there is a limit to the improvements which can be made by craftworkers’ methods… This kind of blockage could also occur in metal-working or the design of machines, and the way round it usually depended on analysing the process more clearly so as to conceptualize what was involved. To do this, it was often important to record data, perform a chemical analysis, or draw a mechanism on paper…
With mechanical technologies, a comparable procedure for analysis and conceptualization often depended on measurement and scale drawing. The latter technique is said to have been ‘invented’ by the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi just before 1420. Certainly, architects and map-makers were increasingly making drawings to scale from about this time, and soon shipwrights such as the Englishman Matthew Baker were doing the same. Another technique used in ship design was the construction of scale models, and Galileo, the great Italian mathematician, wrote about the comparative strengths of models and full-size structures. This was in 1638, and indicated yet another new analytical approach. Galileo’s theory had occasional use (for example, in the 1670s and 1790s) when tests were made on models of pipes, beams and bridges, and it was desired to apply the results to full-size structures.” [95]
; “In one instance after another in Europe [in the 17th century], we find people analysing how individual ‘machines’ were operated, including muskets, surveying equipment and spinning wheels. In each case, the analysis included the motions of the operators’ arms and fingers, either with a view to redesigning the machine, or else with the idea of reorganizing the task so that the operator worked faster. [Gives detailed examples.]” [98-9]
; “One other source of innovation in [the dyeing] industry was scientific study. Several French chemists had attempted crude scientific theories of dyeing, and one minor discovery was the role of calcium minerals in the madder process, as mentioned in chapter 6. The greatest of these chemists was Berthollet, who developed the chlorine bleaching process during the 1780s. Historians who are skeptical of the role of science in the industrial revolution point out that chemistry was in a rudimentary state, and suggest that chlorine bleaching was its only real contribution. But the habit of writing down experimental results, and the tendency to conceptualize processes by proposing theories, however inadequate, suggested new approaches and led to a build-up of more and better-arranged empirical knowledge.” [120]

5. • This is evident in the previous source citations in this section.
• “In any event, given that useful knowledge as it emerged in China was profoundly different from the West, technological history would have taken a very different course without Western “Modern Science.” There is thus no reason to believe that a world without the West would have come upon the internal combustion engine, the microprocessor, or stereotaxic surgery. The Chinese might have, however, quite likely stumbled on smallpox vaccination, semaphore telegraph, hot air ballooning, Bessemer steel, aspirin or other inventions requiring narrow epistemic bases. But the mutually reinforcing interaction between science and industry that created modern metallurgy, chemical engineering, biological technology, and such would simply never have taken place.” [Mokyr 00:50]

6. • On Europe’s technological advances that drove the Industrial Revolution, see section V-4.B.1 and its sources.

7. • On China’s paltry scientific record compared to Europe’s, see section V-3.A-D and its sources.
• “From these points of view [emphasizing the importance of written conceptualization of technology to innovation], the most significant developments in Asia [in 1550-1750] were the technical books published in Japan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a handful of Chinese scientific works…[and a few by India]. But such examples are few and isolated. The great preponderance of new technological potential generated by increased ability to conceptualize technical problems was accruing in the West.” [Pacey 90:97]
• “Even in the dissemination of technical knowledge there appears to have been retrogression [in China]: the great technical encyclopedia, the Thien Kung Khai Wu (Exploitation of the Works of Nature), written in 1637 by Sung Ying Hsing, (“the Chinese Diderot”) provided an excellent summary of Chinese technology from weaving to hydraulics to jade working. The work was destroyed, probably because of the author’s political views, and has survived only thanks to a Japanese reprint. Wang Chen’s great Treatise on Agriculture was published in 1313, but by 1530 there was only one surviving copy.” [Mokyr 90:222-3]
• “[T]here was an insufficient density of interest among educated Chinese in the last few centuries of the empire to create, and to sustain, the network of socio-intellectual interactions needed for a modern science.” [Elvin 0x:8]
• “The facts seem to be that China did not have even the beginnings of systematic cumulative modern science. Throughout history there have been great scientific thinkers in China, but quite often their ideas flourished for a while and were then lost. One reason was the absence of institutions to encourage the cumulative nature of science—a good institutional memory and a critical capacity to build on it.” [Bekar 02:19]

8. • “The Chinese attempt at Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was known as the school of kaozheng or “evidentiary research.” In this school, abstract ideas and moral values gave way as subjects for discussion to concrete facts, documented institutions and historical events. Chinese scholarship of this period… was based on rigorous research, demanded proof and evidence for statements, and shunned away from leaps of faith and speculation. It sounds promising, but in the end these scholars were primarily interested in philology, linguistics, and historical studies “confident that these would lead to greater certainty about what the true words and intentions of China’s ancient sages had been and, hence, to a better understanding of how to live in the present”. Equally significantly, unlike the European Enlightenment, the Chinese movement remained by and for the mandarinate, the ruling Confucian elite, which had little inclination for material progress.” [Mokyr 06:27]
; “It is clear, however, that the Chinese Enlightenment, if that is the right term, did not produce what the European Enlightenment did. Its research agenda included little or no “useful knowledge” and instead, in one succinct formulation, they were “living out the values of their culture”. The “chasm” between China’s scientists and those who made things remained all but watertight. Mathematics and astronomy were applied for instance to reconstruct the size and shape of historical ceremonial bronze bells or reconstruct ancient carriages… The agenda of Chinese scholarship remained retrospective: to prove ancient sages right and to perform exegesis on their writings…” [31]
• “Late Imperial China witnessed not a philological revolution but the ‘rise of Classicism, ritualism, and purism’. The so-called ‘evidential’ (kaocheng) movement was a response to the threatened position of the Chinese gentry, an effort to restore an elite culture which had been considerably weakened by Ming commercialization. The philological scholarship was a subsidiary component of a broader socio-cultural movement by a class seeking to preserve its status. The vision of this movement was conservative, recovery of the ‘original’ or ‘pure’ Confucian norms and language. They were dedicated to philological precision in their efforts to achieve or recover the pure classical traditions. They rejected the Ming Neo-Confucian appeal to the innate capacities of the common people, and instead stressed the distinction between the elite gentry and the commoners. ‘Filial devotion, loyalty to the monarch, and wifely fidelity’ – these were their mottoes combined with ‘punctilious observance of hierarchical relationship, and the exaltation of the ritual authority of the Classics.’” [Duchesne 11b]
• “The late Ming and early Ch’ing dynasties (primarily seventeenth through eighteenth centuries) saw the gradual formulation of a new, more exact and more empirical kind of scholarship, eventually known as the “School of Evidential Research” (k’ao-cheng hsueh). Its practitioners developed sophisticated techniques of technical and historical analysis to establish the precise texts of China’s classical literature and their historical sequence. In so doing they sometimes criticized, on grounds of anachronism or improbability, passages in this literature in which traditional cosmographical ideas appeared… [F]or example, the contention by Wang Fu-chih (1619-1692) that there is no absolute demarcation between between one [of the mystical Five Elements] and another but only a gradual fusing of one into another.
However, when we analyze the coverage and focus of these criticisms, it would appear that their influence upon the subsequent development of Chinese physical science was probably considerably less than might at first be supposed. First, the criticisms are scattered and unsystematic. They deal with particular cosmological references occurring in particular texts, not with the general conception of the yin-yang and Five Elements as cosmological systems. Apparently the overall reality of these systems was scarcely ever questioned. Secondly, the criticisms are based on the study of books within the library, not on the direct study of actual natural phenomena (through observation, experiment, and so on). These are the reasons for the conclusion reached at point four that traditional cosmological thinking retained its prominence in China until recent times—in other words, until approximately the beginning of the twentieth century.” [Bodde 91:103]

————

I. White science and technology created the modern world.

The modern world of marvelous technology, prosperity, and miracle medicine was created by White people. Pneumatics, mechanics, and metallurgy advances led to the steam engine, to steam-powered production and locomotion, and to the internal combustion engine. Electricity and magnetism led to electrical power, batteries, motors, lights, and radios. Chemistry advances led to synthetic fertilizers, cleaning agents, vitamins, and medicines. Whites greatly expanded transportation with inventions of the steamboat, the train, the bicycle, the automobile, and airplanes. Whites greatly expanded communications with inventions of the camera and photographs, the telegraph, the record player, the telephone, motion pictures, the television, and computers. Whites also invented canned foods and refrigerators for dining convenience, and air conditioners for comfort. Above all, Whites greatly expanded our potential to live long and healthy lives with inventions of cures for diseases, anesthetics, antibiotics, pain-relievers, x-rays and ultrasounds, electrocardiographs, blood transfusions, surgeries, and all the miracles of modern medicine that people now take for granted.

————

J. Despite enormous transfers and ongoing theft of White technology, China continues to lag.

Despite enormous and ongoing transfers of White technology to China since the mid-20th century, China continues to lag. In the 1950s, Communist Russia provided China “the most massive international transfer of technology in modern history” [1], and China still relies on Russia for technical military assistance [2]. China’s modernization has depended almost entirely on transfers of White technology [3], and there are thousands of Western technical terms in their language [4]. To compensate for its feeble research and development, the Chinese rampantly steal intellectual property from Whites [5], estimated to have cost American companies alone hundreds of billions of dollars and more than two million jobs [6]. The Chinese state employs a broad array of tactics on a massive scale to expropriate White technology, including espionage, illegal transfers by front companies abroad, utilizing Chinese students and workers abroad, violating copyright [7], and extorting corporations that do business with China [8]. Nevertheless, China’s high-tech industry remains dominated by foreign-owned companies, Western or Western-supported [9]. Despite its rampant copying and espionage [10], China’s military remains deficient in key respects, particularly regarding long-range power projection, such as with submarines, aircraft carriers, jet planes, strategic airlift and stealth capabilities, and air defenses [11].

We see the ‘skill versus creativity’ intelligence difference that is outlined in this essay reflected in China’s extensive and perpetual campaign to obtain White technology, and in the success of Asian-dominated tech companies in the western United States, and in China’s ongoing trade surplus with the West. Asians’ success in acquiring White technology is facilitated by ‘elites’ who make the lion’s share of the profits managing these exchanges; exchanges that result in White underemployment and poverty. These ‘elites’ would do well to consider that the technological advance, quality of life, and security they enjoy is made possible by the ordinary White folk who sustain White nations. If Whites are to maintain the industry that makes a nation prosperous and independent, their top priority must be to prevent such ‘elites’ from collaborating with Asians to plunder White technology.

Note: My principal source here is William Hannas’s The Writing on the Wall; How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity (2003). Hannas’s more recent book, Chinese Industrial Espionage: Technology Acquisition and Military Modernization (2013), evidently reiterates that China’s shenanigans are ongoing. Review citations:
• “Chinese Industrial Espionage: Technology Acquisition and Military Modernization provides the most thorough and insightful review to date of the covert and overt mechanisms China uses to acquire foreign technology. Delving into China’s “elaborate, comprehensive system for spotting foreign technologies, acquiring them by every means imaginable and converting them into weapons and competitive goods,” the book concludes that “there is nothing like it in the world.” (2-3) The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is implementing “a deliberate, state-sponsored project to circumvent the costs of research, overcome cultural disadvantages and ‘leapfrog’ to the forefront by leveraging the creativity of other nations,” thereby achieving “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.””
Review by Arturo G. Munoz.
• www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-59-no-4/pdfs/Munoz-Chinese-Industrial-Espionage.pdf
• “In Chinese Industrial Espionage, leading American national security analysts William Hannas, James Mulvenon, and Anna Puglisi offer a comprehensive account of China’s technology transfer problem that poses a significant threat to U.S. national security. The book’s main argument is provocative: China is diminishing the technological advantages of the U.S. through excessive technology transfers that continue to remain unchecked. This argument is based on the logic that China has managed to reach a high level of economic development because of their cheap and unrestricted access to other states’ technology. The authors follow through with this logic by presenting overwhelming and detailed empirical evidence of China’s industrial espionage activities against the USA.”
Review by Francis C. Domingo.
• www.researchgate.net/publication/274897132_Review_of_Chinese_industrial_espionage_technology_acquisition_and_military_modernization

1. • “Just as the U.S. government in the late 1950s and early 1960s ceded technology to Japan at little or no cost to shore up an ally against Communist expansion, so did Russia in the early and mid-1950s provide China with what RAND Corporation analyst Hans Heymann called “undoubtedly the most comprehensive technology transfer in modern industrial history.” Russia’s contribution to China’s technological development “ran the gamut from scientific and technical education to project design, and from production engineering to creating a modern industrial organization”. Wendy Frieman’s (1989) study on Chinese military R&D observed in the same vein:
‘Soviet assistance to China in the 1950s was the most massive international transfer of technology in modern history. Between 1950 and 1960, over 11,000 Soviet specialists were on site in Chinese facilities, where they were involved in every phase of military industry from basic research to prototype testing and serial production.’
Frieman noted that after Russia withdrew in the early 1960s, “China could not hold on to the state of the art and fell considerably behind world levels in the years that followed.” Although Russia has since resumed transfers of military technology on a scale that some in Russia’s own defense ministry find alarming, China now has state-to-state S&T cooperative agreements with 89 other countries and “cooperative links” with 60 more.” [Hannas 03:54-5]

2. • See the [Hannas 03:54-5] citation, above; and the [Dibb 15] citation, below.
• “China turns to foreign countries, mainly Russia, to purchase weapon systems and technologies that it cannot produce indigenously. Although Moscow’s concern over China’s record of disregarding intellectual property rights by copying Russian weapon designs has contributed to a decline in arms sales to China since the mid-2000s, the two sides reportedly are negotiating several sales of major weapon systems, including those designed specifically to counter the United States…
China also continues to purchase weapon systems and technology from European Union (EU) countries, despite the limited arms embargo those countries imposed on China… For example, most of China’s indigenous diesel-electric submarines and several of its surface combatants are equipped with engines designed and manufactured by German and French firms.” [U.S.-China 14]

3. • “I believe, with many Asians, that the area’s present economic difficulties stem in large part from a lack of scientific innovation, of which these countries are acutely aware but that they are addressing with only limited success. In fact, I will go a step further and argue in this book that East Asia’s economic development has relied to a great extent on its ability to exploit scientific breakthroughs made in the West and to maintain these advantages by incrementally improving process and product technologies, leaving the real innovative work—with its economic and social costs—to their foreign competitors. These intellectual property transfers, sanctioned in policy, are carried out deliberately, systematically, and even cynically through a variety of mechanisms and metaphors that Westerners richly deserve to know more about…
Ironically, this thesis will be challenged only in the West, and in the United States especially, where East Asia’s technical skills are typically confused with real creativity, and where the people have little clue about the degree to which their creative resources are utilized abroad for commercial profit. Asians themselves are cognizant of how much they depend on Western innovation and, until recently, had not even bothered to hide it. Accordingly, one of this book’s tasks is to document the practices used by East Asians to relieve foreign firms and institutions of proprietary technology. My purpose is to convince Westerners inundated with cliches about Asian ingenuity that the truth is almost exactly the opposite and to persuade others who might be sympathetic to the linguistic arguments made later in this book that the creativity gap on which these subsequent arguments are based does in fact exist.” [Hannas 03:3-4]
; “Finally, China’s approach to science is and has been geared more toward technology transfer than indigenous development. Although denied by the regime, there is ample—indeed, overwhelming—evidence that China engages as a matter of policy in informal and illicit transfers of foreign technology on a scale that exceeds Japan’s own prodigious efforts. The process, in fact, is so out of hand there is reason to doubt that China even distinguishes between innovations done domestically and those that are acquired through surreptitious transfers. On this score, the Cox Report, for all the attention it drew to China’s covert efforts to procure foreign technology, barely scratched the surface.
As we shall see, China, like Japan, has devised a wide range of techniques to relieve foreign countries of their advanced technology. Some of these methods are legal and ethical, others are of questionable propriety, while still others are prosecutable under the espionage statutes of the target countries. They include open purchases, cooperation and exchange agreements, sending students overseas for study, participating in international science projects, doing joint R&D with foreign firms, dispatching fact-finding missions abroad, inviting specialists to China for lectures and collaborative research, acquiring foreign high-tech firms, demanding technology for market access, mining open data sources, scanning technology through overseas affiliates, patent research and IPR infringements, exploiting foreign and expatriate scientists, building informal transfer networks in overseas Chinese communities, maintaining collection posts abroad under diplomatic covet; reverse engineering, technical penetration of foreign computers, and using cutouts and front companies to transfer restricted technology, to mention just the more common methods.” [37]
; “China now admits to its dependence on foreign sources for what its leaders regard as core military technology. And for the purpose of the present exercise that is all that matters. For all the hype about Chinese self-sufficiency in innovation, the truth is that China suffers an intractable creativity deficit that is managed only by assiduous efforts to copy foreign models.” [40-1]
; “The first part of this book was meant to drive home a truth which Asian policy makers appreciate but which escapes many Westerners, namely, that East Asia’s modernization has depended almost entirely on innovations brought in from the West. This fact is apparent on four levels. To begin with, it is inherent in the concept of modernization, at least as that concept is understood in the East. As evidenced in the phrase “advanced countries of Europe and America,” which is invoked by East Asians as a common standard of comparison, progress in East Asia is measured by an ability to to match or digest the scientific advances made in the West. This observation has been the focus of scholarly attention for several decades and there is no point belaboring it here.
Explicit recognition of this dependency by East Asian government officials and S&T managers constitutes another level of confirmation. As noted in the Introduction to this book, over the past decade or so science administrators in all three countries—Japan, China, and South Korea—have mapped out plans to reproduce what they believe to be the infrastructure responsible for Western scientific creativity, oblivious to the fact that these foreign research institutions are, in Marxist terms, only the superstructure of underlying social relationships, which the East Asian reforms don’t begin to touch…
In the West, technology transfers supplement the basic research conducted by corporations and national laboratories. Western companies typically seek outside technologies that add to the marketability of products or ideas already within their grasp. When a European company sets up a research lab in the United States, it is aiming not to skim off new ideas about future products but to adapt technology it already owns to a new market. In East Asia’s case, technology transfer is a substitute for basic research. Although incremental improvements to existing technologies are achieved by Asians in quick succession, fundamental changes of the sort that characterize the Western approach to development are rare…
I have given examples of East Asia’s dependence on Western science and technology but have not sufficiently emphasized that this borrowing involves not process or even product technology, but what Asians refer to as “wellspring” technology. No one denies the extraordinary ability of East Asian manufacturers to upgrade existing products, streamline and improve production processes, and commercialize products from technology that exists in laboratories. By the same token, few people, least of all East Asians, would dispute that the region’s ability to generate wholly new technologies has not kept pace with its accomplishments in manufacturing, nor with the West’s capacity for scientific innovation.
This assessment is widely shared by scholars of East Asia’s postwar development.” [88-91]
; “Certainly there are few indications that China has been able to translate its rhetoric about creative research into tangible world-class achievements. To the contrary, China’s government-sponsored programs to foster innovation are the antithesis of the laissez faire approach needed for creativity to emerge. Shrill warnings about the need for more basic research and endless reminders about China’s creative past tell us more about the dilemma China faces than about the country’s prospects for scientific renewal.” [93-4]

4. • “A fourth measure of Asia’s reliance on Western innovation is found in the foreign terms that make up its scientific vocabulary. Since a word’s origin reflects the source of the concept it represents, the thousands of Western technical terms in East Asian languages, in contrast to the handful of words brought into European languages from Asia, demonstrate clearly the one-sided nature of the East-West science relationship.” [Hannas 03:89-90]

5. • “Against this variety of collection venues, covert acquisition of the sort dwelled on in the Western press pales in significance, accounting for only 20 percent of the S&T “take,” according to Chinese intelligence officers (Huo and Wang 1991). Most collection is done through open or gray methods. But let us focus for now on this one aspect of Chinese technology transfer, because it remains a significant means of acquiring foreign technology in absolute terms and relative to its use by other Asian nations.
According to Nicholas Eftimiades, counterintelligence expert and author of the standard work on PRC espionage, China’s intelligence operations against the U.S. industrial sector “have become so intrusive that senior U.S. law enforcement officials have publicly identified China as ‘the most active foreign power engaged in the illegal acquisition of American technology'”. More recently John Fialka, author of a book on economic espionage and advisor to Congress on such matters, noted similarly that China “has flooded the United States with spies, sending in far more agents” than any other foreign country. Responsibility for these operations is shared by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), the country’s civilian intelligence organization, and the Seventh Bureau of the Military Intelligence Department (MID), which is subordinate to the army’s General Staff.
Unlike the intelligence assets of other major powers, which focus heavily or exclusively on political and military issues, the MSS since its reorganization in 1983 has had as its primary mission collecting foreign S&T data to support China’s modernization. As the Hong Kong-based journal Cheng Ming reported in 1997:
‘In the past, the former Central Investigation Department (predecessor to the MSS) was mainly involved in gathering political intelligence, while the Second Department (MID) of the General Staff was responsible for military intelligence. In recent years, the MSS has shifted the focus of its work from political intelligence to economic, scientific, and technological intelligence. The Second Department of the General Staff is also beginning to focus on S&T intelligence in the military field.’
Some idea of the scale of this S&T collection is provided by Eftimiades, who reports that “In recent years the PRC’s clandestine collection operations in the United States have expanded to the point where approximately 50 percent of the nine hundred technology transfer cases investigated annually on the West Coast involve the Chinese”. Some of these cases have resulted in sentencing or deportation for theft of high-tech devices such as radar and communications equipment, numerically controlled machinery, torpedo and jet engine designs, imaging equipment, and laser fusion technology used to simulate nuclear explosions. These counterintelligence successes aside, most of the PRC’s covert collection is never investigated by law enforcement officials owing to China’s policy of concentrating on mid-level technology, which is easier to acquire and draws less attention…
To summarize this dispute, the Cox Commission argued on the basis of an extensive investigation that China over the past two decades stole:
‘classified information on seven US thermonuclear warheads, including every cur-rently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the US ballistic missile arsenal. The stolen information also includes classified design information for an enhanced radiation weapon (commonly known as the “neutron bomb”), which neither the United States, nor any other nation, has yet deployed.'” [Hannas 03:37-9]
• “Last week, President Donald Trump directed U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to investigate, among other things, whether China’s laws, policies or practices were harming American intellectual property, innovation and technology. Undoubtedly, Ambassador Lighthizer will come back to the president with a straightforward (and unequivocal) answer: Yes; China is (and has been) robbing us blind.
For the better part of a decade, if not longer, China has been rapaciously pillaging the core intellectual property of American companies, both at home and abroad. Inside the United States, the Chinese government engages in a now well-documented campaign to aggressively steal the trade secrets and creative output of our most innovative companies across the economy, from chemicals to information technology. While this theft used to be human-enabled, today the vast majority of it takes place in cyberspace.
Moreover, this theft, unlike traditional espionage, is not principally aimed at gaining an intelligence advantage or enabling more effective government policies. Rather, it is focused on directly improving Chinese corporate economic competitiveness by allowing corporations to build products without the massive investment of time and capital that American companies put into creating new, innovative technology.
Indeed, this theft is so vast from an economic perspective, former National Security Agency Director and founding Commander of U.S. Cyber Command Gen. (ret.) Keith Alexander referred to this ongoing cyber heist as the “greatest transfer of wealth in human history.”
But focusing solely on this form of Chinese government cyber-thievery is short-sighted, because it fails to highlight the highway robbery that takes place everyday inside of China, when American companies seek to sell their wares into China’s massive (and innovation-hungry) marketplace. Some of this theft is garden-variety piracy — albeit at massive scale — focused on software, movies, music and the like.
The even more pernicious variety, however, is the theft undertaken by the Chinese government itself, when it extorts American vendors into “partnering” with Chinese companies, essentially forcing them to transfer valuable technology and underlying intellectual property for the economic benefit of Chinese corporations. In many ways, the economic extortion taking place inside of China is merely the flip side of the Chinese cyber-theft coin.” [Jaffer 17]
• “Chinese espionage poses “the single greatest risk” to the security of US technology, a panel has told Congress.
China is pursuing new technology “aggressively”, it says, legitimately through research and business deals and illegally through industrial espionage…
The advisory panel, appointed by Congress, recommended that US security measures and intelligence be stepped up to try to prevent the theft of military technology, in particular.
“Chinese espionage activities in the United States are so extensive that they comprise the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies,” the report said.
It urged Congress to study “military, intelligence and homeland security programmes that protect critical American computer networks and sensitive information, specifically those charged with protecting networks from damage caused by cyber attacks”.”
China spying ‘biggest US threat’ (15 Nov 2007)
• news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7097296.stm

6. • “Chinese economic spying is costing U.S. corporations hundreds of billions of dollars and more than two million jobs. It’s also a national security risk, says Justice Department.
Economic espionage sponsored by the Chinese government is costing U.S. companies hundreds of billions of dollars and more than two million jobs, according to a report from The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property. The spying is also a serious threat to national security, a Justice Department official tells Lesley Stahl, because it saps America of one of its key strengths, innovation…
Carlin’s responsibilities at the Justice Department include counterterrorism, cyberattacks and increasingly, economic espionage, which he says puts American businesses in an impossible situation. “A private company can’t compete with the resources of the second-largest economy in the world,” he says of the spying that is often carried out by Chinese government operatives.
Daniel McGahn knows all too well how unfair that fight is. The company he heads, American Superconductor, was partnering with a Chinese company to make controls for wind turbines. McGahn says that company, Sinovel, stole the proprietary computer codes that operated the wind turbines, despite the encryption security his company built into its system.
In the end, Sinovel was able to get past the security by corrupting an American Superconductor employee who traveled to China often. “They offered him women…an apartment…money. They offered him a new life,” says McGahn.
Sinovel no longer needed American Superconductor because the company itself now had the software for the control systems. Soon, Sinovel dominated the wind turbine market in China. The theft ultimately cost the Massachusetts company 600 jobs and loss of market value worth “well over a billion dollars,” says McGahn.”
Preview: The Great Brain Robbery (Jan15 2016)
• www.cbsnews.com/news/preview-the-great-brain-robbery/

7. • “In fact, China has engaged since the 1950s in a massive, coordinated, and, for all intents, desperate struggle to absorb the fruits of Western creativity by scrutinizing the myriad technical journals, scientific reports, and other materials published abroad in printed and electronic form. Moreover, the collection is centrally directed by state institutes, which ensure not only that the relevant information is gathered but also that it is put to use to compete with countries where the technology originated. The process has evolved to the point where China’s technology collection managers regard their task as a “science,” exercised with rigor and subject to strict methods of evaluation (Huo and Wang 1991).” [Hannas 03:41]
; Hannas details China’s massive, state-directed program to copy the world’s technology, led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), in [Hannas 03:41-3]
; “More recently, the May 9, 2000 Zhongguo Shichang Jingji Bao (an economic newspaper published by the Central Party Committee) defined what it called the new policy of “flexible circulation” as “when an individual is physically somewhere else, his or her talent may for all intents be regarded as being here” in China. Under this policy, students educated and working overseas will be able to move “between China and points outside China, allowing domestic enterprises to instantly master the latest S&T developments and information.” By working in high-tech facilities abroad and “returning to China for short periods,” the modus operandi of technology transfer “moves from one-shot exchanges to sustainable long-term cooperation,” the newspaper explained. China targets not just students but the entire expatriate scientific community. The previously cited Zhongguo Rencai article “Analysis of Overseas Chinese S&T Talent” states, “In addition to students who left the mainland, Taiwan, or Hong Kong to study abroad and remained there, another important constituent part of overseas Chinese S&T talent is to be found in second- and third-generation descendants of foreign citizens of Chinese origin.” The decision to utilize this talent in the service of China’s modernization is backed at the highest levels of government.” [49]
; “China’s willingness to acquire technology through informal means is consistent with its lax attitude toward intellectual property rights (IPR) in general. This is a well-known problem that I need spend little time documenting. As Weidenbaum and Hughes have noted, “Many American firms have been hit hard by the lack of intellectual property protection in China. Only one out of 12 companies surveyed by the General Accounting Office in 1994 reported a satisfactory experience when trying to secure the enforcement of their property rights”.
Although Chinese officials sometimes pay lip service to foreign requests that China take IPR violations seriously, there are clear signs that many Chinese do not regard patented discoveries as private property. For example, in a 1996 article titled “International S&T Cooperation and the Sharing of Intellectual Property,” Keji Ribao, the science ministry’s official newspaper, complained that developed countries and their corporate groups, working from a position of strength, force an “inequitable distribution of the benefits of science and technology” on less-developed nations. Countries with the best research equipment end up with the rights to all new technology “depriving the other side of its legal rights. This is unacceptable.”
That same year the chargé d’affaires at China’s embassy in Tokyo went on record acknowledging the difficulty Chinese have accepting IPR, given, as he put it, that China receives no patent fees for gunpowder, paper, and the compass. Nicholas Eftimiades, who knows more about China’s abuse of intellectual property than most people, observed in his study of Chinese espionage that ‘after reviewing these cases one is left with the distinct impression that Chinese businessmen see the illegal transfer of high technology not as a criminal act but as a simple business transaction.’
Press reports suggest that some in China not only ignore IPR abuse; they elevate it to a moral imperative. An article tided “The International Economic Intelligence War,” which appeared in a reputable PRC business-oriented newspaper, argued that developing countries and China in particular need not consider “economic espionage” wrong, since doing so “is clearly inconsistent with the need for development in the present age.” Instead it should be regarded as a legitimate means of obtaining technology from foreign sources and “a special activity that contributes to the development of a nation’s economy and technology.” Claiming a direct relationship between economic prosperity and a nation’s willingness to steal, the article stated:
‘If a nation’s economic spies can steal core technology or business secrets from their economic competitors in another country, they can help their own firms achieve victory in intonational economic competition at minimal cost.’
The article went on to endorse wiretapping and more sophisticated techniques to intercept foreign corporations’ microwave, satellite, and facsimile transmissions.
A report in the technology policy journal Keji Jinbu yu Duke titled “On the North-South Technology Balance” argued similarly that China cannot obtain the latest technology from advanced countries by the usual means, because monopolists are loath to share their inventions. “Under the strict control of the developed countries, the newest revolutionary results of science and technology can almost never be transferred to a developing country by technology trade,” it asserted. China must therefore adjust its policies toward technology transfer to include strengthening information networks, building up cooperation with transnational firms to facilitate acquisition of their technology, and “making full use of personnel studying overseas to transfer and disseminate technology across countries.” The journal was optimistic about using overseas Chinese who play key roles in the technological communities of advanced nations to redress China’s “technology imbalance.” [57-9]
; “The same ersatz creativity is also evidenced in the links East Asian countries foster with foreign universities, which in the West are at the cutting edge of basic science… Although China’s efforts still lag in this regard, the country cannot be accused of neglecting opportunities presented by the open atmosphere of Western institutions to further its S&T agenda. China, like Japan and South Korea, has sent large numbers of students and researchers overseas as much to learn how research is done as to transfer knowledge of specific products.
This last point is illustrated by China’s recent policy shift toward its overseas students, noted in Chapter 2. While lamenting the loss to China of students who stay overseas after completing their formal studies, China’s science managers now recognize that these unreturned students represent a huge asset in terms of their ability to contribute not just to existing Chinese research programs but to future paths for basic research.” [93]
• See the nefarious tactics of the Chinese listed in the [Cox 99] and [U.S.-China 14] citations, below.

8. • “But almost unnoticed by the outside world, over the past four years China has been moving toward a new stage of development. It is quietly and deliberately shifting from a successful low- and middle-tech manufacturing economy to a sophisticated high-tech one, by cajoling, co-opting, and often coercing Western and Japanese businesses…
At the same time, the government is forcing multinational companies in several sectors to share their technologies with Chinese state-owned enterprises as a condition of operating in the country. This is fueling tensions between Beijing and foreign governments and companies, and it raises the critical issue of whether the Chinese brand of socialism can coexist with Western capitalism.
Our studies show that since 2006 the Chinese government has been implementing new policies that seek to appropriate technology from foreign multinationals in several technology-based industries, such as air transportation, power generation, high-speed rail, information technology, and now possibly electric automobiles. These rules limit investment by foreign companies as well as their access to China’s markets, stipulate a high degree of local content in equipment produced in the country, and force the transfer of proprietary technologies from foreign companies to their joint ventures with China’s state-owned enterprises. The new regulations are complex and ever changing. They reverse decades of granting foreign companies increasing access to Chinese markets and put CEOs in a terrible bind: They can either comply with the rules and share their technologies with Chinese competitors—or refuse and miss out on the world’s fastest-growing market.
Just as securing natural resources often drives China’s foreign policy, shifting the origination of leading technologies to China is driving the country’s industrial policy. In late 2009 China’s Ministry of Science and Technology demanded that all the technologies used in products sold to the government be developed in China, which would have forced multinational companies to locate many more of their R&D activities in a country where intellectual property is notoriously unsafe. After howls of protest from foreign governments and companies, the ministry backed down. However, the government still appears intent on creating a tipping point at which multinational companies will have to locate their most-sophisticated R&D projects and facilities in China, enabling it to eventually catch up with or supplant the U.S. as the world’s most-advanced economy.
Three, Chinese officials have learned to tackle multinational companies, often forcing them to form joint ventures with its national champions and transfer the latest technology in exchange for current and future business opportunities. Companies that resist are simply excluded from projects. The Chinese government uses the restrictions to drive wedges between foreign rivals vying to land big projects in the country and induce them to transfer the technologies that state-owned enterprises need to catch up. Executives working for multinational companies in China privately acknowledge that making official complaints or filing lawsuits usually does little good.” [Hout 10]
• “The even more pernicious variety [of Chinese intellectual theft], however, is the theft undertaken by the Chinese government itself, when it extorts American vendors into “partnering” with Chinese companies, essentially forcing them to transfer valuable technology and underlying intellectual property for the economic benefit of Chinese corporations. In many ways, the economic extortion taking place inside of China is merely the flip side of the Chinese cyber-theft coin.” [Jaffer 17]

9. • “Foreign companies dominate most of China’s high-tech industries, accounting for 85% of the high-tech exports from China in 2008. In value terms the picture is no different: Exports of cellular telephones and laptops, for instance, had less than 10% Chinese content—and foreign-owned factories accounted for most of it. The rest of the hardware and software was imported.” [Hout 10]
• “China’s leading position in high-tech exports is a myth created by outdated trade statistics, which are inconsistent with the trade based on global supply chains. Assembled high-tech products, made with imported key parts and components, accounted for 82% of China’s high-tech exports. Current trade statistics mistakenly credit entire values of these assembled products to China, thus greatly inflate the export value. For instance, in 2009 China’s export in the iPhone amounted US$4.6 billion, of which only 3.6% was the value added by Chinese workers; its annual export in laptop PC valued at US$52 billion, but assembly accounted for only 3% of the gross value. In addition, 83% of China’s high-tech exports was attributed to foreign invested firms, in particular Taiwanese owned companies.” [Xing 11]
• “By our estimation, the share of domestic content in exports by the PRC was about 50% before China’s WTO membership, and has risen to over 60% since then…Those sectors that are likely labeled as relatively sophisticated such as electronic devices have particularly low domestic content (about 30% or less).” [Koopman 08:Abstract]

10. • See the [Hannas 03:37-9,40-1,54-5] citations, above.
• “Methods Used by the PRC To Acquire Advanced U.S. Military Technology:
The PRC uses a variety of approaches to acquire military technology. These include:
· Relying on “princelings” who exploit their military, commercial, and political connections with high-ranking CCP and PLA leaders to buy military technology from abroad
· Illegally transferring U.S. military technology from third countries
· Applying pressure on U.S. commercial companies to transfer licensable technology illegally in joint ventures
· Exploiting dual-use products and services for military advantage in unforeseen ways
· Illegally diverting licensable dual use technology to military purposes
· Using front companies to illegally acquire technology
· Using commercial enterprises and other organizations as cover for technology acquisition
· Acquiring interests in U.S. technology companies
· Covertly conducting espionage by personnel from government ministries, commissions, institutes, and military industries independently of the PRC intelligence services
The last is thought to be the major method of PRC intelligence activity in the United States.
The PRC also tries to identify ethnic Chinese in the United States who have access to sensitive information, and sometimes is able to enlist their cooperation in illegal technology or information transfers.” [Cox 99]
• “China’s large-scale, state-sponsored theft of intellectual property and proprietary information also has allowed China to fill knowledge gaps in its domestic defense and commercial R&D. This process has enabled China to save time and money on defense R&D…
With the emergence of a more modern and able domestic defense industrial base, China is gradually shifting its focus from purchasing complete foreign systems to procuring foreign military and dual-use subsystems and components via open sources, trade, and traditional and nontraditional espionage. Among China’s most effective methods used to acquire sensitive U.S. technology are cyber espionage; witting and unwitting collection by Chinese students, scholars, and scientists; joint ventures; and foreign cooperation. These methods are discussed in this section.
Cyber Espionage: Since at least the mid-2000s, the Chinese government has conducted large-scale cyber espionage against the United States. China has compromised a range of U.S. networks, including those of DoD, defense contractors, and private enterprises. A 2012 Defense Science Board report identified dozens of critical system designs compromised by Chinese cyber actors, including the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 air defense system, the F–35 and the F/A–18 fighter aircraft, the P–8A reconnaissance aircraft, the Global Hawk UAV, the Black Hawk helicopter, the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, and the Littoral Combat Ship. The report also revealed Chinese cyber actors have obtained information on various DoD technologies, including directed energy, the UAV video system, tactical data links, satellite communications, electronic warfare systems, and the electromagnetic aircraft launch system. However, the actors seeking information on these weapon systems and technologies are not just stealing the designs themselves, but they also are targeting internal communications, program schedules, meeting minutes, and human resource records, among other documents.
Dr. Lewis testified to the Commission that cyber espionage ‘‘has been and continues to be a godsend to China’s economic and technological modernization.’’ He explained:
‘Technological espionage has carried over into cyberspace, as the Chinese discovered that the Internet gave them unparalleled access to poorly secured western networks. Cyber espionage has given China access to defense-industrial databases, [which are] the record of previous weapons programs and an invaluable resource. These databases provide the historic experience of building weapons. They show design changes, modifications, how production problems were overcome, and testing results.’
U.S. private cyber security firms such as FireEye have reported that China’s levels of cyber espionage activity have not substantially decreased in 2014, despite a concerted U.S. effort since 2013 to expose and stigmatize Chinese economic espionage.” [U.S.-China 14]
• “A U.S. congressional advisory panel said Thursday that Chinese spies are aggressively stealing American secrets to use in building Beijing’s military and economic strength…
The commission, set up by Congress in 2000 to advise, investigate and report on U.S.-China affairs, said U.S. officials believe Chinese spying is “growing in scale, intensity and sophistication.”
“China is the most aggressive country conducting espionage against the United States,” the report said.”
Panel: Chinese Spies Stealing U.S. Secrets (AP- Nov 19, 2009)
• www.cbsnews.com/news/panel-chinese-spies-stealing-us-secrets/

11. • “It’s becoming commonplace to drum up the military threat from China and belittle America’s military capabilities. Much of this commentary reminds me of statements in the mid-1980s that the former Soviet Union was poised to outstrip the US in military power. This isn’t to argue that China is in the final stages of disintegration like the USSR, but it is to assert that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) demonstrates all the brittleness and paper-thin professionalism of a military that has never fought a modern war and whose much-vaunted military equipment has never been tested in combat.
With a slowing economy, and with structural economic and social tensions becoming worse rather than better, China is a large but fragile power ruled by a vulnerable party that can’t afford any economic or foreign policy disasters, let alone war with the US…
In key areas of military technology China is still a good 20 years behind the US. Its antisubmarine warfare capability is marginal and many of its submarines are noisy. China lacks the necessary quieting and propulsion technologies to build anything remotely comparable to an US or Russian nuclear submarine. Even the newest Chinese Jin-class ballistic missile nuclear submarines are louder than the 1970s era Soviet Delta III SSBN. And the forthcoming type 95 nuclear submarine will be louder than the late-1980s Soviet titanium-hulled Akula, according to US sources.
China’s air defence capabilities have gaping deficiencies against any technologically advanced enemy. Moreover, China still relies heavily on Russia for military reverse engineering and supply of high-performance military jet engines, which it has failed to master for 30 years.
Beijing has made important strides with ballistic missile technologies, but the DF-21 has never destroyed a naval target moving at battle speed. Moreover, it relies crucially on intelligence satellites and long-range over-the-horizon radar for target acquisition. Those are soft targets and vulnerable to pre-emptive US military strikes.
It isn’t clear in any case, according to the Pentagon, whether China has the capability to collect accurate targeting information and pass it to launch platforms in time for successful strikes against distant targets at sea.
As for China’s ICBM capabilities, such as the DF-5B with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), this is hardly a breakthrough nuclear technology. In 1974, as Head of the National Assessments Staff, I was briefed by the CIA about MIRVs on the Soviet Union’s SS-18 ICBM. That was remarkable technological advance 40 years ago.” [Dibb 15]
• “Chase: We found that the PLA still suffers from several potentially serious weaknesses. The first is institutional: The PLA faces shortcomings stemming from outdated command structures, quality of personnel, and corruption. The second centers on combat capabilities, including logistical weaknesses, insufficient strategic airlift capabilities, limited numbers of special-mission aircraft, and deficiencies in fleet air defense and antisubmarine warfare. These weaknesses increase the risk that the PLA will fail to successfully perform some of the missions Chinese Communist Party leaders may task it to execute, though the potential impact varies by mission.
Heginbotham: Right. Many of the material weaknesses that Mike mentions would have a particularly large impact on the PLA’s ability to execute tasks or missions at greater distances from the Chinese mainland, such as around the Spratly Islands. And of course the United States has not been standing still either. The United States maintains a commanding technological lead in undersea warfare. And in long-range air strike, a combination of new generations of U.S. air-launched cruise missiles and new stealth capabilities would enable the United States to hold Chinese targets at risk despite the latter’s improving air defense capability.” [Heginbotham 15]
• “Despite all these advances, it’s important to keep in mind there are many things China can’t do well, or places where it suffers shortages. China has tried to develop a high-performance engine for its fifth-generation fighter jets, but so far has failed. It has just one aircraft carrier to the 11 carriers of the U.S. Navy, and it is seriously deficient in airborne early warning aircraft and tankers. The People’s Liberation Army Air Force was for a time actually growing smaller, as the number of fighter and attack planes being retired was greater than the number of planes being purchased.” [Mizokami 17]
• “At the same time, despite these developments, the report does point out the China will need to sustain its current pace of military expansion for years to come in order to truly rival the US military’s global reach.
“To support, sustain, and defend long range operations, the PLA must continue to develop or procure large amphibious ships, heavy lift aircraft, and logistical support capabilities, as well as continue to improve command and control capabilities,” the report states.
While Chinese naval technology may still be substantially behind current U.S. platforms, the equation could change dramatically over the next several decades…” [Osborn 17]

END Sources of sections V-1-2
—————————————————-

V-3. Whites are also superior to the Chinese at scientific, institutional, and artistic innovation.

A-D: Science.

A. Whites scientifically investigated, analyzed, and classified the world much more than Chinese.

Europeans vigorously explored the Earth and discovered its properties through experimentation, thus giving rise to modern science [1]. The Judeo-Christian church offered some opposition early, but quickly accommodated natural law as ‘the working of God’s will’ [2], and by the fourteenth century European universities were pioneering natural science [3]. Much more than the Chinese, Whites ascertained the laws of nature and axiomatized them to their fundamental causes [4]. While the Chinese remained mired in superstitious nonsense such as the Five Elements, Whites developed the scientific method as a means for determining objective facts [5]. The scientific method included deliberate experiments with accurate measurement and controls, quantification and mathematical analysis, and publication and formal debate of results. Whites also catalogued, classified and disseminated knowledge more extensively than did the Chinese, via science clubs, correspondence, lectures, books, and journals [6].

1. • See section IV-1.A and its sources.

2. • Though Europe’s early scholars were largely Judeo-Christian, they believed that in studying nature’s laws they were studying God’s laws; see section IV-6.B and its sources. Unlike Chinese schools, European universities had sufficient independence from the state to seek objective truths; see section II-8.C and its sources.

3. • See section V-2.C and its sources.

4. • See section IV-5 and its sources.

5. • On China’s persistent belief in the mystical “Five Elements/Phases” (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water) and “yin-yang” as a substitute for real science, see section IV-5.A and its sources. On how this quackery was likewise integrated with traditional Chinese medicine, see section IV-6.E and its sources.
• On Whites’ development of the scientific method and the Chinese lack of it, see section IV-5.B and its sources.

6. • See section V-2.H and its sources.

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B. The White Scientific Revolution.

From the 16th century, Whites alone launched the Scientific Revolution and created modern science. New branches of math were created as powerful tools of analysis, including logarithms by Napier, analytical geometry by Descartes, probability theory by Fermat and Pascal, and calculus by Newton and Leibniz. Astronomers led by Copernicus and Kepler advanced heliocentric theory, explaining the motion of celestial bodies in our solar system. In the Mechanical Revolution, physicists led by Galileo, Huygens, and Newton determined the principles governing how all forces and moving objects interact. They also discovered the underlying nature of light. The principles of pneumatics and hydraulics were revealed in the pioneering experiments of Torricelli, Guericke, Boyle, and Bernoulli. The mysterious forces of magnetism and electricity were gradually uncovered by pioneers such as Gilbert, Hawksbee, Ørsted, and Faraday. Agricola originated the classification of minerals, and Guettard devised the first geological maps. The science of chemistry, of the fundamental composition of matter, was founded by pioneers such as Boyle, Black, and Lavoisier. Biology was advanced by Leeuwenhoek, who discovered micro-organisms, and Linnaeus, who created our system of animal classification based on genera and species. Our understanding of human anatomy was greatly advanced by investigators led by Vesalius, Harvey, and Malpighi, preparing the way for modern medicine.

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C. The Chinese scientific record has been paltry in comparison to Whites’.

The Chinese record in science is paltry in comparison to Whites’ [1]. The Chinese had little ambition to explore [2], and what they did discover they didn’t resolve to essential principles [3]. Chinese ‘science’ lacked all the elements of the scientific method described above [4]. China occasionally produced savants, but they tended to be isolated in space and time [5]. Scholastic institutions in China up to the 20th century were devoted mostly to preparation for civil service exams [6], focused mostly on moral literature [7]. China has a long history of employing foreign astronomers, including Arabs and Indians, for its astrological calendar projects [8]. In the early 17th century, Europeans sent expeditions to China that demonstrated Europe’s scientific superiority, particularly by making more accurate astronomical predictions [9]. They handed to China much of Europe’s inventory of instruments and knowledge, but China made little use of it beyond its astrological purposes [10]. Chinese science hasn’t improved much in recent times. Ethnic Chinese have won only 8 of 328 Nobel Prizes in science; only one (Physiology 2015) in China itself, the other seven by Chinese-Americans working within White institutions [11].

1. • “[M]echanics was ‘modernised’ in three steps: Archimedes’ theorems of the lever and buoyancy; Galileo’s and Kepler’s theorems on a variety of mechanical phenomena; and Newton’s synthesis. In light of this scheme, ancient Chinese mechanics, as we have discussed before, had fulfilled the first half step, but never moved beyond that independently. I agree with Mikami and Fu Si-nian that the great deficiency in old Chinese mathematical thought was the absence of rigorous proof, in particular the absence of a system of deductive geometry. This configuration correlates with the lack of formal logic and the dominance of associative (organicist) thought. From our Sino-European comparison, it is clear that the deficiency was not just in mathematics; it hindered the development of modern science as a whole. In other fields of science, the Chinese way of thinking generally lacked accuracy in defining, exactness in formulating, rigour in proving, and logic in explaining.” [Qian 85:67]
; “This brief presentation of the development of western magnetism further strengthens our arguments about China’s scientific stagnation. Magnetism, as Needham tells us, was traditional China’s strongest branch of physics, and it had developed very early. Yet it did not surpass a qualitative description of magnetic declination. The richness and trailblazing role of De magnete [Gilbert, 1600] provide a foil that accentuates contemporaneous Chinese negligence of, or insensitivity to, physics.
…If De magnete had been translated into Chinese early in the seventeenth century, what would Chinese literati have thought about it? It would have fared no better than Euclid’s Elements did when the latter was first introduced into China… It is even less likely that De magnete could have attracted a group of readers in seventeenth-century China, and produced any scientific influence which was in any sense comparable to what it did in Western Europe. Western Europe produced De magnete because it was the culture that produced a wide circle of potential readers, followers, and innovators.
The degree and character of intellectual activity and creativity on the two ends of Eurasia were very different. D. Price describes England at the time when Gilbert was working on his book in the following manner: ‘During the last two decades of the sixteenth century, professional surveyors, navigators, makers of mathematical instruments, and teachers of their uses became very numerous and enjoyed considerable status, especially in the metropolitan seaport of London.’ At the same time, after 1582, Matteo Ricci began his energetic activities as ‘missionary through astronomy’ in China. The contrasting results were that Ricci, which his Jesuit comrades, Chinese followers, and successors, after 150 years of effort, could not make European science take root in China—because they changed nothing in China’s general attitude towards academic activities. During the same period, Western Europe developed modern science and was prepared to reap abundantly the first intellectual, political, and technological fruits of the Scientific Revolution.” [80-1]
• “Those who look for clues regarding possible Chinese influences [in European astronomical explanation] are likewise [as with the Islamic world] short of evidence. Joseph Needham pointed out with regard to physics and the science of motion that there were no Chinese scholars equivalent to such leading figures in the West as Philoponus, Jean Buridan, Thomas Bradwardine, or Nicole d’Oresme and, hence, no one similar to Ibn Bajja [the last significant Islamic contributor to science, early twelfth century] in the Muslim world. Furthermore, the arrival of the telescope in China in 1618, along with Jesuit scientists, failed to elicit major advances in telescopy, astronomy, or the science of mechanics.
The path to the capstone achievement of a new science of mechanics centered in a unified celestial and terrestrial physics evolved out of an Aristotle-based science of mechanics and the tools of Euclidian geometry firmly located in a spherical universe. All of these elements were missing in China. As the discussion in chapter 4 revealed, when Matteo Ricci arrived in China in the 1580s, he discovered that the Chinese still believed in a flat earth and that the whole apparatus of spherical geometry was missing.” [Huff 11:265-6]
; “The great departure of intellectual paths between East and West becomes starkly evident if one compares the intellectual apparatus of late-seventeenth century Europe with intellectual thought in China, Mughal India, or the Ottoman Empire in the same period. If one were to make a roster of oustanding contributors to the leading edge of the scientific transformation in Europe and seek counterpart achievements in other parts of the world, there would be no equivalent to the advances of Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, or Newton; no William Gilbert, Otto von Guericke, or Francis Hauksbee; no Torricelli, Blaise Pascal, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle; or any counterpart to William Harvey, Marcello Magpighi, Regnier de Graaf, Jan Swammerdam, or Antoni Leeuwenhoek. This is the very short list of stellar scientific pioneers, but it makes the point.
The absence of any clearly definable inputs into the Newtonian achievement from outside Europe will sound jarring to our early-twenty-first-century sensibilities. Nevertheless, the same was true with regard to optics, electrical studies, miscroscopy, and pneumatics.” [293-4]

2. • See section IV-1 and its sources.

3. • See section IV-5 and its sources.

4. • See section IV-5.B and its sources.
• On China’s inferior dissemination of scientific knowledge, see section V-2.H and its sources.

5. • On Chinese science that declined or was lost over time, see section V-2.B and its sources.
• “The facts seem to be that China did not have even the beginnings of systematic cumulative modern science. Throughout history there have been great scientific thinkers in China, but quite often their ideas flourished for a while and were then lost. One reason was the absence of institutions to encourage the cumulative nature of science—a good institutional memory and a critical capacity to build on it.” [Bekar 02:19]
• “It was because traditional China did not provide the necessary intellectual zeal to sustain enduring systematic, rational, and causal inquiries about nature, that we encounter repeated instances where some topic was picked up by an interested scholar but then was subsequently disregarded. That is why Chinese geometrical optics, and physics in general, could never proceed beyond several elementary and imprecise statements.” [Qian 85:59-60]
; “[M]athematics in traditional China was basically an official enterprise. There were not enough autonomous roots of mathematical scholarship among learned circles. Correspondingly, the best achievements in the field appear to have been isolated—both spatially and temporally—successes of mathematical wizards.” [64]
; In comparison, Qian cites Needham on Europe’s run of major mathematical advances: “[In Europe] there followed an astounding range of things basically new — the elaboration of a satisfactory algebraic notation at last by Vieta (1580) and Recorde (1557), the full appreciation of what decimals were capable of by Stevin (1585), the invention of logarithms by Napier (1614) and the slide-rule by Gunter (1620), the establishment of coordinate and analytic geometry by Descartes (1637), the first adding machine (Pascal, 1642), and achievement of the infinitesimal calculus by Newton (1665) and Liebniz (1684).” [66]
; “This outline of the main features of the physical sciences in traditional China has, I believe, convincing presented my theme—Chinese stagnation… Geometrical optics was a topic to be picked up and put off time and again. Mathematics had early glories in the recognition of the ‘Chinese Pythagorian Theorem’, the evaluation of pi, and the analysis of indeterminate equations. But the notion of rigorous proof never appeared, and the necessary notational innovations never occurred. In general, mathematics remained in an incomplete, pre-calculus stage. Magnetic study also obtained some early glories, but long stagnated. The mathematical study of the musical scale made steady progress and reached a marvelous climax by the end of the sixteenth century. But even in this field the alienation of theory from practice was prominent—a situation that barred further Chinese musical progress and its positive influence on other fields.” [81-2]

6. • On China’s imperial schools being mostly preparation for civil service exams, see section II-8.C and its sources.

7. • See section IV-5.B and its sources.

8. • “Chinese scientists lacked a standard of logical proof provided by Aristotelian logic. Importantly, they also lacked trigonometry, an essential tool for mathematical astronomy. As a result, the Chinese were forced to employ Arabic astronomers from the 13th century onwards.” [Bekar 02:19]
• “Traditional China had always demanded a sophisticated calendrical science, and since the thirteenth century, employing foreign experts (Indians and Arabs) had probably been an uninterrupted tradition. Jesuit astronomical introduction and the inheritance of it by Chinese astronomers continued that tradition, which had never posed a threat to the ‘Chinese substance’.” [Qian 85:83]
• On the astrological character of Chinese astronomy and calendars, see section IV-6.D and its sources.

9. • “During his early years, Ricci had been more successful making eclipse predictions than his Chinese hosts. Ricci’s command of mathematics… greatly impressed Chinese officials, who sent their sons to him for tutoring… By the time Ricci reached Beijing, he could write [in 1601]: ‘Because of my world-map, my clocks, spheres, and astrolabes and the other things I do and teach, I have gained the reputation of being the greatest mathematician in the world. And although I have no book on astronomy, I am able with the aid of certain Portuguese calandars and periodicals, to predict the eclipses more accurately than they do.'” [Huff 11:74]
• “The precipitating event that led the emperor to give the reform project to the missionaries was the eclipse challenge of 1629. This was the culmination of the early-seventeenth-century series of eclipse predictions participated in by both the missionaries and the Chinese scholars. On the day preceding June 21 of that year, proponents of all three systems—Chinese, Muslim, and European—were asked to make predictions in writing for the solar eclipse expected the next day. “The traditional mathematicians foretold that it would start at r 10:30 and end at 12:30, lasting two hours. Instead the eclipse occurred at 11:30 and lasted only two minutes, just as the missionaries predicted.” This experiment, as explained by Xu Guangqi, finally convinced the emperor that the problems with the Chinese calendar predictions were not mathematical errors but rather an inherent defect of the whole Chinese calendrical system.” [90]
; See the [Huff 11:90-1] citation, below.
; “Armed with all these insights, tables, and techniques, between 1632 and 1635, Xu Guangqi and his coworkers carried out a sequence of observations based on predictions drawn from Western astronomy and from traditional Chinese astronomy. These involved the positions of Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter as well as solar and lunar eclipses. Three particular predictions stand out. The first was the conjunction of Mars and Saturn in October 1634: “According to the prediction by the new method, Mars and Saturn were to be seen in the same degree in longitude and were to be separated by 1° 54′ in the direction of latitude at the beginning of dusk on October 25, 1634.” But according to the traditional system, the Datong, this conjunction should occur about three days later.
The second prediction concerns Venus and Saturn, which were predicted to be in the same celestial position separated by 3° 31′ of latitude at 6:30 in the morning of October 28. The traditional system predicted that the event would occur a day later.
The third crucial test concerned Venus and Mars, which also would experience a conjunction separated by 1° 30’ of latitude in the morning of November 1, 1634. The Datong system predicted that the event would take place eight days later. In all these cases, the predictions of the missionary astronomers, based on ephemeridean tables from European scholars, proved correct. Likewise, when the eclipse predictions were tested, all those based on the new system were found to be correct. Most of the observations, designed to compare the predictive accuracy of the two systems, were carried out between 1632 and 1635 but some later.” [95-6]
; “The resulting dispute led the emperor to declare that the matter should be settled by a public witnessing of observations using instruments at the observatory. Once again, the missionary scientists, now firmly under the leadership of Ferdinand Verbiest, staged another astronomical showdown designed to prove the greater accuracy of the Western system. Verbiest proposed a sequence of five observations that would test the new Western system and the traditional Chinese system, taking place over several days. Because Verbiest had seen the calculations worked out by the Muslim computus who worked for Yang Guangxian, he chose positions that showed the greatest departure from the calculations based on European ephemerides.
In his communications with the emperor regarding the difficulties of evaluating the two calendrical systems, Verbiest hinted that if officials were to follow the lead of Yang, things in the heavens might be out of order; that is, Yang’s calendar might describe one set of heavenly arrangements, but the sky itself might reveal another. This audacious suggestion implied that the throne itself might be in jeopardy.
Each party was required to submit predictions in advance. Verbiest’s challenge included specifying “the degrees and the minutes of the zodiac which they (sun, moon, and planets) should reach in the heavens on a given day of the month and at a given minute of the day,” in February 1669. These positions included the appearance of the sun in Aquarius on February 3; the position of Jupiter at night of the same day as well as the position of Mars that night; the position of the moon on the night of February 18; and the appearance of the sun in the sign of Pisces on February 18 at noon. When the days of observation came and went, the values of the celestial objects determined by Verbiest proved correct, whereas those of Yang and Wu Mingxuan failed. The upshot was the sacking and banishment of Yang to his home province, during which trip he died.” [105-6]

10. • On China’s lack of interest in the telescope, microscope, and other scientific instruments given to them by Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries, see sections IV-1.A and its sources.
• “The observations of Venus in China were accepted as refuting the Ptolemaic system of The Sphere and seemed to demonstrate that Venus and Mercury revolve around the sun, as that Western system predicted. In that context, it could be said that the Chinese astronomers in the Bureau of Astronomy had gone through two revolutions: from the flat world of traditional China to the spherical Ptolemaic world, and from that to the geoheliocentric cosmos in which all the planets except the earth revolved around the sun.
It was against this background that the project of translating fundamental works in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and the auxiliary sciences that the Jesuits did their best to provide the Chinese with the modern tools of astronomy. They brought the new telescope as well as Tycho Brahe’s classic instruments with which he revolutionized European observational astronomy in the late sixteenth Century. But they also brought many new mathematical tools—for example, Euclid’s geometry, logarithms, and trigonometry (in the 1650s)—as well as the philosophical and technical means for understanding those developments. Most impressive of all, the missionaries brought the new cutting-edge optics of Kepler.” [Huff 11:90-1]
; “[B]y 1630, Chinese specialists “had available to them a rich toolkit of computational techniques, and a view of the cosmos that modified the ‘spherical heavens’ system.” They also had “the latest precision instruments that went beyond those available to the Gregorian reformers in Europe a generation earlier. In addition to that, they now had Kepler’s new optical theory and, by the 1650s, the new trigonometry of Europe as well as logarithms. Beyond that, all those associated with the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy [trained by Europeans] had the practical experience of building and testing new instruments and then using those instruments to test two different theories of observational astronomy…
Given all these innovations and aids to understanding the new astronomy [by Whites], along with the telescopic discovery machine, one might have expected the presumed excellence of the Chinese in science to have propelled them forward in the seventeenth century, making significant discoveries and laying the foundations for a unified celestial and terrestrial physics. One might also have expected them to make innovations with regard to the telescope such as the invention of longer and more powerful telescopes produced by Europeans from the 1640s onward. Some Chinese scholars took a great interest in the new Western mathematics and astronomy, as historians have reported, Some minor celestial discoveries were made, but no significant astronomical innovations were forthcoming, nor were any innovations made regarding the telescope. The main drift of scholars close to the emperor was toward severely restricting the use of the new natural studies and attempting to prove that underneath the Western successes, there was really a Chinese past.” [97-8]

11. • Only Tu Youyou (Physiology/Medicine 2015) won the award working in China. Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang (Physics 1957), Yuan Lee (Chemistry 1986), Daniel Chee Tsui (Physics 1998), and Charles Kao (Physics 2009) were Chinese-American immigrants; and Samuel Ting (Physics 1976), Steven Chu (Physics 1997), and Roger Y. Tsien (Chemistry 2008) were born in the United States.
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_Nobel_laureates
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Physics
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Physiology_or_Medicine
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Chemistry
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsung-Dao_Lee
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen-Ning_Yang
• www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1986/lee-bio.html

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D. Claims of Chinese scientific achievements are much exaggerated.

The fact that science has no definite objective gives anti-White propagandists latitude to exaggerate China’s meager accomplishments [1]. They will dig up from a dusty vault a line of cryptic text by some old Chinese poet, and declare that it expresses profound scientific insight. Thus, a line by Zhu Xi advising students “to go to all things under heaven” proves that the Chinese investigated natural laws [2]. A few remarks about the use of levers become “the whole theory of equilibria as stated by Archimedes” [3]. Intersecting lines on the Chinese abacus show that they nearly scooped Descartes on analytic geometry [4]. Liebniz dabbled in Chinese philosophy, so this means that Chinese ‘correlative thinking’ and vague concepts like “li” and “tao” inspired Whites to create modern physics [5]. A Chinese weather vane becomes “perhaps the oldest of all pointer-reading devices, the importance of which in the philosophy of the natural sciences requires no emphasis” [6]. Bellows and a vessel containing boiling water that when plunged into a well made a “sound like thunder”, demonstrate that the Chinese “understood atmospheric pressure” [7]. China’s primitive knowledge of magnetism (much inferior to Europe’s by 1600) means that they almost beat Europe to electricity [8]. And so on.

1. • “Given the Western inheritance of the Greek legacy as early as the translation movement in the twelfth century…, it is evident that the following judgment by Needham is not correct: ‘Until the middle of the 17th century Chinese and European scientific theories were almost on a par, and only thereafter did European thought begin to move ahead so rapidly’. Indeed this statement poses an unsolvable riddle when we realise the sharp contrast that in Europe the middle of the seventeenth century saw the birth of mathematised and axiomatised mechanics, whereas the best intellectual representatives in China, limited by their politico-academic environment, could not even appreciate this form of mechanics until two and a half centuries later.” [Qian 85:48]
• “We have found Needham’s five cases of Chinese contributions to the emergence of early modern science heavily flawed on several counts, of which the most important are the absence of sources that even begin to point at transmission and the consistent aggrandizement of what Chinese finds, even if passed on indeed to western Europe, may have meant for early modern science in the best of cases. The Needham we have seen making these grandiose but generally ill-founded claims is the self-confessed ‘preacher’ of a message he feels strongly he has to teach the West:
“Everyone who undertakes a big inter-cultural job like this must naturally project his own system of beliefs in doing so—it is his opportunity to preach (and I use this term quite advisedly) to his own and later generations. If sometimes we have written like barristers pleading a case, or sometimes over-emphasize the Chinese contributions, it has been consciously to redress a balance which in the past tilted over much too far on the other side. We were out to redress a secular injustice and misunderstanding.”
What makes Needham so endlessly intriguing a thinker is that, besides the posture described here so frankly, there is also another Needham, one who knows very well that he has been wildly overstating his case. This other Needham, who takes the floor throughout large portions of the main work, could alternate his bolder claims with sober statements like the following:
“Western science…developed on the whole without the benefit of either Indian or Chinese contributions.”
[Also:] “The mutual incomprehensibility of the ethnically-bound concept systems did severely restrict possible contacts and transmissions in the realm of scientific ideas…”
[And even more strongly elsewhere:] “The sciences of the medieval world were in fact tied closely to their ethnic environment, and it is difficult if not impossible for people of those different environments to find any common basis of discourse…” [Cohen 94:437-8]

2. • Zhu Xi’s statement (~1200) about investigating “all things under heaven” was about cultivating personal character, not about discovering laws of nature, and that is how subsequent Chinese regarded it. See [Qian 85:117-9].

3. • “Three centuries later, in Liu An’s Huan Nan Zi the following passage occurs:
‘Therefore if one has the benefit of ‘position’, a very small grasp can support a very large thing. That which is small but essential can control that which is wide and broad. So a beam only 10 wei long can support a house 1000 jun in weight; a hinge only 5 inches in length can control the opening and closing a large gate. It does not matter whether the material is large or small. What matters is its exact position.’
Such a passage can hardly be thought of as a sign that indicated a wide understanding of ‘the whole theory of equilibra [buoyancy] as stated by Archimedes’, as Needham contends. It was obviously a retregression in comparison with the Mohist text [on the lever], which strove to be general and quantitative. By the wording of the Huai Nan Zi passage we even do not know the relative configuration of the beam and the house, or of the ‘5 inch hinge’ and the ‘large gate’.” [Qian 85:58]
; Qian dispatches other lame attempts to show that the Chinese had mastered the principle of buoyancy in [51-8], including an old folk tale about “Cao Chong weighing an elephant”.

4. • In his Science and Civilisation in China Vol 3, sinophile Needham breathlessly spouts: “The commentary says that there was one ball for each vertical column [of a Chinese abacus], which was divided into nine horizontal divisions; hence by moving the balls up and down, any number which it was desired to retain could be set up. This method brings out clearly the way in which coordinate geometry was latent in the abacus system, the graduation into powers of ten forming the x-axis, and the graduation of numbers less than ten forming they-axis. If the balls could ever have been persuaded, even in thought, to move along continuous curves, what a Cartesian world of graphs would have opened out!…” [77]
“Sound-tables of Chinese rhymes were another example of a coordinate system… Moreover, the abacus itself is essentially a coordinate system. From the beginning of mathematics in China, geometrical propositions were expressed in an algebraic form, and when geometrical figures were used, the treatment was uniquely algebraic. In Europe this realisation came relatively late, and only around I630 were the basic conceptions of Western analytic geometry stated by Pierre de Fermat and Rene Descartes.” [107 (p.44 in Colin Ronan’s shortened version)]
To which Qian replies: “The irrelevance of a weather vane to a meter pointer reminds us of another irrelevant connection, that is between the abacus and the coordinate system. (See vol. III, p. 107.) A coordinate system relates a point on a plane with an ordered pair of numbers. Even limiting to the one-dimensional case, ‘a point’ in an abacus is just one digit in a number. Sometimes superficial lines of similarity lead us to the misconception of having recognized true parallelism. Besides, this situation is not limited to the analogy between specific objects. In the case of the Huai Nan Zi ‘theory’ of the lever, or in Han technicians’ mastery of ‘Archimedes’ principle’, we were likewise confused. Chinese toiling masses, leading a subsistence life, had a saying: ‘Zhua jin lan li bian-shi cai—Whatever is dumped into my basket will make me a vegetable dish.’ Do we have to be so indiscriminating when dealing with Chinese scientific history?” [Qian 85:88]

5. • This nonsense is refuted by Wen-yuan Qian in [Qian 85:53,118-9,131-9].
• On China’s silly ‘correlative’ thinking, see section IV-5 and its sources.

6. • “The Chinese were early in the construction of meteorological instruments, such as hygrometers, using charcoal or feather, and the weather cock. But Needham might have inordinately magnified the significance of the latter: it is ‘perhaps the oldest of all pointer-reading devices, the importance of which in the philosophy of the natural sciences requires no emphasis’. The majority of pointer-reading devices function according to Hooke’s law of elasticity; a visible indicator, such as one’s finger, is certainly not an important invention.” [Qian 85:72]

7. • “But [double-action piston pumps in use in China] would be of no significance without the scientific discovery of the weight of air, not to mention Newcomen’s leap of the imagination putting all the components together. The Chinese had invented some engineering devices and had constructed all sorts of waterworks, but there is no evidence that the Chinese understood atmospheric pressure. There are no reports that Chinese scholars or inventors ever conducted any experiments comparable to those of Berti (1639-40), Torricelli (1644), Pascal (1648), Otto von Guericke (1654), or other European experimenters of the seventeenth century.
Furthermore, Needham observed that the Chinese did not use piston pumps until after the sixteenth century (coincidentally, when the Jesuits arrived) so that evidence is lacking that the Chinese invented a device like Agricola’s “seventh” piston-based suction pump with such family resemblence to the principles of the Newcomen machine. In “The Pre-natal History of the Steam-Engine,” Needham refers to a Chinese “experiment” in the second century B.C. in which a vessel containing boiling hot water is plunged into a well with a resultant “sound like thunder.” This is hardly a demonstration of the existence of air pressure, even if one might concede that given our knowledge today, we know that the conditions could have produce a vacuum. This suggests that the claim [by Pomeranz] that the Chinese knew “the basic scientific principle” [“atmospheric pressure”] of steam power is highly exaggerated.” [Huff 11:232-3] See [209-33] for a review of Whites’ development of the scientific principles including atmospheric pressure pertaining to the steam engine.

8. • “One important illustration of the gap between Chinese and Western science is in knowledge about electricity. Although Needham contended that the Chinese knowledge of magnetism put China close to the West in early knowledge of electricity, his critics argue otherwise. Knowledge of magnetism is in six parts: (1) attraction, (2) direction, (3) declination (a compass needle does not always point to true north) (4) local variation (the direction in which the needle points varies due to local disturbing forces), (5) inclination (the needle does not always point in a horizontal plane) and (6) the earth is a giant loadstone, which attracts the compass needle. The Chinese and the Greeks discovered the first two at more or less the same time. The Chinese discovered the third well before it was discovered in the West. It seems that the Chinese also knew the fourth. However, the fifth and the sixth parts were unknown to them. Yet the sixth is what turns magnetism from a wholly empirical body of knowledge into a theoretical science where the earth-is-a-loadstone hypothesis explains other observations. This is what Gilbert (1540-1603) did for the West in his famous treatise De Mangnete. So when European scholars made the study of magnetism into a science in the late 16th century, the Chinese study of magnetism “…did not surpass a qualitative description of magnetic declination” (Qian: 80).
So Chinese knowledge of magnetism was only part way to where Gilbert got to in the late 16th century. Furthermore, it took well over 200 years of cumulative research into other aspects of electricity to complete the West’s research agenda of understanding electricity and magnetism of which the following are just some of the highlights: [Detailed review of 13 steps White scientists and innovators took to develop electrical power.] Virtually none of these discoveries were made, or known, in China. Thus, far from being on the verge of discovering how to make electric motors, telegraphs and radios, the Chinese were showing no signs of even beginning the long series of cumulative scientific advances, stretching over two centuries, that underlay Europe’s development of practical uses of electricity.” [Bekar 02:20]
• For details on Whites’ development of magnetism and electricity, see [Huff 11:234-52].
; “Gilbert, in fact, tested a great range of materials in search of magnetic charge… In all this, he was the first to clearly distinguish between magnetic and electric charges. He even developed the prototype of the first electrical measuring device, the versorium or electrical charge indicator, to detect magnetic or electric charges. As I stressed in chapter 9, Gilbert himself was building on the fertile legacy of his sixteenth century peers and predecessors. That means that this experimental strand of scientific culture was widely diffused in late-sixteenth-century European culture. But not only that: one of Gilbert’s models was the thirteenth-century polymath Peter Peregrinus… who devised the spherical lodestone for purposes of experimentation…
Seen in this light, Gilbert’s seminal study of magnetism that first identified electric phenomena, published in 1600, was the first scientific textbook using experimental methods, crude as they were. At the same time, it was the culmination of an experimental tradition in natural philosophy that, with the publication of Gilbert’s book, established the starting point for electrical studies.” [295]

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E-H: Government and education.

E. White governments are more representative, embedded, and stronger than Chinese.

White governments became increasingly more representative, more embedded in society, more informed, more organized, and more effective at promoting their nations’ well-being than Chinese counterparts. Historically, states that are more representative and less despotic, that allow more rights and freedoms, and thereby enjoy more support from their people, are also stronger: able to collect more taxes and get more constructive work done [1]. White states have been much more representative than Chinese (section II-8). White nations evolved as power-sharing arrangements between citizens and rulers, with intermediary organs of power having their own systems of law [2]. People had individual rights, as did professionals organized into guilds, intellectuals organized into universities, clergy organized into churches and monasteries, villagers organized into communes, and businessmen organized into towns and cities. Each was a semi-independent corporation having a negotiated relationship with the central government. Citizens big and small obtained a voice in their government via legislative bodies, whose approval a ruler must obtain to implement policies.

1. • See section II-8.F and its sources.

2. • On Europe’s representative, power-sharing institutions, and rights, and China’s lack thereof, see section II-8.A-D and its sources.
; On the many subsystems of law that Whites created, see the [Zanden 09a:47-8,65-6] and [Zanden 08:17-8] citations in section II-8-A (on how White rulers were more constrained by law).
• “The aftermath of [Investiture Controversy of 1050–1200] was the recognition by the crown of the church’s corporate autonomy, and the fact that the church, in acquiring independent law-making powers, went on to cultivate a whole new legal system deeply indebted to Roman concepts but which constituted, in the words of Berman, “the first modern Western legal system”: the first comprehensive and rational systematization of law. This was a “modern” system built on the legacy of the Justinian reformation of Roman law (6th century) but which went beyond it by analyzing and synthesizing all authoritative statements concerning the nature of law, the various sources of law, and the definitions and relationships between the different and separate kinds of law (divine law, natural law, human law, the law of the church, the law of princes, enacted law, customary law) – which came to constitute the intellectual and legal basis for the reconstitution of medieval Europe into a plurality of estates in which the form of central government was a monarchy ruling over a society composed of kingdoms, baronies, bishoprics, urban communes, guilds, universities, each with important duties and privileges. This society of estates, backed by new systems of law, was unique to Europe. It… precluded the formation of despotic governments demanding obedience and nameless servility from the population.” [Duchesne 11a:483-4]

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F. Whites have led the world in governmental innovations.

Whites have led the world in governmental innovations, in areas such as: devising individual and corporate rights, and separation of powers with multiple systems of law [1]; instituting an independent judiciary and trial by jury; developing a regulated, professional bureaucracy [2]; collecting necessary information on resources, people, and the economy [3]; standardizing currency, measures, and language [4]; establishing an education system including universities and primary schools [5]; creating a national bank and national bonds [6]; providing relief to the poor [7]; building public infrastructure including transportation systems [8]; supporting economic and industrial development [9]; and protecting the environment and wilderness areas. China, on the other hand, has made barely any institutional innovations since at least as far back as the start of the Qing dynasty (1644) [10].

1. • See the previous section (E) and its sources.

2. • “Everywhere in Western Europe governments set out to create a ‘rationalized’ system of direct rule, trying to eliminate the ‘intermediate rule’ of ‘unruly’ aristocrats, holders of hereditary offices and tax farmers and to get rid of venality, sinecures and so on. Where possible, intermediate, ‘indirect’ rulers were supplanted by ‘real’ bureaucrats who worked for the government and for nobody else and who had to follow its rules, which increasingly were written rules, and nobody else’s. Again, one must be careful not to predate these processes and regard them as quite straightforward. Success was often quite limited. Professional bureaucracies, even more than professional armies, overall, are children of the nineteenth century. But it was already clear earlier on in which direction developments were heading.” [Vries 15:422]
• “[China’s] administration was more conditioned by personal and kinship relations, and by a Confucian ideology that promoted a pious conformism to concrete familial and political virtues rather than to abstract formalized categories. The West carried this rationalization process further through the creation of bureaucracies increasingly managed by specialized and trained officials in accordance with impersonal and universal statuses and regulations formulated and recorded in writing, and the creation of more integrated and codified systems of law (Weber 1981: 338–351).” [Duchesne 11a:249]

3. • “All local self-government notwithstanding, the administration of the British state was centralised, ‘centripetal’, uniform and efficient. Britain’s state no longer had any competitors in any public domain. Its role in ‘rationalising’ society can hardly be overestimated. Just think of the standardisation of time and its measurement, of measures in general, of weights and moneys, of the quality of products and of the system of law. One may also think of the increasing collection and use of statistics and public records, of mapping and of the development of infrastructure.” [Vries 13:318]
• “Governments in Western Europe increasingly cared about whom their subjects were and what they were doing and thinking, and they increasingly had to. So they started to systematically collect information about them and to monitor and police them. With the increasing need for tax money and conscripts, to mention only the most obvious reasons, it became increasingly relevant for rulers to know exactly how many subjects they had, where they lived, what they did, possessed, earned, thought and so on. To find that out, governments – and this is a phenomenon we see all over Europe – had to make the societies over which they ruled, or in any case wanted to rule, ‘legible’…
State officials created standard grids whereby they could centrally record and monitor often exceptionally complex, ‘illegible’ local social practices. As examples, Scott refers to the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities and the organization of transportation. Governments all over Europe increasingly ‘X-rayed’ their societies to make them ‘governable’, as Foucault would say, via measures calculated to make the terrain, its products and its workforce more legible – and hence easier to deal with – from above and from the centre. I do not see an equivalent of equal intensity of such policies in China…
Science and scientists were given an increasingly important role in that process. This had already started in the early modern era when scientific societies, whose members knew that science as such does not know borders, were often expected to serve the national interest and seen as pawns in an international competition. The Dutch Society of Science, for example, founded in 1752, was explicitly devoted to the promotion of Dutch ‘national’ interest. The English Royal Society, founded in 1662, professed to strive for ‘the knowledge of natural things and useful arts to the glory of God the creator and for application to the good of mankind’, but, in practice, it too was not free from national self-interest. With the passing of time the role of knowledge and the men of knowledge in public life only increased. Information, increasingly in quantitative form, became regarded as extremely important for governing…
European governments became increasingly fascinated by collecting and using data, not by accident called ‘statistics’, for a wide range of purposes and actively stimulated activities that they thought might bring about the kind of society and economy that a strong state needed. A clear example would be the development of censuses and population registers. Mapping of course also fits in this effort to make society legible. The number of maps available in society reached an absolutely unprecedented level and they became ordinary objects.” [Vries 15:416-8]

4. • See the [Vries 13:318] citation, above.
• On Whites’ greatly superior currency and coinage, see section V-3.J and its sources.
• “The metric system was introduced in Revolutionary France in 1794. The definitive metre was fixed in 1799. That was not unproblematic. After 1812, pre-metric units were again permitted. It was only in 1837 that the metric system again became obligatory. The legacy of revolutionary and, in particular, Napoleonic France when it comes to ‘rationalizing’ the system of rule in France and all the regions the French conquered can hardly be overestimated. When it comes to the metric system, Britain, as is well known, did not adopt it. In standardizing time, though, the British did take the lead. The British Post Office gave the initial push when it started to run all its mail coaches throughout Great Britain in accordance with a uniform standard of time. With the expansion of the railway network the urge to have a uniform time in the entire country only increased. So-called ‘railway time’ became Greenwich Mean Time. In 1855, 98 per cent of all public clocks in Britain were indicating that time. Standardizations of this kind had a scientific and technical side as well as a political and legislative side. What is striking in that respect is that scientists independently tended to push for more standards and increasingly the central state regarded it as part and parcel of its task to implement and guarantee them. Modern economic life is unimaginable without abundant flows of information and without standardization: the production and maintenance of both of these are mainly provided and enforced by the modern state and its bureaucratic apparatus. The effect of their existence in terms of lowering transactions costs must have been very substantial. The importance of the fact that, as a rule, it has been the state that collected, provided and standardized this information is all too often still underestimated, as is the importance of the fact that, in this respect too, Qing China was and continued to be a ‘weak’ state with a very weak statistical ‘basis’.” [Vries 15:418-9]
• “Another important component of such a system ofcommunication is an accepted set of standards for weights and measures. During the eighteenth century, technology gradually became more systematic about its reliance on quantitative measures, and standardization became essential. Useful knowledge, much more than other kinds of knowledge, requires a strict and precise “I-see-what-you-see” condition to be communicated and transmitted efficiently. Mathematics was one such
language, quantitative measures and standards another. The introduction of the metric system on the continent during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period established a common code that despite some serious resistance eventually became universally accepted. The United States and Britain chose to stick to their own system: in the eighteenth century most people used accepted measures of the pound, and the standard yard was made in 1758–1760 and deposited in the House of Commons. In 1824, Britain enacted the Imperial System of Weights and Measures codifying much ofthe existing system. Standardizations had been attempted many times before, but they required the coercive powers and coordination capabilities of the modern state. ” [Mokyr 02a:58-9]

5. • See the next section (G) and its sources.

6. • “[Britain]’s tax system was more efficient. The same goes for its monetary and financial system. It, in contrast to China, had a system of funded debt, a national bank and state–supported paper money. Its bureaucracy was more efficient and less corrupt than China’s.” [Vries 13:403]
; “In Britain central government was able to collect such huge amounts of money in the form of taxes and to maintain such a huge debt because a certain set of institutions – and a certain set of power relations – had emerged whose combined impact is considered to have been so fundamental that in historiography their emergence has come to be known as a ‘financial revolution’…The main institutional innovations were the creation of a national bank, the creation of a funded national debt, various improvements in the use of bonds and shares, more sophisticated systems of insurance, changes in the functioning of corporate law (e.g. the creation of a New East India Company) and the development of better ways of gathering and using information with regard to country and economy.” [Vries 15:219]
• On the sound currency of Europe, particularly Britain, see section V-3.J and its sources.

7. • On how since medieval times Europe has provided much more relief to its poor than has China, even as a portion of GDP, see section II-8.F and its sources.

8. • “[China’s] river system in any case was not as dense or as multi-directional as that of Britain. The country had many canals but those often did not have a good water supply and they often were not appropriate for the transport of bulky goods. Where transport over water was impossible or problematic, for example, outside China Proper and in large parts of Northern China, costs of long distance transportation must have been so high as to make regular long-distance trade in bulk goods almost impossible. We must not forget that even 100 kms counted as a considerable distance in a pre-industrial context. Transport over land was highly problematic and problems of funding and maintenance increased. To claim like Westad does that China’s land and water transport compared favourably with that in the West certainly is one of the many revisionist exaggerations. References that one comes across in the literature to Qing China as a highly integrated market economy strike me as optimistic and based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the evidence that basically only looks at important towns near rivers and at towns that had an important administrative function, and at official instead of actual prices. In the nineteenth century, China’s transport system over land as well as over water deteriorated. Scarcity of materials like wood and iron played their part in this, in particular in the case of overland transport. But the weakness of central government is also at least partly to blame.” [Vries 15:141]
; “My claim in this book is that Great Britain became a state with far more infrastructural power than Qing China. That power, of course, to a large extent depends on the actual presence of institutional and material infrastructures. Institutional changes have already been referred to often so let us here comment briefly upon material infrastructure. The importance of transport is fundamental in this respect. In the period 1700–1830 efficiency in road transport in Great Britain more or less tripled due to technological and institutional changes. Government’s role was mainly confined to establishing turnpike trusts by Acts of Parliament. During that same period, the capacity of British canals almost tripled, which was fundamental in enabling coal use inland. The introduction of the steamship, of course, was a sensational innovation. In overseas trade, however, it only really took off in the second half of the nineteenth century. But there had already been a substantial lowering of costs of that trade before: mainly because of ‘smoother markets and safer seas’ thanks to protection by the Royal Navy. Less sensational but hugely important was the coastal trade, in particular the transporting of coal from the north to London. That amounted to about half a million tons annually in the first half of the nineteenth century. Here too efficiency increased and here too the state played a role. When it comes to building railroads, central government in Great Britain was quite reluctant to assume too big a role but it, of course, could not simply leave everything to the market. The same goes for the development of good postal services. In all these respects, the contribution of the state in Great Britain was quite substantial and as a rule positive, whereas in China government, as in so many other respects, certainly from the end of the reign of the Qianlong emperor onwards, was less prominently active and less helpful. Again differences became more striking than resemblances and more to the disadvantage of China.” [420]

9. • See section V-3.I-K and its sources.

10. • “[U]nder the Qing [1644-1911], change and development clearly were not normal and increasingly institutionalised as they were in the West… What is also very striking is the almost entire lack of major institutional innovations as compared to Britain with its financial, political and military ‘revolutions’. Even if China may still have been extremely good in incrementally improving the efficiency of what it was already doing – which I think was less and less the case – we see no major innovations that put it on a new trajectory: it just was not heading anywhere new.” [Vries 13:406]
• Chinese communism, an extension of Chinese autocracy (section II-8.D), was of course copied from Jews.
Behind Communism.
• www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/Behind%20Communism.pdf

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G. Europe has long been superior to China in book production, education, and literacy.

Better government goes hand in hand with a better citizenry. Europe’s production of books, already accelerating in the century prior to Gutenberg’s printing press of 1440, was vastly greater (roughly 20-40 times) than China’s from the late medieval period on [1]. While China’s state-run academies were devoted to memorizing classical literature in preparation for civil service exams [2], Europe universities were independent and students since medieval times could learn practical subjects such as law, accounting, and medicine [3]. Europe had 70 universities by 1500, and almost 150 by 1700 [4]. Mass-produced newspapers took off in Europe in the early 17th century [5]; they did not appear in China until the 1840s, based on British models [6]. By 1800, northwest Europe was over 50% literate, while China was only about 15% literate then and only 20% literate as late as 1950 [7]. Public education got underway in Europe in the late 18th century [8]; China did not reach northwest Europe’s 1830 primary school enrollment levels until 1960 [9]. European artisans were also more literate than Chinese; they signed their works more, wrote more technical literature [10], and eventually joined with European scientists to create the Industrial Revolution [11].

1. • On how the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press created a communications revolution in Europe including an explosion in book production, see section V-2.E and its sources.
• “The estimates of book production presented in this chapter show a remarkable and consistent rate of growth in the long period studied here. Growth rates during the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries, the high Middle Ages (eleventh-thirteenth centuries), and the ‘Crisis of the late medieval period’ (1350–1500) are fairly high, showing how dynamic the medieval knowledge economy was. After 1454 the invention of movable type led to a further acceleration of growth.
All regions of Western Europe contributed significantly to the growth of book production. Initially, during the sixth century, Italy was still the dominant producer of manuscripts, but as early as the Carolingian Renaissance the centre of production shifted to Northern France, Western Germany, and Belgium, which remained the core region until the fourteenth century. Other countries – Ireland, Britain, and Spain – at times also contributed substantially to the flourishing medieval manuscript production…
The enormous expansion of book production in all parts of Western Europe is an important clue to the processes of economic growth and knowledge accumulation that took place. It points to the pan-European character of growth in the Middle Ages…
From the eleventh to twelfth centuries on, however, the market took over the role of the monasteries. Urban demand and demand associated with universities drove the continuous growth of the book industry in the late medieval and early modern periods. The growing literacy of the (urban) population, the long-term increase in their incomes (which accelerated after 1348), and, in particular after 1454, the ongoing, rapid technological changes in the production of books dominated the process.
Often, accounts of the rise of the European knowledge economy start with the invention of movable type by Gutenberg as the decisive moment in the growth of book production and knowledge accumulation. The very dynamic development of the manuscript production in the centuries before 1450 (and in particular following the Black Death of 1348) shows that movable type should be seen more as a response to the rapidly growing demand for books in this period. In many ways, Gutenberg’s invention… can be seen as a culmination of existing trends in the medieval economy… What is also striking was the rapidity of the spread of the innovation: within one generation after the printing of the Gutenberg Bible in the mid-1450s, there were printers in almost every corner of Western Europe. This testifies to the dynamic character and the strong integration of the medieval economy in this period.” [Zanden 09a:88-90]
; “The two candidates for having a level of book production similar to Western Europe are China and Japan, both of which developed a commercial printing industry in the centuries before 1800. Recently, literature on the Chinese printing industry has been growing rapidly, which allows detailed comparisons with Western Europe. What emerges from this literature is that during the late Ming and the Qing, book production in China expanded rapidly; especially in the sixteenth century printed books largely replaced manuscripts. The growth of the commercial printing industry in the Yangtze Delta played an important role in this transformation. The best recent evidence on the volume of output in the Chinese book industry is for the second half of the Ming (1522–1644), which was probably the most dynamic period. The two main centres of production, Jianyang (in Fujian) and Nanjing (in Jiangsu) produced about 1,000 and 700 editions, respectively. The estimates for the other cities and provinces are much lower; according to Zhang’s estimates, not more than 1600 titles were published in the rest of China, of which about half was also concentrated in the Yangtze Delta. Combining these figures yields a total of about 3,300 new titles for China as a whole in the 1522–1644 period, or 27 titles annually. Other recent estimates by Lucille Chia for the whole of China from 1505–1644 indicate a level that is almost double this estimate, i.e. 47 titles annually. As with our European estimates, these figures are based on books still available in libraries, and therefore underestimate real output. But even if we multiply these figures by a factor of 10, they are low compared to the estimates for Western Europe (which had a similar population size). The average annual book production in Western Europe from 1522 to 1644 can be estimated at about 3,750 titles, or about 40 times higher than the highest estimates for China in the same period.
For Qing China there has been much less recent work; the only estimate available is that a total of about 126,000 new editions were published from 1644 to 1911, which means that the average annual output was 474. Again, this was much lower than output in Europe, where close to 6,000 titles in 1644 alone were published; Chinese book output was even lower than the output of a small country like the Netherlands during much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” [Zanden 09a:188-9]
• “Manchu emperors, it is true, became great patrons of literature and sponsored enormous projects of compilation and publications, including a vast encyclopedia in 5,020 chapters, and a project which resulted in the collection and reproduction of 3,697 classic works under the title Complete Library of the Four Treasuries. But the same Manchu (or Qing) advocates of these projects conducted the well-known ‘literary inquisitions’ of 1774-89, against books which reflected badly on the alien Manchu rule. Over 10,000 works were placed on the index of prohibited works, and some 2,320 works were completely destroyed. The Manchu rulers also imposed strict controls over teaching and the academies, and carried out punishments against thousands of authors and their families, executions, enslavements, exiles, and tortures.
In the meantime, a rather small region of Europe, England, was being flooded with print materials: belles letters, novels, magazines, newspapers, philosophical treatises, scientific manuals, pulp fiction, periodicals, and the like – as we learn from Roy Porter’s learned and vivacious book, Enlightenment, Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2001). During the 1620s about 6,000 printed titles had appeared in England, increasing to almost 21,000 during the 1710s, and to about 56,000 by the 1790s. The total in separate book and pamphlet titles published between 1660 and 1800 was over 300,000, with an estimated 200 million copies sold. These numbers are all the more exceptional when we consider that the population in Britain in 1750 was only about 6.5 million, whereas in China it was around 210 million in 1700. By the 1770s, the total annual sale of newspapers (25), when there were nine dailies in London and 50 provincial weeklies, was over 12 million. ‘By 1800, a staggering 250 periodicals had been launched in England’, including magazines written by and for women, dealing with love, marriage and the family, education, etiquette and health. Ten thousand copies were printed of the third edition (1787-97) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” [Duchesne 11b]
• “[A] group of economists and social historians associated with the University of Utrecht have constructed databases of book titles extending from the sixth century to 1800 in Europe. In a sequence of studies, they have shown a dramatic and steady rise of book production in eight major European countries from just before the invention of the moveable-type Gutenberg press to the end of the eighteenth century. The rise of book production is, of course, a proxy of literacy rates and parallels more direct measures of literacy…
In contrast to those developments, estimates of book production in Asia reveal exceedingly low levels of production…
Even if evidence should emerge suggesting an equivalence of book production in China and Wetsern Europe in the Early Modern period, we have to remember that the Chinese books would be entirely devoid of the modern scientific advances, none of which occurred in China. Put differently, the books would have none of the modern scientific “propositional knowledge” that some economists have posited as critical for economic growth.” [Huff 11:313]

2. • On China’s imperial schools being mostly preparation for civil service exams, see section II-8.C and its sources. On China’s civil service examinations being based on rote memory of literary classics, see section IV-5.B and its sources.
• “I tend to agree with Ho that the [Chinese] examination system, in which so many people invested so much with an absolutely tiny chance of ever getting a real job, entailed ‘wastage of human effort and talent on a scale vaster than can be found in most societies’.” [Vries 15:273]

3. • Unlike Chinese schools, European universities had sufficient independence from the state to seek objective truths; see section II-8.C and its sources.
• On the early progress of European universities, see section V-2.C and its sources.
• “We have already seen how this movement [increasing reliance on written documents], which started with the issuing of charters by and for monasteries in the eighth and ninth centuries (as proof of the acquisition of certain properties), began to spread to other spheres and formed a crucial element in the ‘silent revolution’ of 1050–1300: written charters issued by emperor and king became the constitutions of cities, statutes issued by city governments defined the rights and duties of guilds and fraternities, as did charters such as the Magna Carta between monarchy and nobility. It was this cumulative growth of the use of the written word – to some extent documented by the enormous growth of book production in these same centuries (see Chapter 3) – that was unique in Europe. The growing demand for literacy and legal skills that arose as a result of these processes was a determining factor behind the emergence of universities, a process of fundamental importance to Huff’s interpretation of the rise of modern science in Western Europe. To some extent universities were a spin-off of the legal revolution of the twelfth century: it was the demand for legal opinion, for literate and educated lawyers, clergymen, or clerks that stimulated the development of universities as universitas, and almost accidentally also created the institutions and the platform for the (other) sciences to flourish.” [Zanden 09a:63]
• “The two earliest institutions that became archetypes for modern universities were the University of Bologna and the University of Paris. Scholars in northern Europe (e.g., France) were preoccupied with logic and theology. But in Italy the emphasis was on grammar and rhetoric. “These arts were studied as aids to the composition of legal documents.”
At the beginning of the eleventh century, there was a “great revival of legal studies” at Bologna. The primary object of legal study was the body of Roman Law that had been condensed and archived (A.D. 528–533) by Justinian I…
Bologna was the natural home of legal studies, because by the year 1000, it was already known as a liberal arts school for the study of literature. In these times, there was a close connection between literature and law.” [Deming 10:141-2]
• “Prince Henry established a sort of institute for advanced study at the southern tip of Portugal, Cape St. Vincent, to which he brought astronomers, shipbuilders, instrument makers, cartographers, and navigators of different nationalities, the Portuguese became the first world historical example of a program of discovery. Many technical solutions and improvements – in the measurement of latitude, the charting of the African coast, the collection of charts on new map projections, the differentiation of types of ships for different tasks – were introduced under the leadership of the Portuguese…” [Duchesne 11a:185]

4. • “[B]etween 1300 and 1500 the number of universities in Europe increased from twenty to seventy.” [Duchesne 11a:181]
• “[B]y the eighteenth century there were almost 150 universities in Europe.” [Vries 13:315]

5. • “Western Europe was the first region in the world to know all sorts of ‘newspapers’ and it had much more of them when industrialisation took off… By the 1770s, when there were nine dailies in London and 50 provincial weeklies, the total annual sale of newspapers was over twelve million; by 1800 it was some sixteen million. There then were 250 periodicals in England.” [Vries 13:223-4]
• “Newspapers, a major medium in the creation of a mass readership, were invented in Europe in the seventeenth century. It has been said that the regular Chinese pao (or reports of court affairs) circulated among the educated civil servants for more than a thousand years (AD 618-1911) was the forerunner of the modern newspaper. But if we define the term ‘newspaper’ as denoting, in the words of Johannes Weber, ‘printed medium appearing at regular short intervals of at least once a week, produced in relatively large print runs, sold to the public at a moderate price and providing information to a sizable number of readers about important current events and developments around the world’, the first newspaper sheet appeared in Strassburg in 1605. By the 1620s a variety of newspapers were circulating in central Europe. Speaking of a broad readership for new ideas, let it be said that by the mid-seventeeth to eighteenth century, newspapers ‘were the most widely read secular material’ in Europe. ‘They provided a seedbed for the broadening political education which fostered the development of the Enlightenment’.” [Duchesne 11b]
• “In the 1640s, the pamphlet format had been transformed into the newsbook.. Such books reported on a variety of topics but especially domestic issues. The newspaper itself appeared in 1666 (the first being the London Gazette). It was larger, printed on half sheets in two columns on both sides. Once the newspaper press emerged in the middle of the seventeenth century, it has not stopped since. As the historian of English newspapers, Joad Raymond, put it, the arrival of the newsbook (in 1640) set in motion an “avalanche, which, with no more than a few weeks of interruption,” continues rolling right up to this morning…
[I]n contrast to this, no newspapers emerged either in China or the Muslim world until the early or late nineteenth century, when British or other Western exemplars were taken as models… In China the first newspaper modeled on British exemplars did not appear until the 1840s. The long tradition of book printing using woodblock technology that had existed in China since the eighth century failed to give rise to the newspaper.” [Huff 11:306-7]

6. • See the [Huff 11:306-7] citation, above.

7. • “In the North Sea area, levels of literacy rose significantly in the century and a half after the Black Death… In the sixteenth century, probably a majority of the male population of Holland could read and write, and these skills were available in towns and the countryside… In England, there was a similar growth in education from 1340 to 1548, as has been well documented by Hoeppner Moran (1985) for York. In London, levels of literacy in the 1470s may already have been as high as those in Amsterdam… Guilds in the Low Countries and in England required their apprentices to be literate, or included training in reading and calculating abilities in their apprenticeships.” [Zanden 09a:129-30]
• “[A]n education revolution… took place in [England] between 1580 and 1640. Summarizing the trend gathered from scattered sources, Stone found that by 1640, “over half the male population of London was literate, that a high proportion of the one third of adult males who could sign their names in the home counties could read, and that 2.5% of the annual male seventeen-year-old age-group was going on to higher education.”… England was not alone in this transformation, as the Reformation’s sponsorship of popular education also swept across the continent, especially in Protestant areas, where reading the Bible became an essential religious duty for every man and woman.” [Huff 11:303]
; “The revolution in literacy was far from being just an English phenomenon: it took place all across Europe, especially Northern Europe. Other researchers have shown that literacy across Western Europe, especially the Low Countries, northern France, and the western part of Germany, spiraled up from 1500 to the 1750s. Remarkable progress was made in the sixteenth century so that around 1800, there was a broad swathe of Northern Europe “where already 60-80% of the male population could read and write,” while about 40% of the female population could do so. In some areas, as in England, literacy was near universal by 1800. But not only that, some evidence points to the fact that Dutch levels of literacy were higher than those for Great Britain in the period between 1500 and 1800. On balance, continental Europe experienced “an enormous rise in literacy” between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.” [304]
; “In 1950, when American and European literacy rates ranged from 80 to 90 percent, the Arab-Muslim Middle East was only 13 to 18 percent literate. The literature rate of China in 1950 stood at about 20 percent.” [Huff 11:317]
• “John Lossing Buck’s survey of 1929-33 suggests that 30 percent of men in China were literate. Between 1882 and 1930 there was seemingly no change in exposure to schooling, so this was likely also the male literacy rate back in 1882… [T]his still places nineteenth-century China only at the level of England in the seventeenth century… The main vehicle of mass education in the Qing era was village-level charitable schools. Since the number of such schools found by Rawski nearly doubled between 1750–1800 and 1850–1900, educational exposure was most likely only half as great in the late eighteenth century, suggesting that male literacy might have been as low as 15 percent in 1800.” [Clark 07a:265-6]
• In 1800, England was ~53% literate and the Netherlands was ~68%. [Vries 13:222; Table 28]
; “I never came across any study in which not literacy rates of north-western Europe in the early modern era were regarded as the highest in the world… For China at the end of the eighteenth century, it is estimated at some fifteen per cent for men. For women it was much lower, some two to ten percent in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The figure for male literacy in the beginning of the 1930s still only was some thirty per cent.” [223]

8. • “The rise of literacy in the northern ‘periphery’ of Western Europe – in Sweden, Scotland, Prussia, Denmark and Norway – was in part the result of enlightened government policy inducing citizens to learn to read and write, often in combination with the supplying of schools and teachers, although in some areas this was delegated to local churches or villages… Germany, and in particular Prussia, is another example of public policies favouring literacy, going back to the sixteenth century when protestant city government promulgated ordinances to foster education.” [Zanden 09a:196]
• “German public education officially began in 1763, when Frederick the Great of Prussia mandated regular school attendance from the ages of 5 through 13 or 14. The denominational or confessional school remained the norm throughout Prussia (which encompassed the Rhineland and most of modern Germany) during the nineteenth century. Teachers often worked as sextons or church organists, and clergymen served as school inspectors. Catholic and Protestant (Lutheran) areas of Germany were geographically separate, facilitating religious oversight of local schools. In Prussia, efforts to establish schools in which Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish children could receive a common instruction, separated only for classes in religion, failed, despite several serious efforts at reform. In the cities, free, public schools educated children of the working class, while public schools, which charged some fees, attracted children of middle class families and offered a more rigorous curriculum. Women, in low numbers, entered the teaching profession in the late 1800s.”
• education.stateuniversity.com/pages/518/Germany-HISTORY-BACKGROUND.html
• “Historically, Lutheranism had a strong influence on German culture, including its education. Martin Luther advocated compulsory schooling so that all people would independently be able to read and interpret the Bible. This concept became a model for schools throughout Germany. German public schools generally have religious education provided by the churches in cooperation with the state ever since.
During the 18th century, the Kingdom of Prussia was among the first countries in the world to introduce free and generally compulsory primary education, consisting of an eight-year course of basic education, Volksschule. It provided not only the skills needed in an early industrialized world (reading, writing, and arithmetic), but also a strict education in ethics, duty, discipline and obedience. Children of affluent parents often went on to attend preparatory private schools for an additional four years, but the general population had virtually no access to secondary education.
In 1810, after the Napoleonic wars, Prussia introduced state certification requirements for teachers, which significantly raised the standard of teaching. The final examination, Abitur, was introduced in 1788, implemented in all Prussian secondary schools by 1812 and extended to all of Germany in 1871. The state also established teacher training colleges for prospective teachers in the common or elementary grades.
When the German Empire was formed in 1871, the school system became more centralized. In 1872, Prussia recognized the first separate secondary schools for females. As learned professions demanded well-educated young people, more secondary schools were established, and the state claimed the sole right to set standards and to supervise the newly established schools.”
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany#Prussian_era

9. • “The low levels of primary school enrollment in Asia and the Middle East in the early nineteenth century [Table E-1 shows that China only reached the 1830 British level of primary school enrollment in 1960, and the German rate was nearly twice this British rate] are an inevitable outcome of the social policies of the countries in question. They did not set up systems of public schooling as Europeans did as far back as the sixteenth century. Neither China, Southeast Asia, nor the Middle East had the benefit of a Reformation movement that encouraged—indeed demanded—universal literacy. In the absence of such a movement, or another impetus toward public schooling, illiteracy rates remained frightfully high from the early modern period all the way to the twentieth century.” [Huff 11:317]
• “[O]ur paper compares and contrasts the provision of primary education in four of the largest developing economies at the turn of the 20th century: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These countries comprised more than 50 percent of the world’s population in 1900, but only 14, 21, 9, and 4 percent of school-age children in Brazil, Russia, India and China, respectively, were enrolled in primary school, compared to more than 75 percent in Germany, UK and the USA.” [Chaudhary 12:1]
• “For example, in education, if we accept E. Rawski’s (1979) estimate of late Qing male literacy at 30 to 45 percent and female at 2 to 10 percent, we still confront estimates of elementary school enrollment in China running from a million in 1907 to 6.6 million in 1922, while in the same period middle school enrollment rose from 31,000 to 183,000—abysmally small figures for a country teeming with 400 million people. ” [Fairbank 06:261]

10. • “[European] book output increased enormously in the decades and centuries after 1455. Finally, the gap between common workmen and ‘men of speculation’ was bridged by the marked rise in literacy in the same region; this process probably began in the Low Countries (and northern France, and perhaps parts of Germany and Italy as well) during the one-and-a-half centuries after the Black Death, and spread to England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the end of the period, almost all skilled craftsmen in the North Sea region were probably literate; they were definitely able to read and write in the Low Countries, and increasingly so in Great Britain, Germany, and France.” [Zanden 09a:200]
• “In [Chinese] nautical technology, the distance between scholar and artisan was so great that systematical nautical treatises failed to appear at all. Shipwrights of the Ming dynasty may well have been “the most accomplished artisans of any age of any civilization who were at the same time illiterate and unable to record all their skill.” But this was only part of a wider situation. Probably most Chinese craftsmen in all fields, down to recent times, remained illiterate.” [Bodde 91:222-3]
; “On the basis of everything said so far, one would expect very little information to be recorded about [Chinese] individual craftsmen and their works in the written sources, especially those of official origin. By and large the expectation is justified…” [225]
; “How does all this compare with the status of the artisan in Europe?…
The [European] Middle Ages, or at least their latter centuries, reveal a rather similar situation [as in the Classical Greco-Roman world] despite their repuation for anonymity. The signing of finished works, by painters, manuscript illuminators, sculptors, goldsmiths, and others goes back to at least the twelfth century, especially in Italy. Sometimes, as in the case of the classical craftsmen, the signatures are accompanied by interesting or amusing comments. The surviving 1292 tax lists of Paris indicate (with names) that of a total of 15,200 tax-payers, there were then 33 painters, 24 image makers, and 13 manuscript illuminators, as against some 350 each of shoemakers and tailors, plus other large artisan groups… For Gothic England, during approximately four centuries from a little before 1180 to a little after 1560, the names are known of 51 masons (a term that in modern parlance would often embrace architects as well), 26 carpenters, 12 carvers, and 14 painters…
In China, with all due respect to the data discussed earlier, it seems unlikely, taking the respective time spans and populations into account, that anywhere near as many individual artisan names are proportionately known as in Europe. The one great exception is that of Chinese scroll painters and calligraphers, whose names are legion. The reason of course is that they are members of the literati, not the artisanate, which is also the reason why I exlude them.” [228-30]
• “The [European] eighteenth century experienced a veritable explosion of books that made useful knowledge accessible. The discovery that information could be made more accessible by alphabetization was exploited in full in the eighteenth century. The document most widely associated with the Enlightenment, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, contained numerous articles on technical matters, lavishly illustrated by highly skilled artists who, in most cases, were experts in their fields. Encyclopedias and indexes to “compendia” and “dictionaries” were the search engines of the eighteenth century. In order to be of practical use, knowledge had to be organized so that it could be selected from. Alphabetization was one way to do this, the organization of science into categories another. Some encyclopedias and dictionaries were designed to be efficient search engines and to reduce access costs. The number of scientific periodicals in the eighteenth century soared. In the early decades the number of learned periodicals (all areas) in all of Europe was still fairly modest: an average of 21 per year in the first decade of the eighteenth century, 34 in 1721/30 and 77 in 1741/50. In the 1790s, this number had soared to 531.” [Mokyr 07c:12-3]
; “Even in the dissemination of technical knowledge there appears to have been retrogression [in China]: the great technical encyclopedia, the Thien Kung Khai Wu (Exploitation of the Works of Nature), written in 1637 by Sung Ying Hsing, (“the Chinese Diderot”) provided an excellent summary of Chinese technology from weaving to hydraulics to jade working. The work was destroyed, probably because of the author’s political views, and has survived only thanks to a Japanese reprint. Wang Chen’s great Treatise on Agriculture was published in 1313, but by 1530 there was only one surviving copy.” [Mokyr 90:222-3]
• “Western Europe had more formal and public schooling [than China], more systems of apprenticeship and guild education and more universities, by the eighteenth century some 150 across Europe. Numerous publications came on the market in which craftsmen could find instructions, and that could help them to prepare for their master exams and meet the guilds’ quality standards. They normally contained a mixture of practical technical know-how and elements of science and assumed much tacit knowledge, but they certainly were useful in enhancing craftsmanship.” [Vries 13:223-4]

11. • See section V-2.H-I and its sources.
• “On both sides of the channel, Enlightenment scientists felt the need to communicate with practical people, and vice versa. More and more people concluded that there was no contradiction between the culture of action and matter, and that of learning. Moreover, the artisanal and pragmatic knowledge possessed by mechanics and apothecaries, botanists and cattle-breeders, gardeners and ironmasters kept improving and became more accessible.” [Mokyr 02a:52]
; “If the access costs are to be affordable so that production can draw on accumulated useful knowledge, there has to be social contact between “knowers” and “doers.”… Any society in which a social and linguistic chasm exists between workers, artisans, and engineers on one side, and natural philosophers and “scientists” (the word did not exist until the 1830s) on the other, will have difficulty mapping continuously from useful knowledge onto the set of recipes and techniques that increase economic welfare. Interestingly, the bridging of the social gap between the sphere of the learned scientist and that of the artisan was used to explain the origins of modern science, but with few exceptions it has not figured large in explanations of the Industrial Revolution. If the savants do not deign to address practical problems where their knowledge could help resolve difficulties and do not make an effort to communicate with engineers and entrepreneurs, the fabricants will have difficulty accessing [general, scientific knowledge].
Within Europe, the depth of this chasm varied substantially (though nowhere was it totally absent). Gillispie attributes France’s moderate technological achievement to the fact that “France was playing Greece to the modern world, and men of learning clearly and instinctively distinguished between the domains of science and practice… in this attitude French scientists were more severe, perhaps, than their colleagues in other countries and especially in Great Britain”. Yet compared to China or classical antiquity, the gap anywhere in Europe appears to have been shallow.” [61]
; “The Industrial Revolution then created a set of bridges between intellectuals and producers, between the savants and the fabricants. All in all, these channels of communication were the most obvious way in which “culture” affected technology and, in the long run, economic progress.” [Mokyr 09:53-4]

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H. China’s despotic government was deficient in many respects, and declined over time.

While White governments became better organized and more effective over time, China’s imperial government was deficient in many respects and actually declined. China’s regime was arbitrarily powerful and could crush anyone it targeted, but lacked the embedded strength possessed by White states [1]. Its tax revenue was largely drained by corruption; the amount that reached the central government being relatively meager [2]. It lacked a national bank and national bonds [3]. China had a relatively small cadre of overworked, often underqualified officials (mandarins) who had a wide range of responsibilities, often farmed out [4]. Their rule was largely arbitrary, and often based on kinship, personal relationships, and bribes [5]. China lacked individual rights and formal property laws [6]. It lacked standardized weights and measures, and had “a very weak statistical ‘basis’” [7]. From the late 18th century, China’s infrastructure deteriorated, including its transportation system of roads and canals and its granaries and big irrigation projects; the Chinese government failing to provide even basic policing [8].

1. • On the relative weakness of despotic states, particularly China, see section II-8.F and its sources.

2. • See section II-8.E and its sources.
• “[B]ehind this rosy, official façade lurks a much less rosy reality, which we cannot pass over here. In discussing taxes in Qing China we do not only have to differentiate between those tax payments that found their way to Peking and those non-statutory surtaxes that were paid as local or provincial tax. We must also realise that in addition to the official taxes and allowances the civil servants were able to collect, they also exacted an endless series of additional payments, either with or without the approval of Peking that knew that the official taxes and allowances, and salaries, were inadequate. Simply counting the number of official civil servants in each district is also highly misleading. Their number was small, but, of necessity, they were aided by a multitude of helpers, apart from members of the local gentry. These had to safeguard their own income. Which they did by making people pay as much for ‘their services’ as they could get away with. How much all these ‘customary fees’ and other extractions, and plain corruption and extortion, cost the population, we do not know. We only have some indications. A modest estimate on the basis of regional studies, for example, suggests that at the beginning of the nineteenth century they paid two to three times more land tax than Peking received. With the weakening of central government the situation only worsened. Even when government functioned at its best the problems of really and efficiently tapping the wealth of a country as big as China with primitive pre-industrial means were immense. In fact, there was no real alternative to taxing lightly, working with local elites, and hoping everything went well.” [Vries 03:37]
• “I provide historical evidence to demonstrate that the contraction of the regime’s fiscal capacity led to a gradual and sustained reduction in the supply of state-provided public goods. This development became evident in the second half of the 18th century, and it predated the military and socio-economic troubles which kicked in after 1796. The nature and timing of these spending cuts strongly suggests that persistent fiscal problems on the revenue side affected the economy adversely, through the under-provision of public goods that protected property rights. Before the modern West began taking steps to open up China by force, the Celestial Empire was already sinking under its own weight. ” [Sng 14:5-6]

3. • “In the eighteenth century [China] did not have a national bank, a consolidated national debt and formal and refined property laws. During the economic Ancien Régime that was not a real problem. With the passing of time, however, it became one.” [Vries 03:29-30]
; “The Qing government, apart from very exceptional exceptions, issued no paper money before the second half of the nineteenth century. Nor was it willing and/or able to collect more taxes or create a system of national debt. Something comparable to a financial revolution as we saw in England or the Dutch Republic – but not before Napoleon in France! – was simply lacking.” [Vries 06:17]
; “The frugality of China’s rulers clearly was a mixed blessing. Their way of running the country’s finances worked satisfactorily as long as it was not put to a real test. Neither China’s rulers, nor their subjects, ever developed any experience with deficit spending or handling public debt. Deficits in metropolitan or provincial treasuries were simply not allowed to occur. As long as revenues were sufficient, that was not a problem. It, however, could and did become a major problem quite rapidly when government needed much bigger amounts of money, in particular when it needed them on short notice. A tradition of borrowing from one’s own population did not exist nor one of borrowing from foreigners. Borrowing from foreigners against substantial interest rates was something unheard of, let alone when those rates were higher than many other countries in the world had to pay. In Britain a complex system had developed with the potential to mobilize enormous sums of money quickly. China completely lacked such a system.” [Vries 15:234]

4. • “The [Chinese] state apparatus over time became even weaker and government in the nineteenth century often was not even able to fulfil the absolute minimum of what one might expect from any government. Many of the emerging problems were connected to the extremely weak financial basis government had. The country’s bureaucracy was very seriously understaffed and under-paid, and often under-qualified for the more technical parts of their job. The bulk of routine work, because of that under-staffing and under-funding, had to be left to clerks and runners, who officially were not in government service and were not paid from government funds but by their direct employer or more often by the populace. The number of soldiers who were actually fit for war was surprisingly small; their payment, training and discipline were bad and getting worse.” [Vries 13:405]
• “In discussing tax collection in Qing China, I already referred to most of the problems that officials had to face in trying to actually do their job and to the ‘solutions’ they came up with. What applied to taxation, applied to administration in general: there were far too few personnel, their official salaries were far too low and they often were not well prepared. Over time things did not improve.” [Vries 15:273]
• “The number of civil ‘public servants’ in China during the eighteenth century was nearly constant and amounted, depending on the exact definition and on the sources one uses, to between 20,000 and 30,000 people, a number that is roughly equal to that of British civil servants at the time. This means that there were, roughly speaking, more than thirty times as many public servants per head of the population in (Great) Britain as there were in China. The numbers we find for China are not just low: they are amazingly low. If we deduct the number of officials that stayed in Peking, we must conclude that no more than some 10,000 to 15,000 officials were supposed to run the country in the provinces. In China Proper in the middle of the nineteenth century, each county magistrate, who was responsible for one of the approximately 1,500 districts, ruled over, on average, some 250,000 people… The following two examples show how different China was in this respect. in Prussia alone, in the 1870s, there were more than 300,000 government employees responsible for their realm of some 24.5 million inhabitants and for helping to run the German Kaiserreich that in total had some 40 million inhabitants. Great Britain was much less bureaucratic. We have figures for officials working for central government there for 1850 (40,000) and 1890 (90,000).” [Vries 15:272]
; “The many references to China’s ‘meritocratic’ system of selecting its administrators that one finds in texts that sing the praise of China’s ‘modern’ system of rule, moreover, should also be taken with a fair amount of salt. The fact that they were educated and had passed exams should of course not delude us about what exactly Chinese officials had learned and what kind of exams they had passed. Most of them lacked any specific organizational or technical schooling. What they imbibed during their studies was a certain culture, not certain professional knowledge. What they definitely were all made familiar with was classical learning. Their education was meant to turn them into ‘generalist’ gentlemen who would rule according to high moral standards, not specialists. The ‘Confucianist rejection of the professional expert’, of which Weber wrote, certainly existed. Mandarins did not as a rule regard themselves, to quote Confucius, as ‘a tool’ in an organization and they were wary of specialist competences. The tradition of legalism that emphasized professionalism and legal machinery much more than the moral qualities of the ruler, in the end, lost its struggle with ‘Confucianism’ when it came to providing an ideological basis to China’s system of rule. The fact that there may have been many legalist bureaucratic appearances in Qing China’s administrative system should not deceive us into thinking that in practice it actually worked like a bureaucracy or was conceived like one by the people running it. Of course, many of them learned a lot during their careers and some of them acquired quite some specialist expertise, but that, as it were, was more by accident than on purpose. It will not have been by accident that officials, as we saw, privately hired thousands of specialists to help them in actually doing their job.” [Vries 15:274-5]
• As China’s civil service examinations were based on rote memory of Confucian literary classics and not on practical subjects, its officials were often poorly prepared. See section IV-5.B and its sources.
; “[Mandarians] were not trained in law, but were appointed according to their proficiency in the classics – which amounted to a vast lore of mixed poetry, proverbs, analects and chronicles, much on the order of the Christian Old Testament or the Jewish Talmud. China was in advance of Western countries in requiring civil service examinations with competitive ratings for public positions. Had not the subject of study been so limited with opposition to all additions of a constructive kind, this system might have worked very well. As it was, the system was about like requiring a man to memorize Chaucer, the Song of Songs, Genesis, and a few other equally archaic things, in order to fit him for the duties of an architect, a judge, a civil engineer and a moralist, all of which the ideal mandarin was supposed to be – and naturally was not.” [Townsend 33:111]
• On the wide range of powers (and responsibilities) possessed by Chinese officials, see section II-8.B and its sources.

5. • See the [Duchesne 11a:249] citation in section V-3.F.
• On the arbitrary powers of Chinese officials, see section II-8.B and its sources.
• On the prevalence of nepotism in China, see section II-7.C and its sources.
• On the Chinese expectation of reciprocity for any services rendered, including business favors, see section II-5.A and its sources.
• On the necessity of giving gifts/bribes for official permission to conduct various business in China, see section II-8.E and its sources.

6. • On China’s lack of rights, see sections II-8.A,D and their sources.
• See the [Vries 03:29-30] citation, above.

7. • On China’s lack of a standard unit of weight in the nineteenth century, see the [Vries 15:260-1] citation in section V-3.J.
• On China’s lack of consistency in measures in general in the late nineteenth century, see [Smith 94:chapter VI; The Disregard of Accuracy].
• On China’s very weak statistical basis, see the [Vries 15:418-9] citation in section V-3.F.

8. • On China’s late imperial decline in infrastructure, see section II-8.F and its sources.
• On China’s inferior transportation infrastructure to Europe, see section V-3.F and its sources.

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I-K: Industry, trade, and finance.

I. White governments actively supported industry and trade, while China stifled it.

White governments cooperated with businessmen to actively promoted industry and trade, while China often stifled it. They developed stable banking and currency, commercial law, quality standards, transportation infrastructure, and education programs. They gave tax breaks or subsidies to vital industries, and when necessary protected them with import tariffs [1]. They provided incentives for inventors and entrepreneurs, including patent laws, grants, prizes, and pensions [2]. They promoted free trade within their nations [3], and supported international traders with favorable laws, charters for overseas companies, and strong naval forces [4]. The Chinese government did not provide such institutional supports. It took over major industries and impeded business concerns as rivals to their power, restricting international trade and key industries such as ship-building and mining. Businessmen were “squeezed” and occasionally looted [5].

1. • See section V-3.E-H on White institutions that promoted business success, lacked by China.
• See section V-2.C and its sources on Europe’s early development of commercial and banking systems.
• “Erik Reinert presents a long list of ways in which a government can support the economy and help in generating wealth. He begins by distinguishing between three roles central government can play, to wit acting as provider of institutions, acting as an institution that takes care of income distribution and, third, acting as promoter of economic growth. He then becomes more specific with regard to that third role by claiming that government might try and do the following: get the nation into the right business, create a comparative advantage in the right business, supply infrastructure, set standards, provide skilled labour and entrepreneurship, create demand (especially high-quality demand), lay an emphasis on knowledge and education, provide a legal system and finally act as an entrepreneur and capitalist of the last resort. European ‘policy-makers’ in the early modern era used almost all of these strategies.” [Vries 15:329-30]
; “The point of course is not that China’s rulers were quite interventionist in this respect: so were mercantilist rulers in the West. Western mercantilism probably more than anything else was about interference in and manipulation of foreign trade. The point is how and to what purpose rulers interfered. In Western Europe – and most clearly in Britain and the Dutch Republic – we see something of a symbiosis and a mutual re-enforcement of ‘power’ and ‘profit’ (i.e. of officialdom and merchants), with both parties, not necessarily for the same reasons, sharing the conviction that foreign trade was of the utmost importance and must be stimulated. In China, on the contrary, rulers were quite sceptical of the positive effects of foreign trade and, in particular, the contacts with foreigners such trade implied. They were much less obsessed by it, and, what is very important, they did not feel the urge to support it for financial reasons.” [351]
; “Government in Great Britain, considering the norms of the time, not only was a big spender and an important employer, but also played a quite prominent role in trying to actively steer the economy in a certain direction. It was quite interventionist, first and foremost in matters of international economic relations. Its economic policy was mercantilist with all that implies and which means that government showed two faces. In matters related to the internal market, apart I would say from some aspects of the labour market, it clearly and increasingly promoted laissez-faire. In matters directly related to international competition and ‘national interest’ it did not and continued to be quite interventionist up until several decades into the nineteenth century. Great Britain’s large international trade (in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP) became an important source of government income. Government systematically tried via every possible means – taxation, subsidies, tariffs, bans and so forth – to support and promote sectors of production and trade that it regarded as important for the national economy. It ‘negotiated’ with entrepreneurs and traders, often supported them and was even willing to go to war to help them. Government policies in China were very different, focused as they were on the preservation of the existing economic order and on ‘people’s livelihood’. Government did not hesitate to intervene in order to preserve that order but hardly ever did anything to change it. This also extended to the field of politics, social relations, morals, ‘science’ or technology. Government literally was conservative. When it comes to foreign trade, it was fairly sceptic and overall not really supportive.” [430-1]
• “What Britain had, but China lacked, was a strong, actively involved state that protected the propertied classes, supported entrepreneurs, and directed ample resources for industrialisation.” [Duchesne 05]

2. • “During the Industrial Revolution, Britain provided many such incentives [that provided incentives to innovate]. Even when inventors were failed by the patent system, some of the more notable ones were voted pensions and grants by parliament and others maintained serious hopes that such compensation would be forthcoming. The Society of Arts awarded small prizes to successful inventors who had not secured patents, and other rewards were handed out or petitioned for by grateful colleagues to inventors who made unusual contributions to a particular industry. Some well-known prize contests challenged the best and the brightest to resolve technological bottlenecks, of which the Board of Longitude and the 1825 Rainhill competition are the best known.” [Mokyr 07a]
; “Some European governments discovered that protecting the property rights of the inventor encouraged technological change. The idea of granting an inventor a temporary monopoly position through a patent to reward inventive activity emerged from customs in mining activity. Mining contractors were awarded monopoly rights over discoveries of new mineral resources. These arrangements were subsequently adopted in other activities, such as grain milling, and eventually applied to new inventions. This custom appears in northern Italy in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. In 1460, the Republic of Venice granted two inventors a privilege stating that no one could reproduce their inventions without their permission. In 1474 a formal patent system was enacted in Venice, the preamble of which noted that if “provisions were made for the works and devices discovered by men of great genius, so that others who may see them could not build them and take the inventor’s honor away, more men would apply their genius…and build devices of great utility to out commonwealth. Although few patents were actually awarded in Venice, its example was followed widely and by the middle of the sixteenth century the idea had penetrated much of Europe. The most effective and famous patent law was the Statute of Monopolies, in England, passed in 1624.” [Mokyr 90:79]
; “The growing use of patents to reward and encourage invention was thus a typical Enlightenment-inspired phenomenon, even if the origins of the institution precede the Enlightenment. Yet Enlightenment thought was never quite unambiguous about this matter: the British Society of Arts, founded in 1754, was a classic example of an organization that embodied many of the ideals of the Industrial Enlightenment. Its purpose was “to embolden enterprise, to enlarge science, to refine art, to improve manufacture and to extend our commerce.” Its activities included an active program of awards and prizes for successful inventors: over 6,200 prizes were granted between 1754 and 1784. The society took the view that patents were a monopoly, and that no one should be excluded from useful knowledge. It therefore ruled out (until 1845) all persons who had taken out a patent from being considered for a prize and even toyed with the idea of requiring every prize-winner to commit to never take out a patent.” [Mokyr 02b:26-7]

3. • “It is not always realized… that the main triumph of the free trade doctrine was in the establishment of free internal trade. Internal tariffs were seen by Enlightenment thinkers as the rent-seeking abomination they were, and the elimination of the French internal tariff barriers followed the abolition of the abolition of the guilds. The U.S. commerce clause had been passed a few years earlier. Internal trade in Sweden was liberalized in the late 1770s. In Germany the matter was more complex, but the post-1815 movement toward a German Zollverein reflected the same sentiment. The system of tolls and duties on Germany’s magnificent river system that hampered trade in the eighteenth century was dismantled. Arguably, the lion’s share of gains from trade were secured through internal rather than external trade.” [Mokyr 06:20]
; “[M]id-eighteenth-century Britain was, in many ways, ahead of its continental rivals in establishing the kind of free and open market economy that Enlightenment thinkers were supporting and that the overly dimensions of redistribution were fairly limited. It already had free internal trade, weak guilds, a relatively effective fiscal system, and a state that was firmly committed to the protection of property.” [Mokyr 09:65]
• See the [Vries 15:430-1] citation, above.
; “When it comes to the domestic situation, mercantilism as economic nationalism overall clearly was pro-market. Mercantilists favoured the creation of free and fair, smoothly functioning national markets and their policies were instrumental in extending and liberating the market economy. Considering the overwhelming importance for all major European economies of their domestic market this of course is far from irrelevant.” [Vries 15:435]

4. • “Transoceanic colonies likewise did not simply become available as a “resource windfall,” but were seized and effectively utilized on the basis of advanced shipping and navigation capacity, political-administrative coordination, a pronounced and growing military superiority, and technologically dynamic economies that sustained and deepened these ventures in empire. In a word, the latent advantages of geology and geography only became manifest upon the development of new forms of European power projection. ” [Bryant 06:433]

5. • See the [Vries 15:351,430-1] citations, above.
; “To begin with there is the unmistakable fact that in Qing China there was less financial and legal sophistication than in early modern Britain. Especially when it comes to what one may call ‘the interface of market and government’. In the eighteenth century it did not have a national bank, a consolidated national debt and formal and refined property laws. During the economic Ancien Régime that was not a real problem. With the passing of time, however, it became one. The importance of these kinds of institutions for industrialisation should not be played down. We already referred to the fact that the market for labour, especially long-term labour, was fairly restricted and did not include women. Interest rates were structurally high, which is normally regarded as a symptom of an inefficient market for money. Furthermore, there are good reasons to doubt that private property, for example in land, was just as absolute and freedom of enterprise as guaranteed in Qing China as they were in Britain.” [Vries 03:29]
• On the Chinese government taking control of major industries, restricting economic activity including international trade, and exploiting businesses, see section II-8.C and its sources.
• On Chinese businessmen’s lack of rights, see section II-8.A and its sources.
• On White economic innovations that China lacked, see the next section (J) and its sources.
• “In a sense, the protection of intellectual property rights represents the maturing of property rights protection. As a matter of fact, while England enacted its first patent law in as early as 1623, China did not have a patent law until 1911 when the Qing Dynasty crashed.” [Chen 12:48]

————

J. Whites have led the world in economic innovation and development.

Whites have led the world in economic innovations, including in the governmental areas already reviewed. Europe pioneered double-entry bookkeeping, shareholding and the stock exchange, joint liability, and insurance companies [1]. Europe developed a sound currency and monetized tax revenue and salaries [2], while China lacked paper currency (especially, government-issued) and a reliable coinage [3]; its taxes and salaries often being paid in bulky copper, grain, or land [4]. Europe developed a robust money market with low interest rates, in part due to Whites’ high level of trust. European interest rates decreased throughout the medieval period, reaching 10-12% by 1250, 5-6% by 1450, and 3-5% by 1600. Chinese interest rates were much higher at 30-50% during the medieval period and still about 12% in the 18th century [5].

Europe developed a capitalist economy with large industrial corporations and a highly developed labor market [6]. In China, businesses were usually family-owned [7], large commercial transactions usually depended upon personal relationships [8], and most manufacturing took place in households [9]. Already in the medieval period, almost half of northwest Europeans participated in the labor market as wage earners, as against about 1-2% in China [10]. Farmland in Europe was increasingly managed on an industrial scale [11], while Chinese families typically eked out a sustenance on ever diminishing plots [12]. Europe rapidly overtook China in extent of urbanization, about 2-3 times higher by 1800 [13].

1. • See section V-2.C and its sources on Europe’s early development of commercial and banking systems.
• “Perhaps most significant [in 14th century Europe] was the advance toward modern business methods and organization. “Unstinting credit was the great lubricant of the Commercial Revolution,” according to Robert Lopez. The formation of large trading companies dealing extensively in credit transactions gave rise, first in Italy, then elsewhere, to commercial banking, dominated by such swiftly growing family-based institutions as the House of Medici. To serve the more complex business world, new record-keeping devices, notably double-entry bookkeeping, wer invented.” [Gies 94:169]
• “[I]n the Occident economic actions had been rationalized to a higher degree. Some of these rationalizations, in the area of economic life, involved the creation of joint liability, double-entry bookkeeping, the separation of business and personal property, the creation of capital assets in the form of private ownership of the means of production, and the rational organization of free wage labour (Weber 1964: 168–280).” [Duchesne 11a:249]
• “The main [British economic] institutional innovations were the creation of a national bank, the creation of a funded national debt, various improvements in the use of bonds and shares, more sophisticated systems of insurance, changes in the functioning of corporate law (e.g. the creation of a New East India Company) and the development of better ways of gathering and using information with regard to country and economy.” [Vries 15:219]
; “Many [British] institutional innovations in the organisation of economic life such as chartered companies, shareholding, the modern firm, the Bank of England or investing in national debt were at the interface of the private and the public.” [Vries 13:318]

2. • “In Britain taxes were paid in money. The ‘success’ of excises and customs suggests a very monetized economy. Taxes in kind were non-existent, as were forms of corvee or any other type of service. In the rest of Western Europe the picture is no different: monetization had become the rule. In market economies, like those that prevailed in most regions of Western Europe, it was clearly preferable for governments to collect payments in money rather than in kind or services. The amounts involved were so high that basically only silver or gold could be used as payment. That is quite important for Britain’s economy as a whole: central government there was the largest spender, employer and borrower.” [Vries 15:131]
; “In Britain the government not only wanted payments to be in money: it also paid in money. Army and navy personnel increasingly were paid in hard and good money, as was the rule in Western Europe, and payment became more regular with the passing of time. In Britain payments by and to the state always were in silver or gold. Even allowances to the poor were mostly distributed in cash. Payments in kind were almost non-existent.” [204]
; Vries gives details of the sound monetary systems in 18-19th century Europe, particularly Britain, in [243-50].
• White-minted coinage was in fact preferred in China: “[A] foreign currency (i.e. dollars from Latin America) was used in various parts of [China], in particular, those that were involved in overseas trade. Dollars not only functioned as money of account but also as ‘real’ money. They began to replace un-coined sycee silver as a means of payment there from the 1730s and did so increasingly from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. As I pointed out earlier, those dollars often were exchanged with a substantial premium over their silver value whereas sycee silver was exported in order to acquire silver coins. Many Chinese used foreign coins as they found them convenient to carry and exchange and superior in craftsmanship when it came to shape and design to what the Chinese themselves were able to produce. Rulers in China were aware of this preference of their subjects for foreign coins and often tried to counter it by insisting that foreign coins should be melted and turned into sycees and by prohibiting their domestic production. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, chinese officials induced some silversmiths to manufacture dollars that in every respect were identical to the Carolus dollar. Those silversmiths, however, did not manage to obtain a similar uniformity in design and weight because numerous artisans working quite independently of each other produced the coins. Moreover, the silversmiths adulterated the money by adding alloy up to 50 per cent. This then led to the prohibition of any further manufacturing of silver dollars in China.” [Vries 15:261]
; “According to [Horesh], in the early modern era, mining and metallurgy were much better developed in Europe and its colonies. Better coinage was produced there, which in turn was exchanged in China at a premium. What Asians normally wanted was European silver coinage rather than silver. Even supposedly advanced non-European monies like those of the Mughal Empire never played a significant role outside India. He concludes that there were several ways in which ‘European coin production departed from the rest of the world, beginning as early as the thirteenth century.’” [265]

3. • On paper currency and face-value coins being only sporadically used in China because of rampant overprinting and counterfeiting, see section II-6.A and its sources.
• “[E]ven if we were able to exactly determine official, private and counterfeit copper money production, and add that to China’s silver stock, we still would have to conclude that the total amount of (semi-) precious metal available for monetary use in Qing China was small. It will definitely have been substantially lower than 200 grams of silver equivalents, with the value of copper (important as it may have been in daily use) amounting to only a fraction of that of silver. Velocity of money use will certainly have been lower here than in Great Britain.
Paper money was not unknown in China. On the contrary: it had been invented there already under the Sung. The first paper money as we know it (i.e. officially issued exchange notes with no date limitation), were the Exchange Certificates issued by the Jin in 1189. There had been previous experiments. After its liberal, inflationary use under the Ming, it had all but disappeared. At the end of the eighteenth century, the role of various paper moneys in general, not that of paper money issued by government, as a means of payment had (again) become substantial. Paper money issued by government only reappeared in 1853. But as compared to the situation in Britain, its importance still was fairly minor.” [Vries 15:258]
; “Qing China lacked a highly developed monetary system. The total per capita monetary stock for China around 1900 has been estimated at 5.2 dollars or the equivalent at the time of 3.77 ounces or some 140 grams of silver. That is very little as compared to developed countries in Europe or the USA. Moreover, is not only quantities that matter. Let me again quote Wang:
‘It is thus evident that under the bimetallic system of Ch’ing China the volume of money depended heavily on the availability of two kinds of metal, silver and copper, over which the monetary authorities exerted no effective control. It was a poor system that lacked the flexibility of adjusting money supply to market demand for circulating media. In addition to the problem of inflexibility, however, other serious defects also existed in the Ch’ing system. The continuing fluctuations in the rate of exchange between the two kinds of money generated unnecessary risks and uncertainty in business transactions. Still worse was its lack of uniformity. Since silver circulated in bullion without standardization, its value was determined by its weight and fineness. It took a professional moneychanger to ascertain the fineness of the white metal. Added to this complexity, was the absence of standard weight in China. The unit of weight called liang differed from one place to another and from one trade to another. Accordingly, there appeared literally hundreds of units of account (tael) with varying degree of fineness and weight throughout the country. Nor was the cash sector less complicated. The stock of copper cash in circulation consisted of a variety of coins – government authorized, counterfeited and foreign (e.g., those from Japan, annam). Needless to say, the copper content and weight of these various types differed from one another. This was even true among the officially cast coins, depending upon when and where they were stamped. As a consequence, the monetary world was filled with a multitude of exchange rates between silver and cash, different sorts of cash, and the multiplicity of taels, all of which resulted in a chaotic fluctuation of rates. Lastly, both kinds of money, copper cash in particular, were too cumbersome to ship over long distances without modern transport facilities and too inconvenient to settle transactions, which involved a large volume of trade.’
Later on in the same text Wang points out that the problem of inflexibility, complexity, and cumbersomeness inherent in the bimetallic system remained.’ The complexity and inefficiency of this system must have pushed up transactions costs. That all was not well with China’s money, and that people at the time themselves thought so too, clearly shows in the fact that a foreign currency (i.e. dollars from Latin america) was used in various parts of the country…” [260-1]
; “[O]verall, one must conclude that China’s monetary (and financial) problems were not really solved during the nineteenth century and rationalization and modernization of its monetary (and financial) system did not make much headway. We have to realize that, of course, in the meantime in the West the pace of development accelerated, also when it came to paper money. In the early 1800s steel plates and siderography, the process of reproducing steel-engraved designs for printing, had begun to change the world of note printing. Here too China clearly fell behind.” [263]
• “As of the early nineteenth century, China’s monetary and financial system was relatively primitive and inflexible. It was dependent on the maintenance of stable rates of exchange between the state-minted copper coins used in small, daily market transactions, on the one hand, and the unminted silver sycee (nearly pure bullion) used for the settlement of larger accounts. Fiat or paper instruments of credit were underdeveloped, and tended to be held in suspicion by “metalist” state ideologues; moreover, it is doubtful that the public would have trusted its largely unaccountable bureaucratic rulers sufficiently to accept state-issued notes at face value…
Devaluation of the coinage had also been hastened by the lowering of government quality standards and by a wave of counterfeiting, and with coins thus debased it was but natural that there would be a quickening demand for silver and an attendant decrease in the availability of the latter. Then, too, Chinese awareness of uniformity of foreign-minted silver dollars and of the savings in assay fees that accrued to the businessmen who used them allowed foreign silver coinage to circulate in China at an above-face-value premium, in turn drawing purer unminted Chinese sycee out of the country.” [Polachek 92:104-5]

4. • “In short, till the very end of the very long eighteenth century – and even beyond that period – a substantial amount of taxes in China were not paid in silver but in copper, which was quite cumbersome. Even if government insisted on payment in silver ordinary people often paid their taxes in copper to intermediaries or officials who then paid the state, at least partly, in silver. When from the 1820s onwards silver began to leave the country, this became more frequent. A governor in the South of China observed just before the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) that 80 to 90 percent of the people in the country paid their land tax in copper cash. A non-negligible part of taxes, to conclude, continued to be collected in kind (i.e. as grain or fodder). That not only was quite inefficient and thus expensive, it apparently also provided ample opportunities for embezzlement, fraud and corruption. When it comes to the entire economy of Qing China, there can be no doubt whatsoever that this never became entirely silverized – far from it.” [Vries 15:140]
; “Overall, payment in money has some clear advantages over payment in kind. This is especially true in the case of high value ‘currencies’ like silver and gold: much less so in the case of very low value and thus bulky copper currency that was so important in China. Taxes in kind always involve high transportation costs. Transporting the tribute grain from Jiangnan to Beijing, for example, in the nineteenth century made its price double or treble. The entire expenditure had to be borne by the people, not by government. Van Slyke in his book about the Yangtze claims that in the early nineteenth century, the Qing authorities may have been spending 15 million ounces of silver, according to him, nearly a quarter of their total income, for the transport and management of tribute grain. Transport costs were also high when tax income, in the form of silver, actually was transferred to Peking. Government with good reason often tried to avoid that. Moreover, to refer to another advantage of monetary payment, money by definition can be put to different uses more easily than, for example, grain.” [142]
; “In Britain the government not only wanted payments to be in money: it also paid in money… In China too, the biggest expenditure of central government was for the army… Basically it consisted of two parts: the Green Standard Army and units of socalled ‘banner men’. The Green Standard troops received a salary. The ‘active’ banner men received a salary plus support for themselves and their dependents in the form of rice stipends… Paying the banner men a salary was increasingly regarded as too heavy a burden on the treasury. So we see a tendency to ‘pay’ them in land that could be tilled for them by Chinese labourers. The highest-ranking banner men were provided with manors including the necessary labour. Isett estimates that the number of ‘rusticated’ banner men, that is banner men who had tracts of land and increasingly lost even the appearance of active soldiers, grew to be as high as 1 million. Whatever the exact figures, many people ‘working’ for government were not paid in money. Besides, if soldiers were paid a wage, that quite often was partly or even completely in copper coins, often at the official copper to silver exchange rate that need not have much connection at all to the actual ‘exchange’ rate, in particular in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This means wages often effectively were much lower.” [204]

5. • “When it comes to money markets, to conclude, judging by the interest rates, more money was available and they worked much better in Great Britain than in China. Judging by the criterion of how much economic life took place on a market, Great Britain, all-in-all, was therefore a more developed market economy.” [Vries 13:431-2]
• “Similarly, studies of the long-term evolution of the interest rate – as we will see in the next chapter, an important index of the quality of the institutional framework– have concluded that the most important changes had occurred from 1350 to 1450 (when interest rates in many areas of Europe fell from 10–12% to 5–6%).” [Zanden 09a:4]
; “Studies by Clark and Epstein (2000) have demonstrated that in Western Europe interest rates declined significantly during the late medieval period and reached a level of 5 to 6% as early as the fifteenth century. This level of interest is still normal today. These results are consistent with studies that analyse seasonal patterns in grain prices by McCloskey and Nash and Poynder, which also point to a sharp fall in interest rates (and seasonal variation) in the late Medieval period. In addition, Figure 2 provides the results of recent research on interest rates in the Netherlands by Zuijderduijn (2007), showing the typical long-term pattern of the decline of interest rates in this part of Western Europe. The transition to an economy characterized by relatively low interest rates occurred in Western Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But what do we know about interest rates in the rest of Eurasia? Adam Smith was convinced that interest rates in Europe, especially in Great Britain and the Netherlands, were much lower than in China: ‘twelve per cent accordingly is said to be the common interest of money in China’, he stated, whereas he considered 3 to 4.5 per cent to be normal in Great Britain…
[I]t is more relevant to look at China, especially the lower Yangtze delta, where, following Pomeranz and Li relatively advanced institutions were found. James Shih observed that, during the early Ming period in the lower Yangtze delta, ‘customarily, if one borrowed one shi of rice, one had to pay back two shi after the autumn harvest; if one borrowed money (i.e., silver or copper cash), one had to pay 50 percent yearly interest’. In the same period, the fifteenth century, the normal return on loans among merchants in Suzhou was a monthly 2 percent. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Chinese interest rates had clearly come down from these very high levels. It is an interesting reversal from
European patterns, where wealthy merchants were always the source of royal credit, that the great salt merchants of Yangzhou borrowed large sums of money from the Imperial Household Department in Beijing at a ‘rock-bottom’ interest rate of 10%. The best information on eighteenth-century interest rates is in the study by Paul van Dyke on the Canton Trade, analysing the many credit transactions between European and Chinese merchants in this period. Europeans borrowed money from other Europeans (and sometimes from Chinese merchants) at about 10 to 12% annually, whereas interest rates on loans to Chinese merchants were much higher, at 18 to 36% (or 1.5 to 3% per month for short-term loans). We can conclude that Adam Smith was right: interest rates in China were much higher than in Western Europe, even when they probably showed a declining trend in subsequent centuries.” [22-4]
; “[T]he very low interest rates suggest that property rights were well respected, and that a relatively high level of trust was common in Western Europe, which was especially important for the development of labour and capital markets.” [28]
; “Moreover, since (at least) the same level of institutional maturity had already been realized by Western Europe in the century following 1350, this implied that Europe had a head start of at least a few hundred years. Looking at interest rates and capital market efficiency alone, the leading position of Western Europe was completely unchallenged: no part of the world had interest rates as low as 3 to 5%, as were by then usual in 17th and 18th-century Netherlands and England.” [29]
; “What follows from this interpretation of the decline in interest rates from 1350 to 1450 is that the most important institutional changes, which helped bring along the very low levels of interest rates characteristic of post 1450 Western Europe, may already have occurred before 1300. As Figure 2 suggests, the first phase of the decline in interest rates took place during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when rates fell from levels that were ‘normal’ in the world economy at the time (about 30% and more) to the 10–12% that was characteristic for pre-1300 Western Europe.” [31]

6. • “[C]alling a society with hardly any commodification of labour, i.e. hardly any wage-labouring proletarians – and thus also hardly any bourgeois-entrepreneurs – ‘capitalist’, is really stretching the term over its limits. In no publication about China’s economic history during the early modern period have I ever come across an estimate of the number of people who had to fully depend on wage labour that was higher than five per cent of the entire labour force. Pomeranz very recently himself wrote that even in the highly commercialized Yangzi Delta at most fifteen per cent of the rural Chinese lived primarily on wages… In this respect, the difference between Britain and China is simply staggering. Whereas in Qing China there were hardly any real proletarians, in Britain they already quite early on had become the norm in the countryside. Proletarianisation there was really massive. In 1851, seventy-three per cent of those working in England’s countryside were wage labourers. According to Gregory King already in 1688, two-thirds of the rural population was landless. Wage labour was also quite common in cities. To work outside one’s own household in the period between childhood and marriage was very common, almost the rule. Between 1574 and 1821, 13.4 per cent of the population in English communities were servants or apprentices. All this was highly exceptional in Qing China, and quite normal in Western Europe as a whole. All circumstantial evidence we have, moreover, in particular that with regard to the level of migration to towns, suggests that labour mobility overall, but especially that of female labour, was less high in China than in Europe…
China certainly had several markets but it had no capitalist organisation of its production processes. Its predominant productive entities were households that functioned according to a logic quite different from that of firms. Together, those households constituted a quite different economy. Capitalism, as Marx and Weber defined it, as an economic system in which wage labour is the norm, is a European invention: nowhere in the world – as far as we know now – during the eighteenth century was it as highly developed as in Britain. The fact that as a rule household and firm in China were not separated whereas that separation is regarded as a prerequisite for a capitalist mode of production by Marx as well as Weber would be yet another reason not to call Qing China’s economy capitalist, as would be the fact that bookkeeping and monetisation played only a relatively minor role in it, and the fact that, to all intents and purposes, the predictability and ‘rationality’ of China’s juridical system – a necessary precondition for an efficient functioning of capitalism according to Weber – were less than in Britain.” [Vries 13:340-1]
; “When it comes to labour markets, differences are striking. Overall, as far as we know now, there was much more wage labour in the West than anywhere else in the world and nowhere so it seems was wage labour more normal, and expensive, than in Britain. When it comes to money markets, to conclude, judging by the interest rates, more money was available and they worked much better in Great Britain than in China. Judging by the criterion of how much economic life took place on a market, Great Britain, all-in-all, was therefore a more developed market economy…
When it comes to capital goods, it would be hard if not impossible to decide whether Britain’s economy overall was more capital-intensive than China’s but in terms of certain fixed capital goods such as animals, implements and land per farm it clearly was. In that respect it is not irrelevant to point out that whereas in Britain there was an increasing tendency to try and profit from scale effects, such a tendency was lacking in China. Differences in labour markets and money markets were substantial and they too were such that it is easier to imagine industrialisation in Britain than in China…
[C]apitalism, at least in the perspective of just about everyone who ever discussed the concept, includes far more than the buying and selling of consumer goods on a market. Whatever else the concept may mean, it in any case refers to a mode of production and exchange that is characterised by (1) exchange on markets of not just consumer goods but also capital goods, labour and money, (2) a specific organisation of production with a focus on accumulation of profits on those markets and (3) permanent investment of those accumulated profits in capital goods. Using this definition eighteenth-century Britain and the Dutch Republic – and admittedly to a lesser extent most of the rest of Western Europe – were so much more capitalist than the rest of the world that one basically has to conclude they, with all the differences between them, were the only capitalist regions in the world. No part of the world had such a large labour market – and so many medium and large-scale enterprises and firms – and such low interest rates. The comparison with China in these respects provided striking results. In that country, there were hardly any fulltime wage labourers whereas interest rates were very high. The bulk of production took place in households which still had means of subsistence and there was not much large scale, productive (re-)investment. Considering its mode of production, it was far more improbable that China’s economy would take the road to industry than Britain’s.” [431-2]

7. • See section II-2 and its sources.

8. • “Qing China was undoubtedly an outstanding example of what Smith called a ‘commercial society’: a society where to a very large extent goods and services are bought and sold for money. But that is not by itself the same as a capitalist society. In a capitalist society, ideally, prices are the result of economic transactions in which scarcity determines the outcome. What matters is not simply whether people exchange goods and services but whether they do so according to the strict supply-and-demand logic of the market i.e. whether exchange really functions like a mechanism. Capitalist economic transactions are not socially embedded. One may doubt whether this was the case in early modern China. Let me quote an expert on the period of the Ming and Qing: ‘Probably few commercial transactions of any consequence in traditional China were either impersonal or casual. At their heart, as a necessary condition, was the prior establishment of a personal relationship.’ This means that in practice cultivating personal relations, reciprocity and responsibilities towards members of household and clan, and all sorts of extra-economic pressure, would often have been more important in determining what we call economic exchange than supply and demand ‘pure and simple’. Of course, many transactions in Britain were also socially embedded, but there are good reasons to suspect relevant differences here.
Fully aware that this claim will probably be very hard to substantiate, I would still like to assert that in Britain internal markets for capital goods, labour and money functioned somewhat better and more according to strict economic logic than Chinese markets. As already stated, this is countered by the fact the Chinese markets, when they were ‘real’ markets, got closer to complete competition than the British ones. When it comes to the freedom of enterprise, combined with protection of private property, Qing China, especially in times of tension or crisis, definitely was a less safe place for a big, rich entrepreneur than Britain. Reading any textbook about China’s history under the Qing suffices to see that they may not have been despots who were constantly intervening in the economy and confiscating goods, but did have the power to do so and every now and then used it. But overall it definitely was possible to become very rich in Qing China. We know of eighteenth-century salt merchants who had a fortune of over ten million taels. Exaction, confiscation and all kinds of corruption, by the way, were more of a problem in times government was weak than in times it was strong.” [Vries 03:29-30]
• On the prevelance of nepotism among Chinese, see section II-7.C and its sources. On the Chinese expectation of reciprocity for any services rendered, including business favors, see section II-5.A and its sources. On the necessity of giving gifts/bribes for official permission to conduct various business in China, see section II-8.E and its sources.

9. • “In China the household continued to be by far the most important unit of production… Producing for subsistence was more common in China as there were more peasants who shied away from producing only for a market. Cash crops of course were grown, but their importance continued to be relatively small… When it comes to factor markets, China’s labour market was definitely less developed and less important than that of Britain as a much smaller number of people were working outside their home and outside any family setting.” [Vries 10:15-6]
; “What in a comparative perspective is striking about the Chinese economy during the Qing dynasty is the predominance of small-scale producers – and consumers – who worked at home as members of a household and who owned at least some means of production, especially land, for their own subsistence…
Rural families had a strong tendency to perform all production stages themselves, including growing cotton, and then sell the cotton textiles they did not need themselves. In cases where the production of cotton or of other textiles was spread over various producers, as a rule, different self-employed entrepreneurs were in control of different stages of the process of production. They bought the raw materials or semi-manufactures themselves, did their specific bit of production, and sold them on, while mostly, at least in the countryside, having their own means of subsistence in the form of a plot of land.” [Vries 03:28]
; “This brings us to the situation in manufacturing. Here too, in comparison to Britain, production was less concentrated and less centralised. In Qing China there was not even much putting out with production co-ordinated by one specific person. Most producers worked at home, as small independent producers. When, as was often the case, they also had other means to provide for subsistence, they could work for extremely low remuneration. Here too the logic of the family economy applied. There was less accumulation of physical capital. Most people simply lacked the money to buy capital goods like big implements or machines and often did not want to buy them as they could not be fitted in the way household members produced at home. Implements and machines had to adapt to the family instead of the other way around. Where earnings were low and the level of self-sufficiency high that implied a relatively low level of involvement in the market.” [33]
• “China certainly had several markets but it had no capitalist organisation of its production processes. Its predominant productive entities were households that functioned according to a logic quite different from that of firms. Together, those households constituted a quite different economy [than European capitalism].” [Vries 13:341]

10. • “The literature on the development of the labour market in Northwest Europe suggests however that as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth century a large part of the population – ranging from one-quarter to one-half, and in some cases even more – was active in the labour market at least for part of the year. Over the life cycle, the extent of the labour market participation may even have been larger than that; in their teens and (early) twenties much more than half the population engaged in wage labour (or as servants or apprentices), and wage employment was a normal aspect of the life cycle for almost everyone living in either the countryside or the towns of England and the Low Countries. Chapter 4 discusses this feature of the labour market of the North Sea region in more detail, linking it to the demographic pattern in this part of Western Europe, which was characterized by small nuclear families. We have no similar studies for early modern China, India, Japan, or Indonesia, but the general impression that emerges from the relevant literature is that wage labour was much less common there. The only estimate in the literature is that in late Ming (sixteenth century) China, perhaps 1% of the rural population engaged in wage labour – a figure that is very different from the 30 to 60% estimated for England and the Netherlands.” [Zanden 09a:28]
; “A number of studies have documented the remarkable depth of the labour market in late medieval Western Europe, although there is still discussion about the evolution of size. In the Low Countries the trend was clearly upward, and in 16th century Holland and the Guelders River area up to 60% of the working population was dependent on wage labour. In England the estimates range from 25% to more than 50% of the population being (partially) active on the labour market; the most recent estimates by Chris Dyer suggest stability between ca. 1300 and 1520, at an extremely high level of about 50% – probably somewhat more than this in the most commercialized eastern counties, and less in the West. Or as Poos argues in her study of Essex (one of the eastern counties): in the North Sea region being a wage labourer was a normal part of the life cycle of a very large part of the population. These extremely high levels of wage labour can be compared with an estimate for Ming China, where perhaps 1 to 2 percent of the population was a wage earner. ” [117]
• See the [Vries 13:340-1] citation, above; and the [Vries 10:15] citation, below.

11. • “At the end of the eighteenth century at least 80 per cent of the Chinese population still worked in agriculture, almost without exception on small tracts of land, which they owned or leased. Reading about Britain at the beginning of its industrialisation, in the second half of the eighteenth century, we are confronted with a completely different picture. It is claimed that in 1750 only some 40 to 45 per cent of England’s labouring population still was agricultural. According to what must of course be a very rough ‘overall’ estimation, per capita these British ‘agriculturists’ had at least four times as much agricultural land, i.e. arable including pasture and meadows, at their disposal than their counterparts in China. At the end of the eighteenth century about half the farmland was in the hands of landowners who owned more than 400 hectares. Big farms were all run with wage labourers. This was the time when the famous three-tiered system of British agriculture: landlord, big tenant, agricultural labourer was fully implemented. Economies of scale of various kinds were obvious.” [Vries 03:31-2]
; “China’s agriculture by and large was much more land- and labour intensive than that of Britain. Whereas in Britain most agricultural production took place on large farms, in China farms almost without exception were very small. Let me just give one example: in around 1800, an average farm in Southern Britain was about 150 acres; in the North that was about 100 acres. In rice-growing regions in China it would be roughly some 5 acres. In 1750, the amount of agricultural land in Britain per agriculturist was about forty-five times as big as in China’s Lower Yangzi region. In China’s energy system, the relative importance of human labour was much bigger than it was in Western Europe, and that of fuels much smaller. In absolute terms the importance of animals for the economy of Western Europe, and in particular Britain, was striking and much bigger than it was in China. Production in China, in particular in agriculture, looks less capital-intensive in terms of implements and animals than in Britain, in particular in rice-growing regions where, in Francesca Bray’s terms, it was very ‘skill-oriented’.
In China the household continued to be by far the most important unit of production. In Britain waged labour became increasingly important. Whereas the percentage of proletarians in China’s total labour force was negligible and certainly amounted to no more than five percent, waged labour in Britain was becoming the rule rather than the exception. In the countryside it was already more than fifty percent at the end of the seventeenth century and about three-quarters around 1850.” [Vries 10:15]
; “Britain not only had much more non-human energy per capita. It also had much more land per agriculturalist. Farms on average were much bigger there and had far more animals and more implements. British farms took advantage of positive scale effect and used far more ‘outside’ labour that worked for wages. Reasons abounded to try to substitute labour with capital goods. What is striking is not only that such clear differences existed between Britain and China, but that they tended to increase over time on top of that. In Britain, the amount of land, animals and capital goods per agriculturalist tended to increase and farms tended to become bigger, in China exactly the opposite happened… Considering all the characteristics we associate with industrialisation, – first and foremost high energy use, the use of scale effects, and wage labour – chances clearly were far greater that it would occur first in Britain. ” [Vries 13:202-3]

12. • See the [Vries 10:15] citation, above.
; “Landlords in China were not managers of large farms but ‘tenurial landlords’, i.e. landowners who rented out their land in small parcels to peasants. One finds this overwhelming predominance of small peasant cultivators in China as compared to Britain, not only in rice-growing regions, where according to Bray it would be logical, but also in places where other grains and, even more surprisingly, products like tea, sugar, tobacco, cotton or silk were grown. For all these crops, one never finds any reference to plantation-like cultivation, either inside or outside China Proper.” [Vries 10:15]
; “What in a comparative perspective is striking about the Chinese economy during the Qing dynasty is the predominance of small-scale producers – and consumers – who worked at home as members of a household and who owned at least some means of production, especially land, for their own subsistence. In the farming sector there were very few large farms. By far the greatest part of agricultural land consisted of millions of small family farms. Those often consisted of extremely fragmented tiny plots. In Northern China the small peasant-owner was predominant. In the South, where plots were even smaller, the small peasant-tenant was much more common. For sure, there were many individuals, families, lineages or clans, especially in the South of China, who owned large plots of land. But the actual exploitation of the land nearly always took place in small plots. There was no primogeniture, so that when the head of the family died plots were often split up. Furthermore, government tended, from time to time, to split large farms and help small farmers set up their own small enterprise.” [Vries 03:28]
; “At the end of the eighteenth century at least 80 per cent of the Chinese population still worked in agriculture, almost without exception on small tracts of land, which they owned or leased.” [31]
• “In an important series of publications, the historian Philip Huang has applied the term “involution” to characterize the uniqueness of late Imperial China’s socio-economic trajectory, which followed a course of “output growth without productivity development”. That is to say, although forms of economic growth did take place — a significant expansion in rural handicraft production, widening commercial exchanges, and an overall increase in agricultural yields — the social specificities and articulations of these forms were all conditioned by the constraints brought on by a steadily deteriorating land-population ratio. As plot-holdings declined in size through the combined workings of partible male inheritance and a surge in population, peasant families found it increasingly difficult to secure a livelihood through agricultural production. By the close of the eighteenth century, average farm size in the Yangzi delta had fallen to a mere 1.25 acres (down from the 4 to 5 acre range of earlier periods) — this at a time when England’s farms were swelling to averages beyond 100 acres, through enclosures and consolidations. A similar trend of excessive parcellization has been documented for the North China macro-region, where average holdings had declined to 2.5 acres, farms of over 20 acres were increasingly rare, and where the landless now encompassed more than a quarter of all rural households. The mounting subsistence pressures that attended this severe compression in holdings necessitated a compensatory expansion in what had formerly been a subsidiary seasonal activity: domestic textile production, the marketable demand for which grew apace with a rising population. But contrary to revisionist views that the growth in silk and cotton handicrafts signaled a modernizing advance, an enrichment that increased life expectancy and sustained higher consumption levels, most scholars view this development as a preservation strategy, a desperate struggle by land-hungry peasants to fend off destitution through a relentless intensification of family labour.” [Bryant 06:428-9]

13. • “[I]n Europe, in 1000 AD, the proportion of the population living in towns with more than 10.000 inhabitants was next to zero (there were only 4 towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants), whereas in China it was 3%. However, by 1800, the West European urban ratio had increased to 10.6%, whereas the Chinese ratio, despite massive population increases, was only slightly higher at 3.8%. In Britain it was over 20%.” [Duchesne 11a:152]
• “[U]rbanisation in Qing China declined to such an extent that in 1820 not even 4 percent of the population lived in towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants. In Britain that was more than 25 per cent. Even in the highly developed region of the Lower Yangzi in 1843 only 7.4 per cent of the population was living in towns with more than 2,000 inhabitants.” [Vries 03:33]

————

K. Whites have long had superior industry, trade, wages, and GDP to China.

White business and industry dominated international trade by the 18th century, and reaped the benefits [1]. Due to its technological prowess, Europe has long had higher labor productivity and real wages than China [2], with a comparative advantage in ‘high-tech’, capital-intensive products since the late medieval period [3]. Whites’ superior industry has enabled them to develop and/or purchase raw materials overseas, transport them home, create value-added products, and then finally sell them on the world market at lower prices than competitors [4]. Whites controlled international trade and global bullion/specie flows, making arbitrage profits (e.g. with silver/gold) and purchasing anything desired at lowest prices to supply their business and industry [5]. China lacked capitalist organization of its production processes, its manufacturing largely restricted to households [6]. From the mid-18th century, China exported to Europe mostly raw or semi-manufactured materials, such as tea and raw silk [7]. Europe has had higher GDP per capita than China since about 1500, and this gap grew large by the mid-18th century, even prior to the Industrial Revolution [8]. Europe’s governments collected far more in taxes [9]. Even when White technology and capital were transferred across the globe in the late 19th century, Whites retained a competitive edge due to higher labor productivity [10].

1. • “The intercontinental trade of the main Western European traders simply was much bigger than that of China, much more money was involved in it, many more ships and a much higher total tonnage. Jan de Vries calculated that the combined trade of Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic in the Atlantic in the 1770s was about three times as big as their trade with Asia. This is at a time when their trade with Asia was bigger than even before. Adding the trade of Spain and Portugal will surely not change this figure to the advantage of Asia. In Asia, China, moreover, was but one of trading partners for the West, and not the biggest one.” [Vries 06:25]
; “At least in Canton [where most European-Chinese trade occurred], Western traders profited more than Hong merchants and they made their profits by trading and selling to Westerners or other non-Chinese. Most of the Hong merchants went broke – to a large extent, because of debt to Westerners and extortion by their government. But China’s government also did not profit much. If we compare total tax customs incomes of China and Britain, the latter simply earned much more. To those who say that China’s government acted rational in setting up its Canton System, I can only say that it could have done much better. Let me give some figures again just to see things more in perspective… [details]… This means that with a population of one-thirtieth of that of China, Britain’s customs acquired some eighteen times as much tax money as its Chinese counterpart.” [26-7]

2. • “Entrepreneurs in England and Holland could only pay these [high] wages because labour productivity was much higher around the shores of the North Sea than elsewhere; had that not been the case, they would have lost their competitive position vis-à-vis entrepreneurs in the rest of Europe, and their market share in international trade would have contracted. In reality, it was the high-wage countries that expanded relative to the rest of Western Europe. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that regional patterns in nominal (silver) wages found in Western Europe to a large extent reflect the geography of labour productivity.
If the Yangtze Delta played a similar role in Chinese economic development, a similar lead in nominal wage levels should be expected. The sources collected by a team of five scholars, which were partially presented in Chapter 5 where the skill premium in eighteenth-century China was discussed, do not point in that direction. The best survey of wage levels in the construction industry, the Wuliao jiazhi zeli of 1769, shows large regional differences, wages in the south being generally lower than in the north (in Zhili, Manchuria, and Inner Mongolia) (see Map 1). The lowest wages were to be found in the south – in Fujian and Taiwan, and in Henan, where the regulations in a few districts set the lowest wages of .020 tael for unskilled and .030 tael for skilled labourers. In the South average wages for unskilled workers were about .040 for unskilled labourers and somewhat more (.050 to .060) for craftsmen. The provinces in the Yangtze Delta, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, which were supposed to have been the most productive parts of the Empire, do not stand out for their wage levels; wages there were representative of the Southern part of the Empire as a whole…
The pattern found in China is therefore exactly the opposite of the regional structure for wages in Western Europe, where wages were low in the periphery and high in the core. In Western Europe a high-wage economy developed in the core region of economic development, which seems not to have been the case for China…
A comparison with similar estimates for Europe shows that in all parts of China real wages measured in this way were relatively low. European levels of real wages generally varied from about 6 to about 10 litres (rye or wheat) per day; in a few regions, such as in Poland, where rye prices were very low, and in the North Sea region, where nominal wages were relatively high, much higher levels of wheat/rye wages were usual during the early modern period. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, when grain prices were high, comparable “rye” or “wheat” wages were 8.7 litres in Stockholm, 8.5 litres in Danzig, 5.9 litres in Augsburg, 9.9 litres in Holland and Paris, 8.1 litres in Oxford, and 6.0 litres in Milan, values which are all higher than for the various regions of China.” [Zanden 09a:278-82]
• “An alternative approach to measuring living standards [than grain-wages] is shown by Broadberry and Gupta (2005a), who do not envisage that the amount of grain a wage could buy as an adequate measure of the general living standard. For example, within Europe during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries the wages of both skilled and unskilled workers in Poland could buy the greatest amount of grain. So measured Southern England was the most destitute area in Europe in the seventeenth century, from Krakow and Vienna in the east, Florence and Valencia in the south. If, instead, the purchasing power is measured with a basket of consumption goods, the map is turned with the living standards rising towards the Northwest of Europe, with Antwerp, Amsterdam and London in the top and pulling ahead over the centuries after 1500.
A similar pattern is derived when wages are measured according to their silver content. Silver wages in Europe did not rise the most in Spain or Portugal, the major ports for the inflow of American bullion, but in the more developed countries in Northwestern Europe. This reflects the higher level of productivity that can also be seen in the real wage as measured with the basket of consumption goods. For China, a comparable basket of consumption goods is so far not constructed and hence cannot be used for the deflation of wages. Broadberry and Gupta (2005a, 2005b) suggest, however, that the silver wage can be used for the same purpose… So measured, and if the London silver wage is set at 100 in both periods, the Yangzi agricultural wage was 39 in Late Ming and had decreased to 15 in Mid Qing. These differences are significantly greater than those that existed within Western Europe. On the basis of this evidence Broadberry and Gupta (2005a, 2005b) suggest that China, as also India, in the Early Modern period was more on level with Eastern and Southern Europe over the centuries up to the Industrial Revolution just as these regions lagged further behind Northwestern Europe.” [Gunnarsson 08:7-8]
• “Recent studies lend little support to the revisionists’ claim and reveal that living standards in the advanced parts of China, Japan and India seem to be closer to the laggings parts of Europe – namely, southern and Central Europe – rather than North-western Europe as claimed by the revisionists. The most acceptable indicator of living standards is money and real wages. We compare living standards using data on silver wage and grain wage from Europe and Asia as well present additional information on wage. Broadberry and Gupta (2006) find that in terms of wages India and China look much more like the backward parts of Europe rather than like the most developed parts of Europe right from the 18th century. With high grain wages reflecting an abundance of grain and low silver wages reflecting low levels of overall development.” [Gupta 10:3-4]
; “[T]the Yangzi Delta is reputed to have the most advanced economy of any Chinese province, but the real wage there was not noticeably higher than the real wage in Beijing or Canton. Overall, the Chinese cities were in a tie for last place with the Italian cities, which had the lowest standard of living in Europe. And they were far behind that in London or Amsterdam – about 30-40% of that of earning levels there in terms of purchasing power measured by our reconstructed subsistence basket during the 18-19th centuries. This makes any optimistic assessment of China’s performance is difficult. In fact, if you include the findings of other studies, it reveals that the history of living standards in Japan, India, and Canton, or Turkey in the 18th century were quite similar to major urban centers in China. So this may point to a living standard close to subsistence for unskilled laborers in much of the non-industrializing world in the eighteenth century.” [12]
• “Contrary to the claims of Pomeranz, Parthasarathi and other ‘world historians’, the prosperous parts of Asia between 1500 and 1800 look similar to the stagnating southern, central and eastern parts of Europe rather than the developing northwestern parts. In the advanced parts of India and China, grain wages were comparable to those in northwestern Europe, but silver wages, which conferred purchasing power over tradable goods and services, were substantially lower. The high silver wages of northwestern Europe were not simply a monetary phenomenon, but reflected high productivity in the tradable sector. The ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and Asia was already well underway before 1800.” [Broadberry 05:Abstract]
; “The key results of the Balassa-Samuelson approach to price level differences can be shown most simply in a two-country Ricardian model, with constant returns to the single factor of production, labour. Applying the model to the early modern international economy, we assume that grain is non-tradable internationally, reflecting the fact that grain was bulky and costly to transport. Thus grain prices were not equalised between Europe and Asia. On the other hand, commodities such as cloth and bullion were widely traded internationally, with arbitrage tending to equalise prices between countries. If the relative prices of all tradable goods are the same in both countries, we can aggregate and consider them to be a single good, with units being chosen so that the price of one unit of each tradable good is the same.
Thus there is one international price for the tradable commodity. Furthermore, since labour is the only factor of production, the silver wage rate in both countries must equal revenue labour product in the tradable sector, that is, labour productivity multiplied by the price of the tradable good. Thus the country with higher real labour productivity in the tradable sector has the higher silver wage, because the price is the same in the two countries. Finally, since wages are equalised between sectors within each economy, this will also be the wage in the non-tradable sector. Again, since labour is the only factor of production, the price of the non tradable good must equal the silver wage rate divided by labour productivity in the non-tradable sector. Hence the price of the non-tradable commodity depends negatively on labour productivity in the non-tradable sector and positively on labour productivity in the tradable sector (since this makes for higher silver wages)…
Countries in northwestern Europe had high silver wages, while Asia had low silver wages. These lower silver wages reflected lower productivity in the tradable sector. Asian countries produced cheaper grain as a result of lower silver wages, so that grain wages were almost as high as in northwestern Europe. This means that we cannot infer equal levels of economic development in parts of Asia and Europe from observations based on grain wages alone. When silver wages indicate a much higher command of European wages over traded goods, and levels of urbanisation suggest higher levels of production of non-agricultural goods, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that north western Europe was more developed and living standards were higher. ..
This paper has attempted a quantitative assessment of the recent claims of Pomeranz (2000) and other “world historians”, that the “Great Divergence” between Europe and Asia occurred only after 1800. An examination of data on wages and prices on the two continents suggests that the prosperous parts of Asia between 1500 and 1800 look similar to the stagnating southern, central and eastern parts of Europe rather than the developing northwestern parts. In India and China, grain wages were comparable to those in northwestern Europe, but silver wages were substantially lower. This is exactly the pattern observed in the less developed parts of Europe…
Generalising this beyond the British experience, a key feature of the pattern of development in northwestern Europe was a structural shift out of agriculture, accompanied by an extensive urbanisation. The existence of sufficient grain to feed the population at a reasonable standard of living in southern, central and eastern Europe was the result of a high share of the economy’s resources being devoted to agriculture, and this shows up in relatively low levels of urbanisation. Similarly, in Asia, the high grain wages of the most prosperous parts of India and China can be attributed to the high share of agriculture in economic activity, combined with the natural advantage of the high yield of rice relative to wheat. This is a long way from the development of a large, specialised, high value added structure above the subsistence agrarian system that characterised northwest European countries such as Britain and the Netherlands. The “Great Divergence” between Europe and Asia, in other words, was already well underway before 1800.” [28-32]

3. • “The decline of interest rates in late medieval Europe was part of a much broader process: recent work by a team of scholars led by Peter Lindert focusing on the study of relative prices and wages in the very long run has produced new ideas about the distinct features of Western Europe’s economies. This team demonstrated that ‘Northwest Europe led in the development of non-agricultural productivity concentrated in the capital-goods and knowledge-intensive sectors’, and had, in fact, an early comparative advantage in ‘high-tech’ products, which required large amounts of human and physical capital. This comparative advantage in high-tech and highly skilled work had important long-term consequences. For example, it meant enlarged capabilities for producing guns and ships and other weaponry, and in this way formed the basis of the ‘military revolution’ of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which made it possible to conquer and rule increasingly large parts of the globe. It made possible the rapid adoption of a new ‘high-tech’ mode of producing and disseminating information: the printing press, ‘invented’ by Gutenberg in the 1450s, which laid the basis for a rapidly growing industry that was to transform the ‘knowledge economy’ of Western Europe.
The development of labour-saving technologies and the increase in human-capital formation made possible the emergence of a high-wage economy in the North Sea region in the early modern period. Recent research has uncovered that real wages in England and Holland in the early modern period were substantially higher than in the rest of the continent, and higher than in the most developed parts of China and Japan.” [Zanden 08:22-3]
; “In large areas of Eurasia, the skill premium [a measure of the scarcity of skilled labor] was much higher than in Western Europe; only in south China and (probably) in Japan do we find a skill premium comparable to Western Europe. Similarly, book production was only significant in China and Japan, but grew more slowly and was smaller on a per capita basis there than in Europe. What is known about levels of literacy seems to confirm this picture: the estimates for nineteenth-century Japan and Ming China compare well with the estimates for (for example) eighteenth-century France (and perhaps Europe as a whole), but they are still lower than those in the Low Countries and England. It is not clear whether parts of China – such as the Yangtze Delta – had levels of literacy significantly higher than the rest of the country. The estimates of book consumption suggest, however, that the reading public in Europe was growing much more rapidly than in China, signifying that trends in the two parts of Eurasia were different… In Western Europe, China, and Japan, relatively efficient institutions produced relatively high levels of human capital formation. But in Western Europe these efficient institutions had their origins in the late Middle Ages, as was again manifest in our analysis of the skill premium, which had already declined from 1350 to 1450, whereas similar signs of institutional maturity and high levels of human capital formation only appeared in China and Japan in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In other words, in both respects Western Europe had a head start of 300 to 400 years on its closest rivals.
Finally, there were strong links between these measures of human capital formation and knowledge accumulation and economic growth. Papers by Davin Chor (2005) and Baten and Van Zanden (2008) found, respectively, that skill premiums were negatively related to real wages, and book consumption was positively linked to income growth. Moreover, both measures were able to predict the Great Divergence fairly accurately. Trends in human capital formation and knowledge accumulation that are closely linked to the efficiency of the underlying institutional framework can thus explain why Western Europe – and in particular the North Sea area – took an early lead in the early modern period, while other parts of the world economy were much less dynamic.” [Zanden 09a:201-2]

4. • “‘It is true, of course, that by 1800 cotton grown in the New World was a major input into the British cotton industry, one of the vanguards of British industrialization. However, it was not raw cotton that made the industry but innovations in British machinery and the harnessing of waterpower and steam power that made it worthwhile for Britain to import cotton, spin it, and weave it into fabrics. If not for that machinery, it would have made no sense to import raw cotton to England, as the cost of the finished product would have been far greater than that of cotton textiles produced by raw cotton-producing countries such as India and China. The new British machinery made it profitable to import raw cotton, whether from India, Egypt, Turkey or the Americas.’
What goes for cotton mutatis mutandis of course also goes for other land-intensive products Britain imported. Jan de Vries thinks likewise and claims that (a) Britain never imported much raw cotton from its colonies and (b) that the rise of cotton production in the United States was induced by Britain’s industry. He moreover adds, quite correctly, that Britain had access there to cotton on the same terms as any other country. So why, then, did other countries not profit from that capability and start a cotton-revolution of their own? In Mokyr’s view, the increased import of raw cotton was undoubtedly “an effect, not a cause, of the developments in cotton technology”. Improvements in that technology were impressive. Raw cotton prices from 1784 to 1830 fell from 2 shillings to 0.645 pence, while the price of cotton yarn over the same period fell from 10.9 to 1.2 shillings. The trend in raw cotton prices accounted for just 14% of the fall in the price of cotton yarn. Whereas, according to Robert Allen, the real costs of raw cotton remained almost identical over the entire period from 1760 to 1836, the real price of spinning one pound of cotton thread declined from seven pennies to 0.34 pennies. The price of cotton textiles declined so much that only the enormous increase in demand, also stimulated by lower tariffs and transport costs, prevented the cotton revolution from being aborted…
As a rule, innovation created its own markets. It cheapened goods and consumption (domestic and foreign) grew in response. Indeed, as Mokyr writes: “…ingenuity and innovativeness… drove exports and trade, not the other way around.” The terms of trade of Britain’s exports, which almost entirely consisted in manufactured goods, fell, i.e. they became relatively cheaper as compared to Britain’s imports that increasingly consisted in food, raw materials and semi-manufactured products. In that way, industry led and trade followed, or to put it more poetically: “Trade functioned as the handmaiden of industry.” Britain, from quite early on, had a major comparative advantage in manufacturing. At least from the 1780s, manufactured goods overwhelmingly dominated exports. It was simply good economic sense to import an increasing amount of food and raw materials and focus on what the country did best. Britain did what all advanced economies tend to do: specialise in producing products with high added value and import the ingredients one needs to produce them.” [Vries 13:299-300]
; “Obviously, a country that wants to specialise in the production of manufactured goods and services, as a rule, will (have to) import food and raw materials. That, however, is not a free lunch: those imports have to be paid for. Britain, like all industrial nations in the West, did so by exporting manufactured goods. Not just to its peripheries but all over the globe. It could do so because its manufacturing was efficient and its products became ever cheaper, that is because it had a modern industrialising economy. What is more, it was the countries in the West themselves that financed most of the production of the goods they imported from ‘their’ ghost acreage as well as most of their transportation. Very often, that production and in particular that transportation could only be undertaken in a cost-effective manner because modern Western technology was used.” [301-2]
• “The expansion in the demand for colonial staples in Europe and for European manufactures in the Americas was largely a function of falling transportation costs brought on by changes in ship design as well as improvements in the handling, sorting, and warehousing of goods. In other words, it was the internal dynamism of the British economy that made the acquisition and use of colonial resources possible and profitable in the first instance.” [Duchesne 11a:145]

5. • “[T]he fact that gold was often exported from China, whereas silver was massively imported, is not unrelated to the fact that during most of the early modern period, although no longer after the 1770s, silver was cheaper relative to gold in Europe than it was in China. The difference in the silver to gold ratios presented the Europeans with an opportunity to engage in profitable forms of ‘arbitrage’. This means that they took silver to China and exchanged it for gold, which in terms of silver was much cheaper there. They then took this cheaply acquired gold to Europe where they exchanged it for much more silver than it would have bought them in China. This cheap silver was then taken to China, where it could buy them more gold than at home, and so on.” [Vries 15:251]
; “In the early modern era, moreover, Europeans acquired ‘mastery of global bullion and specie flows’. They were the ones who knew global supply and demand and who profited from arbitrage… He sees the ‘European exchange of Latin American silver for Chinese commodities like silk and tea as essentially a marker of Chinese comparative weakness in the late imperial era rather than as a marker of strength’…” [265]
; “(British) East India Company and British private traders, who did the actual trading, had a surplus in their exchanges with China. From the 1820s onwards, China bought far more from British traders (whether they acted as employees of the company or as ‘private traders’) than it sold to them. Western traders, very prominently among them traders from Britain, carried large amounts of goods from other countries in their ships to China, to begin with cotton and later on of course opium, both from India, and they earned lots of money in doing so. They also earned by selling goods they had bought in China at home or in other countries. In multilateral terms and looked at from the perspective of the East India Company or private traders, the China trade had always been quite profitable, which of course need not surprise anyone: why else would they have continued trading?” [368]
; “The British could have done without any of
China’s export products. They had done so for ages. There can only be one answer to the question why British and other traders persisted in going to China to exchange silver, and some commodities, for Chinese goods: they did so because, one way or another, that was a good bargain for them and, as I will show in the case of tea, not just for them but also for many of their compatriots and consumers all over the world. The reason that it was lucrative for British traders, apart from arbitrage profits made in exchanging silver and gold, must have been that in the end consumers somewhere in the world were willing and able to pay so much for their Asian products that it was worthwhile to go there and buy them.
I will not again discuss the arbitrage profits made in exchanging silver for gold that made it a very lucrative and ‘rational’ strategy for Western traders to export silver to China – even though in many concrete instances their existence forces one to see the silver exports and ‘deficits’ of Westerners in a completely different light. Let me instead illustrate my point with reference to tea. The first thing that strikes in a comparison of the amounts of money that Chinese producers and traders received for ‘their’ tea with the amounts paid for it by consumers in Britain, or in the countries where the British shipped it, is that the differences were so big. In brief, most of the ‘added value’ was ‘added’ (i.e. earned) by people who were not Chinese. A very substantial part of the consumer price was pocketed by British merchants who brought the tea to Britain and sold it there or – which, considering the importance of re-exports of tea, is not entirely irrelevant – some place else. [Reviews details of the huge profits made by European businessmen.]” [373-4+]
; “In the end the ones who profited most from Sino-Western trade, even during the days of persistent silver exports from the West to China, were Western traders, Western governments, who taxed the imported goods, and Western consumers, who purchased the luxuries they wanted to purchase. Comparatively speaking, China’s economy and government gained little. To regard people who, like the British, could afford to buy their favourite drink at the other side of the globe, notwithstanding enormous markups – mainly due to the activities of British middlemen and the British Excise – as desperate and poor, as various defenders of the silver-sink thesis do, of course is ludicrous. The same of course applies to imports of products like spices, textiles or coffee from Asia.” [380]

6. • See the [Vries 13:340-1,431-2] citations in the previous section (J), in which China’s simpler economy is contrasted with Western Europe’s capitalist economy.
• See the previous section (J) and its sources on how most Chinese manufacturing was done in households.

7. • “The claim that China was a highly advanced economy at the time – in the eighteenth century – “flooding [sic!- Vries] the world market with Chinese manufactures” simply cannot be upheld. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, the export had already acquired ‘peripheral’ traits; that is before industry took off in Britain and before the country became politically ‘colonised’. Exports of porcelains had diminished substantially because of European import substitution, as Europeans started to produce their own porcelains or substitutes. The same goes for silk textiles. Their export became less important. Exports of silk increasingly referred to raw silk instead of textiles. China’s cotton fabrics, the so-called nankeens, in the end could not compete with those made in Britain. China had already become an exporter of tea, by far the bulk of its exports, other semi-manufactured goods and raw materials, decades before the First Opium War.” [Vries 13:403]
; “[P]roponents of the silver-sink thesis systematically give a wrong characterization of the goods that were exchanged between China and the West. They persistently refer to huge amounts of manufactured goods that would have been involved and regard their (presumed) predominance in China’s exports as proof of China’s superior productive capacities. An analysis of China’s trade from the 1750s onwards, however, shows that the role of various manufactures in its exports – that was not big anyhow – diminished quite quickly. It did so to such an extent that at end of the eighteenth century it had become almost non-existent… From 1709 onwards, however, the secret of [porcelain’s] production was unravelled and after a couple of decades Europe already made substantial amounts of it. In the second half of the eighteenth century, it was surpassed as a commodity of mass consumption by European substitutes. Imports from China, that in terms of money never had amounted to very much anyhow, began to trickle…
[T]he silk that was exported by China increasingly was raw silk, not silk clothing. a closer look at China’s exports to the West in the late eighteenth century shows that, overall, exports of silk increased over the eighteenth century. Compared to total domestic production they never became massive. The exports of silken fabrics, however, actually declined…” [Vries 15:369]
; “Exports to Western countries, here including Russia and the United States – from the late eighteenth century onwards a very important but often overlooked trade partner for China – during the second half of the eighteenth century increasingly, and in the case of Britain even almost exclusively, began to consist of tea, the other main items being raw silk, rhubarb, various metals and drugs.” [370]
; “Tea literally was a ‘manu-factured’ product (i.e. a hand-made product), the production of which required extensive expertise and experience but in which ‘advanced technology’, in the form of complex implements or ‘machines’ of any kind, played no role. China’s excellent export position was not so much caused by the sophistication of its productive technology – although tea-growing and -producing is anything but easy – as by the fact that at the time China had all but a monopoly on growing tea plants.” [371]
; “China had already become an exporter of tea, semi-manufactured goods and raw materials decades before the First Opium War. Its downgrading from an industrial producer to a producer of primary goods had been almost entirely completed before that war and before Britain had become a major exporter of industrial products. In strictly economical terms, China had already become peripheral before the country suffered from formal imperialism by Western powers, Russia and Japan – at least, as far as it was integrated in a global division of labour, which to an overwhelming extent it was not.” [372]
; “The products that China exported in the second half of the eighteenth century when trade between China and Britain took off, either increasingly were not real manufactured goods (e.g. gold and other metals, raw silk and drugs) or, in the case of tea (which by the end of that century had become by far the most important export commodity), a very peculiar kind of manufactured good that the British simply could not produce as it did not grow in their country, nor in any other country they had contacts with except China.” [Vries 10:7]
• “While spices and tea always remained Asian specialties (although by the nineteenth century, tea produced outside China came to dominate the market), Caribbean coffee and sugar and European silk, porcelain, and, most famously, cotton textiles all arose to reduce or eliminate the competing Asian product from European markets. If Asia was vastly superior to Europe in the production of manufactures (a claim often made on the evidence of the inability of Europeans to find Asian markets for their products), why did the European demand for goods that had originally come from Asia time and again come to be satisfied by imitations and substitutes from elsewhere?” [De Vries 10:20]

8. • “Chinese GDP per capita fluctuated at a high level during the Northern Song and Ming dynasties before trending downwards during the Qing dynasty. China led the world in living standards during the Northern Song dynasty, but had fallen behind Italy by 1300. At this stage, it is possible that parts of China were still on a par with the richest parts of Europe, but by 1750 the gap was too large to be bridged by regional variation within China and the Great Divergence had already begun before the Industrial Revolution.” [Broadberry 17:Abstract]
; “1. Comparing the Northern Song, Ming and Qing dynasties.
This section sheds light on the long term evolution of the Chinese economy between 980 and 1840 by comparing the growth rate of GDP and the level of GDP per capita during the three dynasties for which data are available. Although China’s territory expanded between the Northern Song and Ming dynasties, and expanded further between the Ming and Qing dynasties, it is nevertheless useful to compare these three dynasties. First, most of the newly extended territory was sparsely populated, so that it did not have a particularly large effect on the aggregate volume of economic activity. Second, our main concern is with GDP per capita, which was affected even less by territorial changes. The average annual growth rate of real GDP during the Northern Song, Ming and Qing dynasties was 0.88%, 0.25%, and 0.36%, respectively, although there was also a sharp fall in the level of real GDP (and population) between the end of the Northern Song and the beginning of the Ming dynasties. Real GDP more or less kept pace with population during, as well as between, both dynasties, so that GDP per capita fluctuated without trend around a high level. During the Qing dynasty, however, GDP per capita trended downwards strongly at an annual rate of -0.34 per cent. As a result, GDP per capita in 1620 was about the same as it had been in 980, but by 1840 had fallen to around 70 per cent of its 980 level.
This general pattern of fluctuations without trend around a high level during the Northern Song and Ming dynasties, followed by decline during the Qing dynasty, is broadly consistent with much of the largely qualitative literature on Chinese economic performance over the very long run. The early good performance during the Northern Song and Ming dynasties is most obviously consistent with the work of Hartwell (1966), who was impressed by China’s development of coke smelting of iron in the eleventh century, and Elvin (1973), with his idea of China being caught in a high-level equilibrium trap. The idea of an early peak is also consistent with the view of Chinese science expressed by Needham (1954), who asked why China was overtaken by the West despite its early scientific successes, such as the development of gunpowder, the magnetic compass and paper and printing. It also fits with the emphasis of Wittfogel (1957) on the early development of irrigation works, leading to high levels of agricultural productivity, but also a bureaucracy that stifled later development.
The idea of a decline in GDP per capita during the Qing dynasty is also most obviously consistent with the work of Huang, who argues that the rapid population expansion at this time led to a growing division of land holdings into ever-smaller plots. Given the decline in the cultivated land per capita (shown in Figure 1), and the failure of grain yields to rise sufficiently to offset this over time (shown in Figure 2), this led inevitably to a decline in living standards. This pattern of Qing decline is also captured in a number of recent quantitative studies, which draw upon a range of indicators. First, Allen, Bassino, Ma, Moll-Murata and van Zanden (2011: 28) find falling real wages in China, with welfare ratios declining from 1.7 to 0.8 in Suzhou/Shanghai between 1738 and 1818 and from 1.7 to 1.0 in Beijing over the same period, and continuing to decline further until the 1850s. Second, Baten, Ma, Morgan and Wang also find evidence of declining heights and numeracy in China, although their evidence on these indicators begins only in the nineteenth century. Third, Bernhofen, Eberhardt, Li and Morgan (2016) show growing grain price divergence in Chinese regions from the 1740s, while European grain prices continued to converge, so that a large gap opened up between Western Europe and even the most advanced regions of China, the Lower and Middle Yangzi. Fourth, the comparative study by Li and van Zanden (2012) showed GDP per capita in the Lower Yangzi to be only around half the level of the Netherlands already by the 1820s. Fifth, recent estimates of Chinese national income produced by Shi, Xuyi, Ni and van Leeuwen (2014) for the period 1661-1933 show a similar percentage decline in GDP per capita during the Qing dynasty as in our study…
This picture of falling living standards during the Qing dynasty is also very different from the view of Chinese economic performance painted by California School authors, who see the eighteenth century as a period of economic success for China. On its own terms, the Chinese state would clearly have seen this as a successful period, with new territory and a rapidly expanding population. However, in the modern world which was just emerging during the eighteenth century, economic success was beginning to be measured in terms of rising productivity and living standards. Careful analysis of the cultivated land area and grain yields reveals a decline in per capita food availability, which was not compensated for by an increase in industrial production or service sector output.” [24-7]
; “3. Asia-Europe comparisons.
So far, we have compared China only with Britain. However, Britain was a relatively poor part of Europe in the eleventh century and a relatively rich part by 1850, as can be seen in the recent estimates of GDP per capita presented in Table 7. Before the Black Death struck in 1348, per capita incomes were substantially higher in Italy and Spain than in England and Holland. There then followed a substantial reversal of fortunes between the North Sea area and Mediterranean Europe, so that by 1750, just before the Industrial Revolution, per capita incomes were substantially higher in Britain and the Netherlands than in Italy and Spain. This “Little Divergence” within Europe accompanied the “Great Divergence” between Europe and Asia…
The GDP per capita figures presented here suggest that China was the richest country in the world during the Northern Song dynasty. China was certainly richer than England in 1090, some time after its peak, although England had caught up with China by 1400. However, England was a relatively poor part of Europe at this time, and comparing China with the richest part of medieval Europe, it is likely that Italy was already ahead by 1300, and perhaps even earlier. By 1500, Holland and Italy were both substantially ahead of China. However, we need to be careful here before concluding that the Great Divergence began in the sixteenth century, since China was much larger than any individual European country… While the GDP per capita gap between the leading North Sea area economies and the whole of China remained small, as it did until the eighteenth century, it is quite possible that a smaller region of China, such as the Yangzi delta, may still have been on a par with the richest parts of Europe.
4. Sensitivity analysis.
The most important result in this study is the finding of a substantial decline in Chinese GDP per capita during the Qing dynasty, largely as a result of a widely accepted large increase in population, without an equivalent expansion of the cultivated area or crop yields. This coincided with positive growth of GDP per capita in the leading regions of Europe, producing a clear divergence in the eighteenth century, so that the gap between Europe and China became too large to be bridged by regional variation within China. In this section we explore whether it would be possible to restore Pomeranz’s (2000) original finding of a delayed divergence beginning only in the nineteenth century by taking error margins into account. The answer must surely be no.
Li and van Zanden (2012) have produced a comparison of GDP per capita in the Yangzi delta and the Netherlands in the early nineteenth century, finding per capita incomes in the Yangzi delta to be 53.8 per cent of the level in the Netherlands during the 1820s. This suggests a per capita GDP figure of 1,050 for the Lower Yangzi, in 1990 international dollars, or about 75 per cent higher than in China as a whole. A high estimate for GDP per capita in the Yangzi delta in earlier years would apply this ratio to our estimates of per capita GDP for China as a whole. This produces our Yangzi (H) series in Figure 13, which also plots the GDP per capita data for the richest part of Europe. The European frontier is based on Italy until the 1540s, followed by the Netherlands until the 1800s and then Great Britain. Although the Netherlands enjoyed a significant lead over the Yangzi delta in the early seventeenth century, this could be discounted as a very small part of Europe, with no other North Sea area economies enjoying a significant advantage over the Yangzi delta. But once Great Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium had all forged ahead of the Yangzi delta during the first half of the eighteenth century, this is too large an area to be ignored. By 1750, Dutch GDP per capita was 42 per cent higher than in the Yangzi delta, rising to a 90 per cent lead by 1770. This is well outside the 5% error margins for a grade A series such as GDP per capita during the Ming dynasty, and indeed even beyond the error margins for a grade B or C series.
Figure 13 also includes an alternative low estimate of GDP per capita in the Yangzi delta, shown by the dashed line Yangzi (L). This is derived by rebasing the Yangzi (H) series on an alternative mid-nineteenth century benchmark from Shi, Xuyi, Ni and van Leeuwen (2014). Their figure for China’s GDP per capita in 1850 in 1990 international dollars is obtained by accepting Maddison’s (2010) estimate for 1933 and projecting backwards using a different series. Instead of our figure of $600 in 1850, this yields an alternative estimate of $472, which is getting quite close to bare bones subsistence of $400, thus providing an effective lower bound. Note that even with this lower bound series, although western Europe appears to start forging ahead in the sixteenth century, GDP per capita in the Yangzi delta remains 93 per cent of the level of the leading European country as late as 1700, and the first half of the eighteenth century remains a critical juncture.” [30-3]
; “Conclusions.
This paper provides estimates of Chinese GDP and relative standing in the world constructed from the output side between 980 and 1840, covering the Northern Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties. These GDP estimates are combined with population data to track the path of GDP per capita. China’s GDP per capita fluctuated around a high level during the Northern Song and Ming dynasties, before trending downwards during the Qing dynasty, falling to around 70 per cent of its 980 level by 1840.
From an international perspective, Northern Song China was richer than Domesday Britain in 1090, but Britain had caught up with China by the fifteenth century. Although China had the highest standard of living in the world during the Northern Song dynasty, Italy had already forged ahead by 1300. At this point, however, and even until the eighteenth century, it is quite possible that a relatively rich Chinese region such as the Yangzi Delta was on a par with the most developed parts of Europe. But Chinese GDP per capita declined sharply during the Qing dynasty, so that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the gap between China and the most developed parts of Europe was too large to be bridged by regional variation within China. Since China was still the richest Asian country at this time, it is therefore likely that Western Europe was significantly ahead of Asia not just by the early nineteenth century, but already by the mid-eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution. This suggests that the Great Divergence had deep institutional roots, rather than springing up suddenly as a result of factors such as coal or ghost acres.” [33-4]
• “[O]n the eve of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, China was already substantially poorer than Great Britain in terms of GDP and real wages per capita. Differences between the income of its ordinary peasants– the bulk of the population– and ordinary labour in Great Britain, in all probability were much smaller, although in that respect too Great Britain began to fare better during the eighteenth century.” [Vries 16a:18]

9. • “Whatever may have been the exact figure, all the information I could gather clearly indicates that total central government income – let alone official taxes – expressed in grams of silver, per capita was much lower in China than it was in Western Europe, especially Great Britain. The difference when it comes to the amount of taxes paid per capita is really huge. This is not just a difference: it is a gap… Taking into consideration the various kinds of income of China’s government apart from regular taxes does not alter our conclusion: compared to Britain’s central government and to a somewhat lesser extent those of most states in Western europe, China’s central government did have very little disposable income…
Let us now delve somewhat deeper into the Sino-British comparison. According to Wang, the government in Peking in 1753 collected, including surcharges, almost 74 million taels in taxes. Other sources of government income at the time, according to him, were still almost irrelevant. So let us settle for a total of 90 million taels. That, in silver, would be the equivalent of £30 million. This would be somewhat over four times as much as the tax revenue of Britain’s central government at the time. If this estimate is correct, it would mean that in the sixth decade of the eighteenth century Britain’s central government received an equivalent of 25 per cent of China’s tax income while Britain’s population was only some 3 per cent of that of China. Even if we were to believe Kent Deng’s extremely low population estimate for China, Britain’s population at the time still would have counted for only some 8 per cent of that of China. Just before the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the inhabitants of Britain paid their government effectively £16 million, or the silver equivalent of 48 million taels, in taxes. Per capita, in terms of silver, that is more than 200 grams and some twenty times as much as inhabitants of China, where regular tax income had not, or at best marginally, increased over the century.
As indicated before, at the end of those wars, total gross tax income of Great Britain’s central government had risen to over £70 million, net tax revenue to over £60 million. Average gross tax income of central government over the period 1802–17 was some £60 million. Divided by the total population of Great Britain, that is of England, Wales and Scotland together, that would boil down to a per capita gross government income of the equivalent of roughly 550 grams of silver per year over that period. The difference with China, where at that time, in an extremely high if not simply far too high estimate, effective payments from the populace to central government per capita still were only 300 million taels divided by some 350–60 million people (some 30 grams of silver), is enormous. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, total gross revenue of the Qing government, expressed in silver-equivalents, would, even in an unduly ‘optimist’ estimate, have only been 60 to 70 per cent higher than that of the rulers of Great Britain. Per capita, government in London then would have received some eighteen times as much revenue from its subjects as its counterpart in Peking. This does not seem an extreme assumption: as indicated John Barrow, who made an estimate in 1803, claimed that at that time, on average, a Briton paid fifteen times as much tax as a Chinese. I have no doubt that in fact the difference was even bigger. Please note that I am talking about ‘effective payments’ – the amounts of money that actually were at the disposal of central government – not of actual payments – the amounts of money people had to pay in one way or another for being governed or, for that matter, in many cases simply for being squeezed…
The interesting point of course is that several scholars who think the Qing managed to effectively tax their country have accepted these estimates. In particular the case of Wong stands out here as he, while accepting Lee’s estimates, at the same time persistently claims that China’s government managed ‘to mobilise and disburse revenues quite beyond the imagination, let alone the abilities, of European state makers at the moment’. For the eighteenth century and the part of the nineteenth century that we are discussing here this claim simply is untrue for all the Western European countries for which I have found information.” [Vries 15:96-9].

10. • In [Clark 07a:chap16-7], Clarke explains that efficient world markets and communication/ transport ensured that China and India had equal access to loans/capital and technology as White nations “since the nineteenth-century improvements in communication and trade”. Along with this, China and India had huge advantages in both lower wages and lower regulations of labor, and yet nevertheless Britain and other White nations continued to outcompete them, because they had far higher labor productivity. They also had more capital, but this is because “[i]n a world where capital flowed easily between economies, capital itself responded to differences in country efficiency levels”. The same superior White labor productivity was evident in the operation of railroads.
; “Locomotive utilization was no higher in low-income, low-output-per-worker countries. As in cotton textiles, managers of railways in these countries seemingly gained nothing from their extra labor inputs.
Thus in both cotton textiles and railways around 1910 we observe the same picture. Poor countries used the same technology as rich ones. They achieved the same levels of output per unit of capital. But in doing so they employed so much more labor per machine that they lost most of the labor cost advantages with which they began.
The problem of persistent inefficiency in labor use in poor countries like India was the main barrier to the spread of the technologies of the Industrial Revolution…
The situation in 1910, in which excess labor without apparent benefits in the form of capital utilization was found in low-income countries, persisted throughout the twentieth century in the cotton textile industry…
The strong correlation between wages and output per worker continues until the present day, as do surprisingly high labor costs in low-wage countries…
The technology in industries such as garment making and textiles is relatively standard. In making a pair of jeans, labor costs even in such low-wage economies as China, Mexico, and Nicaragua, account for about 75 percent of all costs, including transport to the U.S. market. The cost of shipping a pair of jeans from a clothing workshop almost anywhere in the world to the high-wage markets of the United States is no more than $0.09 per pair (1 percent of the wholesale cost of about $8). With the ending of quotas in the U.S. market, and the agreement of the European Union countries to allow manufactures from the fifty poorest countries, as well as twelve Mediterranean countries, to be imported free of tariffs, we would expect to see apparel manufacturing booming across Africa, and apparel industries disappearing in any high-wage country.
While there have been major increases in imports into countries like the United States, a number of surprising features appear. The first is that, despite its extraordinarily high labor cost, U.S. production of apparel in 2004 was still 42 percent of its consumption. The second is that the major exporters to the United States and the European Union were often countries with high wages compared to sub-Saharan Africa. Thus Mexico and Costa Rica continue as major suppliers to the U.S. market, even though they have wages more than six times those of most sub-Saharan countries and of the Indian subcontinent…
It is clear once again that this situation is sustained by differences in output per worker across exporters that correlate with the countries’ wage levels. Figure 16.16 shows, for China, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua, labor productivity in 2002 versus the industry wage rate. [Figure 16.16 shows China’s output per worker and wage rates in clothing production both at 40% of Mexico’s.]
…Thus the crucial variable in explaining the success or failure of economies in the years 1800–2000 is the efficiency of the production process within the economy. Inefficiencies in poor countries took a very specific form: the employment of extra production workers per machine without any corresponding gain in output per unit of capital.” [Clark 07a:345-351]

————

L-M: Artistic innovation.

L. Whites have had more eminent artists than Chinese.

Although the value of artistic innovations cannot be measured as definitively as that of technological, scientific, and institutional innovations, the record of White excellence is clear. A basic way to gauge the accomplishment of artists is to examine how much notoriety they have received in the pertinent historical literature of their civilizations. By carefully reviewing such literature and applying statistical methods, Charles Murray compiled separate inventories of “significant figures” in the arts for White (“The West”), Chinese, and other civilizations. For the Visual Arts, he identified 479 eminent White artists against only 111 Chinese; for Literature, it was 835 against just 83; and for Music there were 522 eminent White musicians against none identified in China [1]. Murray explained that using a separate inventory for China inflated the number of Chinese significant figures relative to Whites, because they had to compete for notoriety only with fellow Chinese [2]; and that the number of anonymous Chinese artists was counterbalanced by the number of anonymous White ones [3].

1. • See Murray’s Human Accomplishment, particularly [Murray 03:113].

2. • See [Murray 03:84,250-1].

3. • See [Murray 03:260].

————

M. Whites have made many major innovations in the arts.

Whites have made many revolutionary innovations in the arts. Whites developed oil-based painting techniques, creating vivid colors and giving the artist more time to work [1]. Whites developed linear and spatial perspective techniques in painting, using geometry and light/shadow shading to create the impression of depth [2]. Whites produced architectural and sculptural works of majestic scale, realistically recreating the human form. In literature, the Classical Greeks pioneered the the epic and the tragedy [3], and medieval Whites developed and prolifically composed the novel [4]. The Classical Greeks also pioneered the theatrical drama [5]. Whites invented many brilliant new musical instruments, including the organ, piano, harpsichord, violin, clarinet, saxophone, and valved trumpet [6]. Whites created polyphonic music with large orchestras and other forms of ensemble, developing counterpoint and harmony to create symphonies, operas, etc. unparalleled by anything in China. Whites also devised a codified system of musical notation, to record all the notes, pacing, and rests in these compositions, along with methods of conduction [7].

1. • “In the decorative arts, two landmark technical innovations appeared. Oil as a painting medium was mentioned by Theophilus Presbyter in the twelfth century, but egg-based tempera reigned supreme until a process for refining linseed oil, producing volatile solvents, was developed, mainly in Venice. Pigments dispersed in the treated oil created a responsive medium, exploited early by the Van Eyck brothers in Bruges and a number of artists in Italy (and seized on by Gutenberg for printer’s ink).” [Gies 94:274]
• “The most obvious changes during Renaissance times are seen in the paintings and sculptures. Though they continued the medieval tradition of using religious subjects, illustrating stories from the Bible, they combined this interest with classical ideals of the human figure and an increased interest in depicting nature. Secular works were also popular, often inspired from Greek and Roman mythology. Artists began to experiment for the first time with oil-based paints, mixing powdered pigments with linseed oil (gradually abandoning the Medieval technique of egg tempera). The paints dried slowly, and remained workable for a few months. The fresco technique was employed on plaster walls (reaching perfection with artists such as Michelangelo). Sculpture began to be conceived “in the round”, instead of as relief decorations on cathedrals. Perspective and light were also introduced into art, perfecting the sense of three-dimensional reality. The artists of the Renaissance made such a dramatic impact in their concept of space and form that they have changed the way we look at the world for all time.”
Key Innovations and Artists of the Italian Renaissance
• www.robinurton.com/history/Renaissance/early_ren.htm
• “In 1774, the work of Theophilus Presbyter, identified perhaps with Roger of Helmarshausen, was found to have given instructions for preparing oil paints, specifically Cinnabar (Lead) Red in linseed oil medium, in Schedula diversarium artium, dated to about 1125. Another contemporary source discovered later is Eraclius, in his Coloribus et artibus Romanorum, although that refers to heating linseed oil with lime in order to create the medium. So by the end of the eighteenth century, it was well known that oil paints were in use long before the Northern Renaissance and the likes of the van Eycks.
The most convincing examples of such early oil paintings came to light in ancient churches in Scandinavia. The painted altar front of the church at Tingelstad in Norway, dated to 1300-25, is one that has been studied extensively by Unn Plahter and her colleagues, and you can see modern reconstructions here. Later work on a painted crucifix from the ancient stave church at Hemse, on the island of Gotland, Sweden, dated to about 1180, showed evidence of drying oils being used on that as well. I believe that crucifix is shown here. Not only were these true artistic paintings, but examination of the structure of their paint layers has shown the use of glazes much as in classical and modern oil painting technique…
So for the time being, there appears to have been isolated use of some form of mixed medium oil painting in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, around 650 AD. But the continuous tradition in European art goes back at least to church decoration in Scandinavia before 1200…”
Who invented oil paint?
• eclecticlight.co/2015/02/10/who-invented-oil-paint/”

2. • “If the demonstration in the piazza occurred by 1413, as recently uncovered evidence indicates, it took more than a decade for the discovery of linear perspective to make its way into the wider world of painting via Masaccio’s fresco of the Trinity, which may still be seen on a wall of the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. It took another decade for Leon Battista Alberti, another of the great Renaissance architects, to write Della Pittura (dedicated to Brunelleschi), laying out both the mathematics of perspective and devices for artists to use in applying perspective to their own work. Within a few decades, every major artist was painting in perspective. The theory of perspective developed as well, along with technical apparatus artists were employing screens and grids by the end of 15C, and later began using the camera obscura, to produce ever more precise representations of three-dimensional objects. But these were elaborations on the core invention of Brunelleschi, a method for creating, in Alberti’s words, “an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen,” and then reproducing that subject with a fidelity hitherto unimagined.” [Murray 03:215]

3. • “In the West, the existence since early times of the epic and the tragedy did much to shape the writing of biography along lines of conflict and changing personality. In China both literary forms were absent.” [Bodde 91:287]

4. • “The word “novel” came into use only at the end of the 18th century in England as a transliteration of the Italian word “novella.” The roots of the novel can be traced back to:
i) Spanish picaresque tales (1500s) with their strings of episodic adventures held together by the personality of the central figure;
ii) Elizabethan prose fiction and the translation of ancient Greek romances into the vernacular,
iii) French heroic romance (mid 17th century) with its huge baroque narratives about thinly veiled contemporaries who always acted
nobly and spoke high-flown sentiments.
What British novelists added in the 1700s was a more unified and plausible (down-to-earth) plot structure, with sharply individualized and believable characters, and a less aristocratic (or more “middle class”) style of writing. The novel, in these respects, was invented in Europe, particularly after 1750 (Watt 2001). It was “associated from its inception,” in the words of Roy Porter, “with individualism and a certain political liberalism”. England played the leading role in this genre, cultivating a new sensibility for authenticity, personal experience and feeling, a spirit of nonconformity towards rigid and “insincere” conventions, a fascination with the inner depths of the affective self. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa was one of such novels, as was… [long list of 18th century European novels].” [Duchesne 11c:383]
• “In Lionel Trilling’s words, the novel is “a perpetual quest for reality, the field of its research being always the social world, the material of its analysis being always manners as the indication of the direction of man’s soul.” The essential characteristic of the novel in this more specific sense, that it constitutes a simulacrum of real life, sets it apart from the genres that went before. Not completely apart—that’s why the Satyricon and Tale of Genji are called novels by some critics—but substantially so.
Jacques Barzun dates the first novel to 1500 and the appearance of the anonymous La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes. Lazarillo’s hero is an orphan who becomes a servant, not a nobleman. The book depicts society matter-of-factly, neither idealizing nor satirizing it. Its characters are just that—characters, with complex strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices.
Lazarillo was followed a century later by Cervantes’ Don Quixote, widely seen as the first great Western novel, but still a transitional work, integrating large dollops of allegory, philosophy, and the fantastical alongside its rich portrayal of character and social scene. Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678) was another precursor. But it was not until Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740 and, a decade later, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, that the novel reached the form as we know it today, and opened an outpouring of work in 19C that would transform literature throughout the West.
Nothing quite like the novel developed in China, Japan, or India until late 19C, when it was adapted from the Western model. China and Japan (though not India) had produced works that portrayed common people and gave detailed descriptions of social life. A famous anonymous Chinese work, Jin Pingmei, not only portrayed the details of everyday life in 16C China but contained such detailed accounts of sexual practices that early translators felt compelled to render them in Latin. However, elements of the supernatural remained woven into Chinese fiction through the end of 19C, and the plots were more episodic than in the Western form—characteristics that are true even of the work often labeled the greatest Chinese novel, Cao Zhan’s Dream of the Red Chamber.” [Murray 03:220-2]
• “The story-telling tradition had a powerful influence on the novel. Chapters end with a form of words appropriate to the conclusion of a story-telling session, and the style is loose, rambling, and episodic, as if the author is prepared to go on and on as long as he can keep an audience.” [Dawson 78:245]

5. • “The invention of drama is a separate meta-invention, postdating –800, with a known history. If we trust a rhetorician named Themistius, the crucial event took place in –534, when a poet named Thespis—the source of the word thespian—created a character that stood apart from the Greek chorus which until then had been a unitary voice telling the story. This individual engaged in a dialogue with the chorus and, stunning departure that it was, pretended to be someone he was not. He was called the Answerer, which in ancient Greek was Hypocrites, the source of hypocrite and hypocrisy.
The development of the dramatic role once again added a new dimension to an existing art, putting new obligations on both the performer and the spectator. The performer must pretend to be another person. The spectator must ignore all the imperfections of the pretense that, acknowledged, would spoil the effect. If both performer and spectator did their respective jobs, the resulting collaboration was nothing less than the ability to observe events outside one’s own life.
Drama went from a standing start to historic peaks within a century. The chorus was reduced to about a dozen people and its role as narrator was slashed, with multiple individual roles carrying the burden of the drama. Stages evolved, incorporating multiple entrances, painted scenery, and scene changes. Actors were masked and costumed to fit their parts. And what a stunning outpouring of plays this infant genre got to work with—the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes.” [Murray 03:218-9]
• “There were different styles in the north and south, but all Chinese drama has certain features in common. There are a limited number of character-types, and actors specialize in one of these; and there is a bare minimum of scenery.” [Dawson 78:248]

6. • “Western music was unique in its counterpoint and harmony, formation of tone and “the understanding of chromatics and enharmonics since the Renaissance in rational form.” The orchestra, the organ, the piano, and violin, together with ensembles of wind instruments, the string quartet, the system of musical notation, sonatas, symphonies, and operas, were all unique to Europe.” [Duchesne 11a:248]

7. • “The fourth candidate for a meta-invention, the invention of polyphony, is unequivocally the real thing. Just as linear perspective added depth to the length and breadth of a painting, polyphony added, metaphorically, a vertical dimension to the horizontal line of melody…
[T]he main sequence for the development of polyphony came through the Catholic monasteries, especially the great monastery of St. Martial in Limoges, in central France, via an evolution of the method of singing prayers called organum. Originally consisting of a few tones not even resembling a melody, organa grew gradually more complex. We know that by 11C two-part organa were being sung in Winchester, England. By 12C, organa were being sung in which the lower voice served as the principal melody while the upper, solo voice sang phrases of varying length against it. The end of 12C and the beginning of 13C saw the advent of named composers of polyphonic music, Léonin and Pérotin. The music grew more complex and sophisticated. Secular versions of polyphony began to develop, as the troubadours adapted polyphony to their popular melodies. The motet—a polyphonic, unaccompanied choral composition—began to flourish, soon adding a third part and sometimes being sung in French rather than Latin.
The process that had begun with the invention of polyphony would continue for centuries. If one were looking for the most dazzling immediate effects of a musical invention, the most promising candidate would not be the original invention of polyphony, but the development of modern tonal (major-minor) harmony that began in the Renaissance and reached its full expression in the Baroque. It is tonal harmony that made possible the music from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, and that fills most of today’s concert programs. But tonal harmony falls in the category of a great invention that builds on a more fundamental expansion of the human cognitive repertoire—in this instance, the idea that music has a vertical dimension as well as a horizontal one. Notes can be stacked. Melodies can be stacked. Once that idea was in the air, all else became possible.” [Murray 03:217-8]
• “[A] rough, and rather incomplete, catalogue of these immense [medieval European] achievements [includes] a new polyphonic music where sounds could be seen as a phenomena moving through time, written on a paper using a codified and standardized system of notation for all sounds and rests.” [Duchesne 11b]
• “In the past it was widely assumed by musicologists, both Chinese and foreign, that Chinese music was purely monophonic. However… [a few exceptions were found in “multi-part folk songs”].”
Tradition and Change in the Performance of Chinese Music, Volume 2; pg. 3

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V-4. Arguments.

Introduction: Anti-White propaganda with a familiar theme.

Whites’ superior creativity, technology, industry, and prosperity doesn’t sit well with those who hate White people and want us to be race-mixed into extinction. Some of them are quite clever, and like a cabal of cunning defense lawyers they have cooked up impressive-sounding, dishonest arguments denying the clear historical superiorities of Whites outlined in this section.

The primary strategy of anti-White propagandists is to claim that Europe did not surpass China technologically and economically until the early-mid 19th century, when Europe had begun to impose its will on China, so that they can blame the surpassment on White ‘bullying’ of China and other countries. This is the familiar ‘White oppression and theft made everyone else poor’ narrative. As if nonwhites had benevolent government and prosperity and were cozy kittens with their neighbors before Whites came along. It is of course perfectly clear that European impositions on its rivals including China were the consequence, and not the cause, of White technological and economic superiority.

A secondary strategy of anti-Whites is to claim that Whites got lucky. China had lots of coal in various places, but Europe was lucky that a patch of its coal happened to lie in Great Britain, near one of Europe’s (many) industrial areas. Europe was lucky that Britain was severely short of wood (it wasn’t) and so was forced to develop coal energy, and lucky that Britain had high labor costs (it didn’t) and so was forced to invent the steam engine. The fact that Britain had the world’s finest metal craftsmen and mechanical engineers and the most proficient industry to begin with had nothing to do with it.

In this final section I shall sort through and refute this nonsense in detail, relying largely on the fine work of Peer Vries, Ricardo Duchesne, and Joel Mokyr.

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A. Argument: “China’s superior trade balance with Europe in the 18th century, by which they obtained a lot of Europe’s silver in trade for its commodities, shows that it was technologically/ industrially superior at this late point in time.”

1. Europe was in fact economically superior to China in the 18th century, and imported from China mostly raw materials.

In the first place, the fact is that by the 18th century Europe was superior to China in every important economic respect. Europe had long been superior in the crucial metal craftsmanship and power machinery technologies, as reviewed in section V-2. China retained an advantage only in some specialized manufactures, such as porcelain and silk textiles, that represented only a small portion of China’s exports to Europe. These final advantages disappeared in the early to mid 1700’s [1], and by the start of the Industrial Revolution (~1770) China exported to Europe mostly agricultural or raw materials that Europe could not grow or find at home: predominantly tea, and also raw silk, rhubarb, and various metals and drugs [2]. Europe had long had a large superiority in education, in science, in labor productivity (wages), and in GDP per capita [3].

1. • See section V-2.F and its sources on how China’s last manufacturing advantages disappeared in the early-mid 18th century as Europeans discovered China’s ‘trade secrets’ or developed alternatives, forging ahead in areas such as ceramics, textiles, metallurgy, and agriculture.

2. • See section V-3.K and its sources.

3. • On Whites’ superior education, see section V-3.G and its sources.
• On Whites’ superior science, see section V-3.A-D and its sources.
• On Whites’ superior labor productivity and GDP per capita, see section V-3.K and its sources.

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2. China restricted imports but wanted silver, a valuable commodity.

Whereas Europeans were open to other cultures and ideas from around the world, China deliberately closed itself off, restricting foreign influences and external trade [1]. Europeans were happy to purchase foreign products while the Chinese were not, an attitude that left China backward and ultimately provoked trade wars [2]. One thing that the Chinese dearly wanted from Europeans was silver. Silver was not just a means of payment, but a useful commodity [3]. It had of course aesthetic value for artistic and decorative purposes. As China lacked a stable paper currency [4], silver also served as a vital medium of exchange for its tax collection and settlement of large transactions. Chinese especially desired silver coinage finely minted by European craftsmen [5]. The amount of silver traded to China by Europe has, however, been greatly exaggerated by those who like to represent this trade as a European weakness [6].

1. • On the Chinese government restricting international trade, see section II-8.C and its sources. This was a reason they scrapped their ocean-going fleet (section V-2.G.8).

2. • See section V-4.E.5 and its sources.

3. • “[E]xperts on early modern Chinese history seem to agree that silver was scarce in China already before the famous ‘drain’ of the second quarter of the nineteenth century… The Qing authorities claimed the right to tax commodities with customs duties. In their view foreign bullion imports were not incoming currency but incoming commodities. They therefore taxed them, insisted that the silver be kept intact after being shipped into China and, in principle, till the second half of the nineteenth century did not officially accept it as legal tender for China’s domestic markets. Silver tax payments up until then always had to be made in sycees. The only strategy to combat scarcity seems to have been prohibiting silver exports.” [Vries 15:251-2]
; “[T]he thesis of Flynn and Giraldez [is] that the silver that the Europeans exported should not be regarded as money but as just some economic good, one that many Asians, especially the Chinese, wanted desperately and that the Europeans were glad to sell, as it earned them huge arbitrage profits. Why would Europeans try and export other products, when selling silver earned them a lot of easy money, and when Asian buyers wanted silver more than anything else? From this perspective the structure of the Asian-European trade balance does not tell us much about European or Asian technology, except that it was the Europeans who were willing and able to sail to China.” [Vries 01:415]

4. • See section II-6.A and its sources.

5. • “According to [Horesh], in the early modern era, mining and metallurgy were much better developed in Europe and its colonies. Better coinage was produced there, which in turn was exchanged in China at a premium. What Asians normally wanted was European silver coinage rather than silver. Even supposedly advanced non-European monies like those of the Mughal Empire never played a significant role outside India. He concludes that there were several ways in which ‘European coin production departed from the rest of the world, beginning as early as the thirteenth century.’” [Vries 15:265]
; “Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Chinese officials induced some silversmiths to manufacture dollars that in every respect were identical to the carolus dollar. Those silversmiths, however, did not manage to obtain a similar uniformity in design and weight because numerous artisans working quite independently of each other produced the coins. Moreover, the silversmiths adulterated the money by adding alloy up to 50 per cent. This then led to the prohibition of any further manufacturing of silver dollars in China.” [261]
• “As of the early nineteenth century, China’s monetary and financial system was relatively primitive and inflexible. It was dependent on the maintenance of stable rates of exchange between the state-minted copper coins used in small, daily market transactions, on the one hand, and the unminted silver sycee (nearly pure bullion) used for the settlement of larger accounts. Fiat or paper instruments of credit were underdeveloped, and tended to be held in suspicion by “metalist” state ideologues; moreover, it is doubtful that the public would have trusted its largely unaccountable bureaucratic rulers sufficiently to accept state-issued notes at face value…
Devaluation of the coinage had also been hastened by the lowering of government quality standards and by a wave of counterfeiting, and with coins thus debased it was but natural that there would be a quickening demand for silver and an attendant decrease in the availability of the latter. Then, too, Chinese awareness of uniformity of foreign-minted silver dollars and of the savings in assay fees that accrued to the businessmen who used them allowed foreign silver coinage to circulate in China at an above-face-value premium, in turn drawing purer unminted Chinese sycee out of the country.” [Polachek 92:104-5]

6. • “[T]his net silver import surplus of China in its trade with the West cannot have been as big as many revisionists claim. Sino-Western trade only really took off a couple of decades into the eighteenth century. Before that it was tiny. The impressive increase in this trade that so often is referred to in the literature can to a large extent be explained by its strikingly low point of departure in the beginning of the eighteenth century. As percentages of their GDPs, the commercial exchanges between China and Britain, overall by far the biggest European trade partner of China, in the very long eighteenth century were very small. This implies that the amounts of silver that ended up in China over the entire early modern period must have been much smaller than has been claimed in various recent publications by global historians… During the eighteenth century for all major Western trading nations – except the Dutch Republic – the Atlantic was much more important than Asia. The combined trade of Britain, France and the Dutch Republic with the Western hemisphere, for example, was three times as big as that with Asia. China certainly did ‘collect’ substantial amounts of silver during the last decades of the eighteenth century and into the second decade of the nineteenth century. But the point is that many serious scholars, in particular specialists in the economic history of China, have come up with estimates that are much lower than those suggested by various global historians but are systematically ignored by them. The matter at hand is very complicated. My reading of the literature convinced me that over the period 1500–1820, China, even in an extremely optimistic estimate, definitely did not collect more than 30 per cent of all silver produced and marketed in Latin america. That is a lot but, considering its huge population, not striking. The Europeans kept more, in total and per capita. They on top of that collected the bulk of Latin American gold, whose major importance for various European economies is completely ignored by proponents of the silver-sink thesis. If there are good reasons to be much less optimistic about the size of Chinese silver imports, there are also – and this is the point I want to make – good reasons to be less optimistic about how well China was doing in international trade. When it comes to the British side, the drain of silver from Britain to China did cause problems for the East India Company and could be quite a nuisance, but it never caused any major overall trouble for Britain’s economy.
Already in the 1810s, substantial amounts of silver began to leave China, in particular in exchange for Indian opium, and China’s overall silver balance of trade slowly started to incur a net deficit, the famous drain we already referred to.” [Vries 15:366-8]
; “It appears there simply is no basis for the China-as-the-global-silver-sink thesis in the specialised literature that actually deals with bullion flows. Adding up, as I did, even the most optimist estimates one can find there, still does not bring you even near the amounts Sinocentrists write about. Neither can one find any support for that thesis in literature focusing on China and its monetary history, a very rich source of information that apart from the work by Von Glahn, that happens to be used quite selectively, is almost completely ignored by the new Sinocentrists. In this literature, that looks at matters from a Chinese perspective, also using many Chinese sources, and that focuses on the inflow of silver into China and on its silver stocks (and that therefore tends to be much less speculative) estimates tend to be drastically lower than in texts that discuss global silver flows. I have to say that I find it quite ironic that our Sinocentrists are willing to completely ignore what Chinese experts – and various Western experts on Chinese monetary history – have to say about the monetary history of China. What good reasons can there be to ignore what people like Yeh-chien Wang, Peng Xinwei, Man-houng Lin or Yen-p’ing Hao and many others say with regard to the topic that is at the very hearth of the China silver-sink thesis? Could that be because all the figures one finds with regard to inflows of silver into China and with regard to increases of its silver stock in their publications are much lower than those that are taken for granted and constantly repeated by Flynn, Giráldez and other Sinocentrists?
Well then, how big were silver inflows into China?
To be on the safe side, and to defend myself against claims of being too eager to make my point, I have constantly selected those figures that would be most in line with the Sinocentric point of view i.e. I have systematically opted for the highest estimates of silver imports into China that one can actually find in the specialised literature and even systematically ‘rounded them up’. Even this extremely optimist – without any doubt far too optimist – approach does not result in a figure that would be anywhere near the Sinocentric claim, not even when I add the very substantial imports into China from Japan, which are not intercontinental as this silver was mined in Japan itself. For imports from Japan I again used the same strategy: I constructed them using the highest estimates I found in the literature that is specifically dealing with this topic.
The most ‘optimist’ estimate that I could come up with was 35,000 tons of silver imports from Latin America into China between the 1570s – when silver began to enter China from Latin America – and the 1830s – when China’s import surplus of silver had turned into an export surplus. Total production in Latin America is estimated at somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 tons in this period, in all probability closer to 120,000 than to 100,000 tons. So China’s imports at the very, very best were still less than one third of total production there, not 75% or 66% and not even 50%. If we were to include imports from Japan, again taking the highest estimate, China’s total imports would be about 47,000 tons, on a total global silver, production, outside China itself, of, according to my estimates, well over 150,000 tons.
To know what these percentages mean, the reader should bear in mind that over the entire period, from the last decades of the sixteenth century to the 1830s, roughly one third of all people in the world were Chinese. This would mean that China, even in this over-optimist
estimate, received less of total silver production than could be called its ‘fair share’, which is quite astounding for a ‘silver sink’.
Looking at these figures, and figures with regard to Europe’s total silver exports, it also becomes clear that, as for example Barrett, Morineau and Jan de Vries have quite convincingly shown, China’s silver imports were smaller than the amounts of silver that were retained i.e. not exported, in Western Europe. This must mean that, on a per capita base, people in Western Europe were far better supplied with silver than Chinese people. This, as we will see, indeed was the case. Considering the fact that fewer people were living in Western Europe, one has to realize that even in case the very high Sinocentrists estimates would have been realistic, per capital Western Europeans probably would still have been better off. Later on in the text, I will give figures with regard to the silver/bullion/money stock of (various countries in) Europe and of China to support this point of view.
It appears that when you have a closer look at them, the silver imports of China, on average, on a per capita basis per year, amounted to very little in terms of weight. It is very easy to be seduced by all the impressive figures, all those thousands of tons, that Sinocentrists present, but one always has to realise that there were very many Chinese and that we are discussing often long stretches of time! Even in the highest estimate, China’s imports of Latin American silver via whatever route during the period from 1570-1830, per capita per year only were about 1.4 gram. If we were to include imports from Japan, they were still less than two grams. (I have assumed an average Chinese population during this entire period of 150 million people, which, according to by far the majority of experts, would be a very low figure).” [Vries 06:9-10]
; “It looks like even after many decades of un-interrupted import surpluses of silver, the available amount of silver per capita in China still was quite small. That would even be the case if we ‘construct’ China’s silver stock at the moment departing from absolutely optimal conditions from the point of view of the defenders of the China-silver-sink thesis. That is, if we were to take the highest import estimates, the highest estimates of domestic production, and the highest estimates for China’s stock at the beginning of the early modern era (or rather for the middle of the seventeenth century for which we have estimates ranging from over 250 million taels to 350 million taels) and completely ignore exports, wear and tear, and losses of whatever kind. This approach would result in a stock of almost 2,000,000,000 taels or about 75,000 tons. Even in this estimate, that is unrealistically high, China’s total silver stock – that of course need not all be used as ‘money’ – would still only amount to less than 190 grams of silver per capita.
We may get a more realistic view on China’s silver stock at the beginning of the nineteenth century by using estimates of that stock, and of China’s total money stock, for the beginning of the twentieth century. In the beginning of the twentieth century China’s silver stock must have been much larger than it was in the 1820s, as after the drain of silver from the late 1820s to about the middle of century, China again started to import huge amounts of silver. These imports compensated for the losses that had occurred especially in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Well, at the beginning of the twentieth century China’s total silver stock still only was some 1300 million dollars according to one estimate and some 1650 million dollars according to another one. A dollar at the time was about twenty-five grams of silver. China’s total silver stock eight decades earlier will definitely not have been bigger. Divided by China’s population of 1830 even the highest estimate would result in less than 105 grams of silver per capita…
As we will see, in various respects this stock is really small. It appears that, as anyone reading literature on Chinese monetary history could easily have found out himself, Ming and Qing China were and continued to be under-monetised economies where silver was scarce. It is not by accident that one can find endless amounts of quotes by foreigners to the effect that the Chinese would do anything to lay their hands on it.” [13-4]
; “The conclusion can only be that there was less silver available in China, per capita and even in total, than in Western Europe. There indeed often were complaints about scarcity of bullion in Europe as there was an almost permanent anxiety, at least in certain circles (mostly government circles) about the amount of available bullion and the negative effects of the drain caused by importing goods from ‘the Orient’. But there never was a long, serious, overall, shortage of money in Northwest Europe, as can be concluded from the decreasing and low interest rates, from the ease with which capital could be mobilised by the state or big companies and from the structural tendency of prices of goods and labour to rise. There of course in a sense never is ‘enough’ money, but the relative scarcity that we do see, was caused by huge demand rather than short supply…
The circumstantial evidence too quite convincingly points in the same direction: the silver-sink thesis flies in the face of all circumstantial evidence I could think of.” [15-6]
; “Everything points in the direction that China did not have much money – which need not imply that it was poor! Its total money stock was quite small, relatively speaking, and its monetary system quite cumbersome and instable. It had no minted silver coins, whereas the ratio of silver to copper (the basis of bronze coins that were the current means of payment) fluctuated heavily and differed widely between various regions.” [17]
; “[S]ilver remained scarce in Qing China in the very long eighteenth century. The estimate of the total silver stock at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Lin, presented earlier in this text, would mean that there has never been more than some 140 grams of silver available per Chinese in our period. As always there are margins and uncertainties but even in my most optimistic estimate, based on studies by experts in monetary history who tend to be far more prudent than the global historians dealing with the topic, the amount of silver available per capita in China in the first decades of the nineteenth century, after more than two centuries of silver imports and before the famous drain started, certainly was less than 200 grams, in all probability much less.
Whatever the exact figures with regard to imports, exports and production may have been, experts on early modern Chinese history seem to agree that silver was scarce in China already before the famous ‘drain’ of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. According to Rowe, ‘For most of the eighteenth century, the demand for money still increased more rapidly than supply.’ Notwithstanding that they may have different opinions about their exact timing and causes, scholars like Fang, Lin and Von Glahn all refer to periods of serious silver shortage in China some time in the eighteenth century. Von Glahn in general writes about a ‘persistent scarcity – relative to demand – of monetary media’.” [Vries 15:251-2]

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3. Europe’s silver trade with China was just an aspect of its international trade dominance.

Europe’s trade of silver to China was just an aspect of its international trade dominance. European businessmen controlled and managed international trade, and by deciding what goods to buy and sell and where to buy and sell them, they made the lion’s share of the profits. Trading silver to China made them a lot of money. Much of the silver Europe traded to China was exchanged for gold in order to profit from arbitrage, taking advantage of the greater demand for silver in Chinese versus European markets [1]. European trade dominance was enabled by its proactive governments, its economic innovations, its superior ships, and its powerful navies [2].

1. • On how White businessmen controlled international trade and global bullion/specie flows, thus optimizing their business and making arbitrage profits by exchanging silver/gold, see section V-3.K and its sources.
• “[P]roponents of the silver-sink thesis, and more in general those who claim that the West ‘lost’ in its exchanges with China, apparently ignore that one always has to consider trade flows in the totality of foreign exchange relations and in the entire balance of payments of a country. Britain paid for an increasing amount of the goods it bought in China with goods it had bought elsewhere. It took care of all the transporting involved and often re-exported them, in certain cases after having processed them. As we will see, it was the British who did the bulk of the value adding, not the Chinese.” [Vries 15:368-9]
• “And then finally there is the fact that even if trade between China and Britain as such resulted in a drain of silver from Britain to China, the British earned a great deal of money by transporting and selling what they bought in China, far more than the Chinese did. Can one seriously expect them to have traded for decades with China without making any profit?” [Vries 10:7]
• See the citations of [Vries 06:13-4,15-6,17] and [Vries 15:251-2] in the notes of the previous section (2) on China’s shortage of and demand for silver currency.

2. • On how European governments promoted industry and trade while China stifled it, see section V-3.I and its sources.
• On Europe’s brilliant economic innovations and development, see section V-3.J and its sources.
• On Europe’s superior ships that spanned the globe, see section V-2.G.8 and its sources.
• On Europe’s superior navies that took control of the oceans, see section V-2.G.6 and its sources.

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B. Argument: “Europe’s industrial success was due to its privileged access in its colonies to raw materials such as cotton, sugar, and silver, to customers, and to its exploitation of slave labor.”

1. Europe’s development of resources into products was a consequence of its technology; its colonies were unnecessary and hardly worth the costs.

In fact, Europe’s Industrial Revolution was due to its advanced industrial technology; Europe’s development of raw materials from overseas into value-added products was a consequence of this revolution, not a cause of it. Raw resources could be ‘exploited’ only because Whites were able to purchase or produce them overseas, transport them home, and then—in spite of all these costs—manufacture them into valuable products at a profit. Europe’s utilization of transoceanic resources was not a ‘lucky windfall’, but rather the result of technological prowess, planning, organization, investment, and development of infrastructure [1]. The principal innovations that generated the Industrial Revolution—the steam engine, coke-smelted iron, and the mechanization of fabric spinning—were independent of colonial trade [2]. The costs of maintaining the colonies were so enormous that some economic historians even believe that they exceeded the benefits [3]. Switzerland and Germany industrialized early without any significant colonies, while Spain and Portugal failed to do so despite having enormous colonies [4].

1. • “Transoceanic colonies likewise did not simply become available as a “resource windfall,” but were seized and effectively utilized on the basis of advanced shipping and navigation capacity, political-administrative coordination, a pronounced and growing military superiority, and technologically dynamic economies that sustained and deepened these ventures in empire. In a word, the latent advantages of geology and geography only became manifest upon the development of new forms of European power projection. ” [Bryant 06:433]
; “[A]s economic historians have extensively documented, it was not the comparative cheapness of colonial resources that provided Europeans with their decisive advantage, but the astounding productivity gains that came with mechanization and the factory organization of labour. Savery’s steam pump (1698), Newcomen’s atmospheric engine (1705), the fly shuttle(1733), spinning frame (1738), carding machine (1750), cylindrical air pumps (1761), steam engine (1769), spinning jenny (1770), Crompton’s mule (1779), cylindrical press (1783), rolling mill (1783), steam hammer (1784), power loom (1785), metal-turning lathe (1797), boring machines (1803), the hydraulic turbine (1825): these were the technological advances that resulted in revolutionary enhancements in productive power and in ensuing material enrichment, which in turn extended and secured the European ascent to global preeminence and imperialist hegemony.” [434]
• See the [Vries 13:299-300] and [Duchesne 11a:145] citations in section V-3.K, on how Whites’ superior industry has enabled them to develop and/or purchase raw materials overseas, transport them home, create value-added products, and then finally sell them on the world market at lower prices than competitors.
• “As a rule, innovation created its own markets. It cheapened goods and consumption (domestic and foreign) grew in response. Indeed, as Mokyr writes: “…ingenuity and innovativeness… drove exports and trade, not the other way around.” The terms of trade of Britain’s exports, which almost entirely consisted in manufactured goods, fell, i.e. they became relatively cheaper as compared to Britain’s imports that increasingly consisted in food, raw materials and semi-manufactured products. In that way, industry led and trade followed, or to put it more poetically: “Trade functioned as the handmaiden of industry.” Britain, from quite early on, had a major comparative advantage in manufacturing. At least from the 1780s, manufactured goods overwhelmingly dominated exports. It was simply good economic sense to import an increasing amount of food and raw materials and focus on what the country did best. Britain did what all advanced economies tend to do: specialise in producing products with high added value and import the ingredients one needs to produce them.” [Vries 13:299-300]
; “[M]ost of Britain’s “ghost acreage” was just land that might be used. It only could be and was effectively used thanks to those technical and organisational changes – and the rise of total incomes – that are at very the heart of the process we call industrialisation. In brief, there would have hardly been any ghost acreage if it were not for productivity-enhancing changes. It was not so much ghost acreage that generated modern economic growth but rather the other way around, with ghost acreage being a necessary condition at best but never a sufficient one…
Obviously, a country that wants to specialise in the production of manufactured goods and services, as a rule, will (have to) import food and raw materials. That, however, is not a free lunch: those imports have to be paid for. Britain, like all industrial nations in the West, did so by exporting manufactured goods. Not just to its peripheries but all over the globe. It could do so because its manufacturing was efficient and its products became ever cheaper, that is because it had a modern industrialising economy. What is more, it was the countries in the West themselves that financed most of the production of the goods they imported from ‘their’ ghost acreage as well as most of their transportation. Very often, that production and in particular that transportation could only be undertaken in a cost-effective manner because modern Western technology was used.” [301-2]
; “Whatever their impact, the accumulation and division of labour were not the core and motor of the kind of growth that started with industrialisation, although they clearly were important. Investment and investment rates did increase substantially as did specialisation. Production, however, increased far more than aggregated investment and specialisation as such would predict. The main reason for that is innovation, a catch-all phrase that is used in particular for changes in the characteristics of the means of production and the way in which they are combined. The innovations that tend to catch the eye have always been ‘technological’ and the bulk of scholars dealing with industrialisation – and with the Great Divergence – would still agree that what in the end made the difference was technology. I already referred to Jack Goldstone. In his recent book dealing with the subject, Robert Allen wrote: “Technology was the motor of the Industrial Revolution.” His namesake Douglas Allen holds the same view. Joel Mokyr is even more explicit: “The best definition of the Industrial Revolution is the set of events that placed technology in the position of the main engine of economic change.” For Stephan Epstein industrialisation was first and foremost “a technological revolution”, a view that is endorsed by Prasannan Parthasarathi…” [Vries 13:305-6]
; “The challenge for [anti-White, pseudo-] historians who want to refute Eurocentrism in this respect would be to produce a list of technological innovations for other parts of the globe during a similar period of time that would beat this one. They will not manage to do so. ” Herefollows a long series of lists of White inventions of 1700-1850 that drove the Industrial Revolution; inventions in 1) power, 2) metallurgy and machine tools, 3) industrial chemicals , 4) mining, 5) transportation and communication , 6) textiles, and 7) agriculture. [Vries 13:308-10]
; “Let us start with Pomeranz’s thesis on the contribution of the periphery. The simplest way to make the point I want to make is by observing that Britain had to pay for the supplies it acquired there, and then by asking how it acquired the money to do that. The answer is quite simple: by and large by exporting industrial goods. This applies to America as well as to other peripheral areas. Without its industrial exports Britain would not have been able to become a country that at the end of the nineteenth century imported the bulk of its food and other land-intensive resources. Without its Industrial Revolution Britain simply would not have been able to import the goods Pomeranz likes to refer to! Its exports, and thereby its imports, would then have been much smaller. Significantly, the prices of British export products—overwhelmingly manufactured goods—declined as compared to the prices of its imports—overwhelmingly food, raw materials, and semi-processed goods, something Pomeranz does not refer to. Part of this decline may be explained by simple economies of scale, but the bigger part of it is due to technical innovations in production and transport that we consider to be part and parcel of industrialization. Britain’s terms of trade by and large deteriorated during the nineteenth century. That makes me subscribe to the view that industry was a stimulus to trade more than trade was to industry. The Industrial Revolution in B ritain in essence was an increase in productivity, much more than a windfall of cheap resources.
I could go even further. A lot of Britain’s imports would simply have been impossible without industrialization. Not just in the sense I just described, industrialization creating the wherewithal to pay for various land-intensive imports, but also because of the changes in production and transportation that were at the heart of industrialization (railroads, steamships, machinery, artificial fertilizer, and so on and so forth) that enabled the periphery to produce cheaply for the core at the same time enabling the core to produce more and cheaply to provide for its own and its periphery’s needs. The increase in production and export of land-intensive goods in the periphery—and indeed also in the core—was more an effect of industrialization than a precondition.” [Vries 01:435-6]
; See also the [Vries 03:21-2] citation in the next section (2).

2. • “The question still remains whether the Atlantic system played a decisive role in stimulating this revolutionary change; or to put it in the contrafactual terms currentiy popular among economic historians, whether the Industrial Revolution would have taken place without it. The answer, I think, is clearly, yes, it would have. The crucial changes in energy (coal and the steam engine) and metallurgy (coke-smelted iron) were largely independent of the Atlantic system; so was the attempt initially to mechanize wool spinning.” [Landes 98:121]

3. • “The costs in people and resources of Empire for Britain were enormous, so enormous that various scholars claim they, at least in direct monetary terms, surpassed the benefits (O’Brien/de la Escosura/Engerman in: O’Brien/de la Escosura 1998). The direct and indirect benefits, however, were also significant. In that respect, one clearly finds new and more ‘positive’ interpretations of British mercantilism that, ever since attacks on it by Adam Smith, has had a bad press amongst mainstream economists and economic historians who considered it as inefficient and as an obstacle to development.” [Vries 10:18-9]
; “Half of total overseas investment went to countries that were part of the British Empire, and of that half three-quarters went to dominions. As the reader can see, total foreign investment in 1914 of some 4,000 million pounds sterling was substantially higher than national income. The bulk of it was in railroads, harbours, telephone and telegraph lines and the like. To get a realistic idea of total cost of the supposed ‘windfall’ of “happening to have” colonies and ghost acreage one of course would have to add the billions of pounds sterling that Britain spent from the beginning of colonisation onwards to be able to conquer its colonies, to prevent other European imperialist countries from conquering them and to keep and where possible improve its position in the European states system. The number of people leaving the British Isles, in particular for the United States – who can also be regarded as a kind of overseas ‘investment’ – and a way to get rid of surplus population – was enormous…
Whereas costs of formal and informal empire building are not mentioned at all or just in passing by Pomeranz and all those who endorse his thesis, its benefits in terms of providing cheap, land-intensive resources are exaggerated…” [Vries 13:303-4]

4. • See section V-4.B.3 and its sources, particluarly the [Vries 13:246-7,254-6] citations, on how Spain, Portugal, and the Islamic world failed to industrialize and become prosperous despite getting the supposed “windfalls” of precious metals and slaves from America and Africa, while Switzerland did so despite lacking any colonies.
; “[W]hen it comes to fractions of the national economy the colonies of Spain and Portugal at the time definitely were more important for their motherlands than those of Britain were for Britain. That country took off at a time when it no longer ruled what became the United States, from which, after independence, it increasingly began to import its raw cotton. Countries that industrialised quite early, such as Belgium and Switzerland or, somewhat later, Germany, that with its huge population became an industrial super power, had no or hardly any colonies and were not exactly global traders.” [Vries 13:248]
• “[I]ndustrialization in the nineteenth century happened in places without coal (Switzerland, New England) and without early colonies (Belgium, Germany).” [Mokyr 03:18]
• “Switzerland was one of the first industrialized countries. The industralization of Switzerland began, as in Great Britain, with the production of textiles and expanded soon to the construction of machines, to food products and to chemicals and pharmaceuticals…”
• history-switzerland.geschichte-schweiz.ch/industrialization-switzerland.html

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2. Colonies were only a small factor in Britain’s industrial success, and Britain usually had to pay fair market value for the materials it imported.

Europe’s industrial leader Britain did not depend on colonies for its industrialization and trade. Britain had to pay fair market value for most of the resources it imported (even from colonies) [1], and most of its agricultural imports were bought from Europe [2]. It bought most of its cotton from the United States, which became independent in 1776 and made Britain pay dear [3]. Britain’s so-called “ghost acreages”, which were mostly in Europe, amounted to only a tiny fraction of its GDP in 1800, and this produce had to be paid for via exports [4]. Only 4% of Britain’s caloric intake came from colonial sugar, and this was mostly replaced during the 19th century by European beet sugar [5]. Britain (and Western Europe) did possess the agricultural wherewithal to feed herself, but deliberately chose to invest in her specialty of manufacturing, instead [6]. Northeastern Europe could have supplied Britain’s timber needs, instead of Canada, and at a lower price [7]. In 1800, commerce beyond Europe added less than 10% to Britain’s total foreign trade [8]. As late as the 1820’s, 58% of Britain’s piece-goods and over 65% of her cotton manufactures exported went to Europe [9].

1. • “Whereas costs of formal and informal empire building are not mentioned at all or just in passing by Pomeranz and all those who endorse his thesis, its benefits in terms of providing cheap, land-intensive resources are exaggerated. In his publications Pomeranz systematically suggests and sometimes quite explicitly claims that Britain could profit so much from available ghost acreage because that ghost acreage was in countries over which it had political leverage – therefore the frequent use of the term ‘non-consensual’ trade – and where it could organise the economy as it saw fit. Actually, that is not true for many countries that provided Britain with land–intensive raw materials and food. Just think of the United States, an extremely important trade partner for Britain, destination of large amounts of British capital and of large numbers of British migrants and Britain’s main provider of cotton during its take-off. From 1776, they were independent. It only is true to some extent for the white settlement colonies with ‘responsible government’ that played a similar role for Britain’s economy but where the actual power of the mother country was quite minimal. It is not at all true for countries in Central and Eastern Europe that exported food and raw materials to Britain. The position of Ireland, in many respects a real periphery, was a very specific one. Most of the regions where the British bought their land-intensive raw materials and food in principle sold those on exactly the same condition to other (potential) purchasers. Overall, the role of the market in Britain’s economic exchanges with other parts of the world during the nineteenth century was greater and that of coercion smaller than Pomeranz suggests.” [Vries 13:304-5]
; “When it comes to the non-consensual character of trade between Britain and “its” New World periphery, Pomeranz might have expanded a little more on how to fit in the fact that an extremely important part of the New World, to wit the United States, was independent and sovereign from the late 1700s, while “Latin America” only became liberated from Spanish and Portuguese tutelage after 1800. I will not deny that “Britannia ruled the waves,” but how could the British force people there to pay them “their” price and deliver them “their” goods? Pomeranz seems to be aware of the problem and indicates that in the nineteenth century the role of India and China as peripheries became more prominent. That is true, but it does not really fit in “elegantly” in his argument. Neither does the fact that in the 1820s Europe still was by far the biggest importer of British cotton, buying more than 58 percent of the piece-goods and more than 65 percent of the cotton manufactures Britain exported.
All this talking about coercion, collusion, and non-Smithian trade suggests that Britain had a periphery that provided cheaper and easier supplies than peripheries of other regions in the world. The reader, however, looks in vain for a comparison between the prices the British paid in their periphery, prices paid elsewhere in the world and, if they existed, “world market prices.” It is clearly implied in his argument that Britain could procure its cotton from the United States for a lower price than, for example, the Chinese could from their periphery, or from someplace else. But nowhere in his book does Pomeranz put this card clearly on the table, nor is any effort made to prove that this indeed was the case… Sugar, for example, was often sold in Britain at prices higher than world market prices!” [Vries 01:429]
• “Vries also reminds us that West Indian sugar in Britain cost more than world sugar due to preferential duties and that the only West Indian export sold below world prices between 1768 and 1782 was ginger.” [Duchesne 11a:145]

2. • See the [Zanden 09a:256] and [Vries 01:433] citations, below.

3. • “Even in the case of commodities produced by slave labor, there were many instances in which the terms of trade were favorable to the Americas. John McCusker and Russell Menard (1991) observe that “the final thirty years of the colonial era (of the future United States) were marked by a major improvement in the terms of trade as prices for American staples rose more rapidly than those for British manufactures”. Douglass has also estimated that, in general, the years 1793–1808 were marked by “unparalleled prosperity” in the United States, not only because of the increased productivity of shipping and the rise in freight rates, but also the large increases in imports for consumption at favorable prices. In the expansive years of 1815–18 and 1832–39, when a rapid rise in the price of American exports occurred, the terms of trade were also “extremely favorable”.” [Duchesne 11a:145]
• Despite the United States’ slave labor, cotton grown by the dirt poor masses of China (China’s own cotton) and India was likely produced more cheaply. Britain could afford to buy and import cotton from the United States only due to the superior production and transportation methods employed. See the next section (3) and its sources, particularly [Vries 01:430].

4. • “From the mid-eighteenth century, when agricultural trade was probably in equilibrium, to 1800, the ratio between simulated rents and real rents increased by almost 40%, which is an index of how much England profited from ‘ghost acreages’ (or being able to import land-intensive products). The share of agriculture in GDP was only 26% in 1800, and the share of land cannot have been more than half that amount (10–13%), so the extra GDP that resulted from alleviating the land constraint in this way must have been less than 4.5%. Of course, as in the case of Holland, this is an upper bound estimate, a consequence of the assumption that as a result of international trade these countries acquired extra land as a ‘free lunch’, because we simply added ‘ghost acreages’ to the inputs in the production function (or in fact run a simulation with an enlarged land input, which brings the simulated rent down to the level of the real rent). In reality, there are no free lunches, and the services of this extra land were bought by selling capital- and labour-intensive products to land-abundant countries and colonies (Note 13). Producing the commodities that were exchanged for the foodstuffs and the raw materials that were imported from the ‘ghost acreages’ directly and indirectly claimed some land (if only to feed the labourers making those products), as a result of which the net gains from these imports were smaller than suggested by the estimates presented so far.
Note 13: Moreover, as Vries (2001) has rightly pointed out, most of these agricultural imports did not come from colonies overseas, but from Ireland, the Netherlands, Prussia, and Russia, and were therefore not the result of privileged access to certain raw materials and foodstuffs, but of (more or less) ‘free’ commercial exchange.” [Zanden 09a:256]

5. • “Even the imported drug foods could have been done without. The importance of New World peripheries in this field is not stunning. Sugar amounted to 4 percent of the calorie intake in Britain around 1800. These calories could have been missed with out any economically significant consequences. The real loosening of the food constraints was brought about by imports, not from the New World, but from the Celtic fringe, the European continent and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, increasingly from North America and Russia.” [Vries 01:433]
• “Let us note in passing that in the case of sugar, we are dealing with a sweetener that Britons could have done without. Pomeranz also forgets that Europe’s dependency on cane sugar was eventually eased or broken by the familiar process of import substitution. Already toward the end of the 18th century, chemists and agronomists in Germany, Hungary, and France had discovered a practical way of extracting sugar from beets and of breeding the cultivated fodder beets for sugar content. While in 1810, the amount of European beet sugar produced was still tiny compared to cane sugar output, by 1840, its total output as a percentage of the world sugar output had increased to 8 percent and by 1900 to the very high figure of 64 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of cane sugar produced in the Caribbean witnessed a general decline through the 19th century, from 81 percent in 1800 to 48 percent in 1840, to 21 percent in 1910. Exactly how much of this beet sugar was consumed by the British population is difficult to say. But the evidence we do have is sufficient to raise a warning flag against Pomeranz’s seemingly exaggerated estimate that the caloric intake of sugar in the average British diet had increased from roughly 4 percent in 1800 to more than 18 to 22 percent in 1901 (274–75). For it so happens that during this very period, there were fundamental changes in the region of provenance of sugar imports: while 76 percent of sugar imports to the United Kingdom in 1831 came from the British West Indies, by 1850, that figure had dropped to 37 percent, and by 1900, to a mere 4 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage coming from Europe had risen from 1 percent in 1850 to 13 percent in 1875, to 80 percent in 1900.” [Duchesne 11a:141-2]

6. • “Pomeranz tends to give the impression that Britain really went through the eye of the needle, and that without food imports things would have gone very wrong. He thinks it had not much so-called “advantages of backwardness” left. Britain’s increasing dependence on the outside world for food is an unmistakable fact, but it has to be seen in perspective. Its predicament was not as bad as Pomeranz suggests when for example he claims that “. . . English agricultural productivity seems not to have changed much between 1750 and 1850,” or comments that “. . . per-acre and total yields from arable land remained flat and the threat of decline constant.” Britain’s population between 1750 and 1850 increased from some 6 million to some 18 million. Its trade balance for food and drinks in this period changed from a small “agricultural” export surplus up to the 1770s, to an import surplus of some 25 percent, which implies that total production must have roughly doubled. The old system apparently had not yet reached its limits. Production and productivity still could, and did, increase remarkably. The Netherlands, one of the most densely populated regions of Europe in the early nineteenth century, and one of the richest as well, was a food-exporting country. In Britain at the end of the eighteenth century rural agricultural wages were much lower than urban wages, which I regard as an indication that pressures on agriculture were less than possibilities in industry.” [Vries 01:433-4]
• “That Britain was not (yet) in a real Malthusian predicament when its industrialisation started might also be deduced from a couple of other indicators. Between 1700 and 1850 the percentage of its population working in agriculture steadily kept decreasing, whereas its absolute number remained almost constant. Agricultural wages became much lower than wages in industry. The acreage of land used as pasture or meadow increased more than that used as arable. Weight and value of livestock increased substantially. There is discussion whether that was also the case with their number. This is not what one might expect in a country heading for, or even caught in, a Malthusian trap. Considering the circumstances, the overall rise of prices was anything but impressive.
All these remarks, however, are rather minor points, compared to the main criticism that can be formulated with regard to the thesis of the ‘California-School’ that Britain somehow ‘failed’ to procure its own food, clothing, housing and energy. In putting it like this a choice is turned into a failure. It is much closer to the truth to say that for Britain, considering its comparative advantages, it was only logical to let other countries produce the food it could then procure on an international market and to specialise in the production and export of certain manufactures. British agriculture had by far the highest labour productivity in Europe at the height of the Industrial Revolution, but its lead in industry was even bigger. All the imports we referred to were paid for by the proceeds of the strong rise in exports. The main exports were industrial products that, in relative terms, became ever cheaper. This implies, in a nutshell, that industrialisation made imports feasible, rather than imports making industrialisation feasible. What is even more, the countries that exported food and raw material to Britain would not have been able to do so without capital and technology from Britain or other European countries.
All in all therefore, it is incorrect and at the very least an exaggeration to state that Britain was heading for a Malthusian trap at the very moment it started to industrialise and that the revolution was a fortuitous escape from this trap. But even if this were true, then we still only have a description of what happened in Britain, not an explanation. The Malthusian trap is a constant in pre-industrial history. To suggest Britain industrialised because it was heading for a Malthusian trap is begging the question.” [Vries 03:21-2]
; “[T]o suggest as Pomeranz and many others do that Britain was heading for serious Malthusian trouble and could only escape – and in the end industrialise – thanks to imports of raw materials and food definitely is getting the main causality wrong. Agricultural production increased substantially during the country’s take-off.
British agriculture was one of the most productive agricultures in the world in terms of labour productivity. But the gap between the rest of world and Britain in terms of productivity was even wider in manufacturing. Therefore, specialising in manufacturing and importing food and raw materials was the logical thing to do, a fact of which David Ricardo was already aware: ‘… a country possessing very considerable advantages in machinery and skill, and which may therefore be enabled to manufacture commodities with much less labour than her neighbours, may, in return for such commodities, import a portion of the corn required for its consumption, even if its land were more fertile, and corn could be grown with less labour than in the country from which it was imported.’
For Europe as a whole, the suggestion that it was saved by ghost acreage in other parts of the world and able to industrialise thanks to its imports of land-intensive goods is even less convincing. Its total production of cereals tripled over the period of 1815–1913, whereas population only doubled. Germany, which was to become its new industrialising giant, exported grains for most of the nineteenth century…” [Duchesne 13:300-1]
; Duchesne reviews the evidence against claims that various Western European nations were facing a food/agricultural crisis in the 18th and 19th centuries, in [Duchesne 11a:124-137].
; “Pomeranz’s argument that demographic expansion in England was accompanied by rising food prices due to the inability of the agrarian sector to sustain an output high enough to keep up with demand is forcefully questioned by Overton (1998). He argues, on the contrary, that the unprecedented increases in agricultural productivity that England experienced during the 1700s led to a new historical situation in which the old Malthusian “link between population growth and the growth in food prices was irrevocably broken”. This positive relationship
between rising population and rising food prices continued until the 1780s. “But after the 25-year period starting in 1781 the relationship changes: population growth rates rise to unprecedented levels (over 1 percent per annum), but the rate of growth in prices starts to fall, from a peak of over 2 percent per annum” (69). Pomeranz’s figures on wheat prices are thus misleading. Overton notes that the price index of wheat began to rise in the 1760s, as population kept growing, “reaching a high of 296 in 1809, [but] from this peak [wheat] prices start to fall, despite the continued rise in population”.
Thanks to the valuable research of Schofield, Wrigley, and Livi-Bacci, it is well known that in the period between 1700 and 1800–1850, England witnessed a complete end to the old demographic system in which population growth would eventually exceed the ability of the economy to supply food until higher mortality rates and lower birth rates would intervene to control the number of people.” [134-5]

7. • “British North America (Canada) emerged as a major competitor against Russia and other Baltic states only when Napoleon closed the ports of his empire to British shipping. Otherwise, the nascent Canadian timber industry was excluded from the British market by both its high costs and its high shipping charges as compared to the nearby Baltic countries, which also provided the required types of timber, pine, and oak and had a competitive advantage in lower wages and better skilled labor. The rough-hewn Canadian lumber was less valued than the finished timber of the Baltic in the construction sector and shipbuilding industry in Britain. But the threat posed by the Napoleonic wars, including the introduction by Napoleon of his “Continental System” of 1806 intended to block British trade in continental Europe, prompted the British government to subsidize the timber trade of British North America. A discriminatory tariff was thus raised against Baltic timber from 11 shillings per load to 22 shillings in the years 1802–5 and then raised to 65 shillings in the last years of the war. Though this tariff was reduced slightly to 55 shillings in 1821, it remained high enough to ensure to Canadian producers the biggest share of the market.
The Baltic States were willing and able to supply Western Europe and Britain with primary resources. The Nordic countries were as eager as Russia to export their vast supplies of timber. Bo Gustafsson (1996:212) observes that when the timber trade was still restricted to North America, Sweden’s wood exports more than doubled between 1832–5 and 1846–50. Once it was clear to Britain that its national objectives would be best served by a freely operating market, it began to reduce the tariff on Baltic timber in the 1840s, and by 1849, terminated the Navigation Acts. Sweden responded in the first half of the 1850s by increasing exports of timber by 50 to 60 percent, with greater increases after the 1860s. In the end, despite major innovations in the techniques of ocean transport, the shift to free trade led to a steady decline in the proportion of timber imported by Britain from North America (including the United States): from 63 percent in 1850 to 31 percent in 1875, to 28 in 1900, whereas Europe’s share rose from 36 percent in 1850 to 69 in 1875, to 72 in 1900.” [Duchesne 11a:143-4]
• “Besides, imports from outside Europe need not necessarily indicate shortages in Europe. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the British government imposed duties of approximately 100 per cent on all foreign timber while colonial timber was accepted at nominal rates. The prices of timber from the Baltic and Scandinavia were artificially raised to such an extent that in every year from 1816 to 1846, Canadian timber accounted for at least sixty per cent and in most years for over seventy-five per cent of all un-sawn timber imports into Britain despite the far longer distance in shipping required to transport timber from Upper and Lower Canada than from Scandinavia or the Baltic states.” [Vries 13:301]

8. • “The revisionist position also misleadingly discounts the preponderant role of intra-European trade, which dwarfed in volume and value all colonial exchanges. Even for England, the world’s foremost trading nation by 1800, commerce beyond the bounds of Europe contributed less than 10% to the English total (O’Brien, 1982, 1997; O’Rourke and Williamson, 2002). Revisionists downplay as well the capacity of regions such as Scandinavia, the Baltics, Eastern Europe, and Russia to supply many of the key raw resources and grains that stoked the emerging capitalist juggernaut.” [Bryant 06:434]
• “In the period between 1720 and 1780–90, foreign trade provided Britain with 4–8 percent of its total demand, but that the trade “with non-European countries represented some 33–9 percent of total British trade, so that the contribution of the future less developed countries could have absorbed, at most, 2–3 percent of total demand”. Consider also that, without its colonial markets, the English home market would have absorbed some of the resources used in this sector, or a proportion of the resources would have found employment elsewhere.” [Duchesne 11a:86]

9. See the [Vries 01:429] citation, above.

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3. Northern Europe which industrialized got little of the supposed “windfalls” of precious metals and slaves; China had plenty of cheap labor.

Northern Europe, which industrialized first, got little of the supposed “windfalls” of precious metals and slaves from America and Africa. Most precious metals and slaves were acquired (at much expense), used, and/or sold by Spain, Portugal, and the Islamic world, and this ‘bounty’ scarcely did anything for their industrialization or long-term prosperity [1]. At its height during the late 18th century, bullion mining brought to Western Europe each year about a single day’s unskilled wages per person [2]. Slave trade profits were small, amounting to only a few tenths of a percent of Britain’s GDP [3]. The ‘indirect benefits’ of trade related to slave labor are greatly exaggerated, and its costs are ignored [4]. Slave labor was no free lunch: slaves had to be bought, managed, and cared for, and they did not work enthusiastically. In this era, many “free” workers were practically slaves and were paid less than subsistence wages, and so they were hardly more costly than slaves. Cheap labor was no advantage for Europe, as there was an abundance of it in China [5]. Claims are also made about poor slaves constituting “perversely large markets”, but in fact slave populations produced much of their subsistence goods themselves [6].

1. • “The economies of the countries in the West with the biggest, super-normal, ‘windfall’ incomes, Portugal and Spain, never seem to have really profited from them and ended up being quite poor and under-developed. Portugal had a huge and very profitable slave trade and in no country more slaves were employed to work for Western employers than in its colony Brazil, a colony that became a major sugar producer and moreover exported enormous amounts of gold to Portugal. Nevertheless, Portugal continued to be poor and underdeveloped, which by the way was also the case for Brazil, notwithstanding the fact that after its independence, it continued to import slaves and set millions of them to work. Anyone thinking in terms of (primitive) accumulation will have to deal with the question of why Portugal– the longest running European colonial empire– continued to be so poor whereas Switzerland – a landlocked country which never had any overseas colonies – became so rich. A similar question can of course be raised with regard to Spain; a country that acquired enormous amounts of bullion and land, but that according to the most recent estimates saw a decrease rather than an increase in real income per capita over the entire early modern era and where economic development was not exactly impressive. The Conde-Duque de Olivares already in 1631 wondered whether discovering the New World had been a blessing for ‘Spain’: “If its great conquests have reduced this Monarchy to such a miserable condition, one can reasonably say that it would have been more powerful without that New World.” New World bullion brought inflation and financed many wars that were not exactly successful for Spain and, on top of that, created a lot of havoc all over Europe. Over the entire early modern era and on a per capita base no country in Europe had a larger amount of trade with the non-European world than the Dutch Republic. But whereas that trade became even more important for its economy during the eighteenth century, its per capita real income stagnated or even declined then and the country’s economy did not take off.” [Vries 13:246-7]
; “Even though the Portuguese and Spaniards did their utmost to profit as much as possible from the bullion they appropriated in Latin America, its extraction was not a free lunch. There were substantial costs involved in mining and transporting all that bullion, which of course as far as possible were paid for via additional extraction. But the actual gains must have been smaller than the figures presented here – which only refer to total gross production and transfers – suggest. Besides, as already indicated, an increasing amount of bullion stayed in the continent in the form of tax income that was spent there.
Whether the amounts mentioned are big or small can always be turned into a matter of debate, but I fail to see how they might be regarded as the cause or even a major cause of the emergence, let alone the permanency of modern economic growth in north-western Europe. Portugal and Spain, which, however one wants to look at it, must have had the easiest and biggest windfall gains, were not set on a road to take-off. They, in particular the Spanish government, spent most of their bullion in war, and in that way, as indicated, wreaked havoc and destruction all over Europe. But waging war was what basically all governments did with most of their income. The rest of Europe acquired most of its bullion by selling something to the Iberians: that is as payment for products, not for free.” [252]
; “Per capita, much more bullion stayed in Latin America, that around 1800 still had only some twenty million inhabitants, than ever reached Western Europe. Why then did that region not take off?” [253]
; “Looking at the destinations of the slaves who made the Middle Passage, it again is striking how big the involvement of the Spanish and Portuguese and their descendants in Latin America was [Table 33 shows that 6,500K African slaves went to Brazil and the Spanish Empire, against 500K to British North America] and how little this apparently contributed to laying the basis of a lasting acceleration of development in the mother countries as well as in the (former) colonies. In that respect one might of course also wonder why not for example Russia, where many millions of serfs were ruthlessly exploited, did not see successful primitive accumulation and then take off…
[I]t has to be pointed out that there is an increasing awareness that the Atlantic slave trade was not the only major slave trade. More attention to Western slave trade in other regions than the Atlantic, e.g. the slave trade of the Dutch East India Company in ‘the East’ is needed. Europeans, moreover, were not the only ones who enslaved Africans. Arabs and Muslims transported millions of them eastward via the Red Sea, the Swahili Coast and several Trans- Saharan routes. Exact figures for these trades of course are hard to get but there are several estimates that all point to very high numbers. Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau has come up with an estimate suggesting that seventeen million enslaved Africans would have been taken eastwards between the year 650 and 1910/1920; some 9,000 per year during the eighteenth century and no fewer than some 43,000 per year during the next century. He bases his findings to a large extent on figures by Ralph Austen, who later in his work came up with a lowered estimate of some twelve million. Nathan Nunn thinks that some six million African slaves were transported along these three routes between 1400 and 1900. The number for the period before that, from the seventh century onwards, must in any case have amounted to a couple of million. John Wright in his recent publication, which, to me, looks the best substantiated of all, estimates that between 600 and 1900, some six million slaves were transported trough the Sahara; 2.6 Million of them between 1500 and 1900. It, in any case, is not certain that Western, i.e. European slave trade was more extensive than Eastern Arabic-Muslimic slave trade. It would be interesting to know what happened with the money paid to those Arabic-Muslim slave traders. If the slave trade and slavery are supposed to have been so important for Western economic development, why would that not be the case in other instances?” [254-6]

2. • “The idea that shiploads of bullion must have made those who received them rich is almost irresistible. But what amounts are we actually talking about, and what is their value as compared to the national incomes of the countries whose wealth they are supposed to explain? According to the best available estimates, total bullion production in the Americas in silver equivalents (i.e. silver plus gold, expressed in silver equivalents) over the entire period from 1493 to 1800 amounted to 130,000 to 150,000 tonnes. Let us take the highest figure and assume a total production of 150,000 tonnes; that is 150 billion grams of silver over roughly three hundred years. That boils down to 500 million grams per year on average. What is relevant here is the amount that reached Europe, as not the entire production was exported. Let us, moreover, not look at Europe as a whole but only at its Western half, where bullion first arrived. Taking Europe in its entirety would of course reduce the amounts per capita. During the second half of the eighteenth century, exports reached their highest point ever, on average 600 tons per year over the fifty years period. That is some 600 million grams of silver-equivalents for the roughly 100 million people that were on average living in Western Europe at the time. That would amount to six grams of silver per person per year. How much is that? Let us compare this amount of money to the wages of unskilled labourers over that same period as Robert Allen reconstructed them. According to him, London’s unskilled labourers had the highest wage rate of all European cities he discusses: 11.5 grams of silver per day. The lowest rate he found in Krakow, 2.9 grams of silver per day. In the last quarter of seventeenth century, when Western Europe had some 80 million inhabitants, on average some 370 tonnes of silver equivalent reached the region, more than ever before. That would boil down to some 4.5 grams per capita. The highest daily wage rate for unskilled labourers then again was that of London, to wit 9.7 grams of silver per working day; the lowest again that of Krakow, at 2.7 grams.
The bullion imports, impressive as they are in absolute terms, were quite small as compared to total income, even if we assume that in an average family more than one person would bring in some income. A lot of all this bullion, moreover, left Europe…” [Vries 13:249-52]

3. • “Calculations made for the situation in Britain, which shipped about half of all the slaves that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the eighteenth century, do not show super-normal profits: on average they would have been between five to ten percent, probably somewhat closer to ten. This implies that as a percentage of GDP they must have been tiny, especially considering the fact that most estimates still use figures for Britain’s GDP over the eighteenth century that are too low. Slave trade profits can never during the entire eighteenth century have amounted to more than a few tenths of a percent of GDP, at best. Roger Anstey estimated that over the period 1761–1807, the total gross profits of the British slave trade – that is the difference between the total amount of money one paid for slaves when buying them and the total amount of money one received when selling them, without subtracting other costs!, amounted to forty-nine million pounds sterling, on average some one million pounds sterling per year. Britain’s GDP over these years increased from over 100 million annually to over some 250 million pounds sterling annually. To put things in perspective in a different way: in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Britain had some 14,000 seafaring ships. Of these, never more than 204 were engaged in trading slaves. In the Dutch slave trade, the total gross profits over the entire period from 1595 to 1829 have been estimated by scholars who want to show how big they were at between sixty-three to seventy-nine million guilders. There were yearly averages of between 200,000 and 600,000 guilders. At the very end of the seventeenth and the second half of the eighteenth century gross profits at times reached levels of way above one million guilders, with an absolute, all-time peak of 1.6 million Dutch guilders. But one has to realize that in the second half of the eighteenth century, total Dutch oversees trade was an estimated 300 million guilders per year, which is in about the same order of magnitude as Dutch GDP at that time. In French slave trading, one was considered very lucky when average profits of an enterprise were some six per cent. Trade with Africa, where it bought its slaves, took up to fifteen per cent of the ships and thirteen per cent of the tonnage that France devoted to colonial trade in 1788 and some ten percent of the value of its total international trade. Information about the Portuguese-Brazilian case is very limited. That is unfortunate, as it was the biggest and according to Robin Blackburn “may have been the most profitable branch of the eighteenth-century slave traffic.” Profits in the trade in general were not ‘supernormal’, because it was an open, competitive business on the European side and slaves were bought on a market where supply and demand ruled. Europeans could not fix prices.” [Vries 13:257-8]

4. • “Sugar prices – and those of rum – were artificially high as British sugar barons had a monopoly on the markets of Britain and those parts of America that belonged to the British Empire. Their gains to a substantial part were earned over the back of costumers, mostly from Britain, who were deprived of the possibility to buy cheaper sugar from other sellers. This ‘sugar planter’s subsidy’ amounted to several hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling per year in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Only looking at the ‘private’ gains of sugar barons, at least from a macro-economic perspective, is also rather misleading in another respect: the British taxpayer had to pay the sometimes huge costs involved in defending the sugar islands and their trade against foreign threats. When it comes to determining cause and effect, there is the complicating factor that many slave regions inside and outside Great Britain’s empire became good outlets for British products but could only pay for them with money they had earned in selling products to Great Britain. The Navigation Acts turned trade between the ‘motherland’ and the colonies of the British Empire almost inevitably into a kind of communicating vessels. To count the imports from slave-regions and what the British did with them as well as the export to these regions both as gains from trading with them and having slaves there as Blackburn does in his table printed here on page 260, can easily become a form of double counting. It is very doubtful whether it will ever be possible to determine the exact amount of profits or value added for those sectors where slaves provided the labour force. For the main question at hand here, that fortunately is not necessary. The value added produced and the profits made in selling the slave-produced goods may well have been big enough to have functioned as a lever of riches igniting industrialisation. The substantial amounts of money that were earned in trading and employing slaves could in principle very well, in Eric Williams’s own words, have “provided one of the main main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution”. But, and that is my main point, finding the money for investment was not a main bottleneck for Britian’s economy as many sectors could have provided it and escaping from the Malthusian constraints that characterised the old economic regime was not simply and primarily a matter of having more funds. What is relevant here is that you cannot build an entirely new economy on a relatively small sector that only contributes a relatively small sum to total GDP and, very importantly, has relatively few backward and forward linkages…
Some comments are in order to more realistically assess the importance of the figure provided. Firstly, it is very important that Blackburn in this calculations takes on board indirect profits or as he calls it ‘surplus realization’ via [various aspects of Britain’s triangular trade].
This, of course, means that the concept ‘profits of the triangular trade’ – which already provides a quite ‘broad’ interpretation of profits of slave trade and slavery – itself is also stretched to if not over its limits. Applying this strategy systematically, i.e. to every sector of an economy, would in the end lead to absurdly high GDP figures. Secondly, we have to realize that in that figure, all incomes are included, but no ‘hidden costs’ are deducted: that is, monopoly subsidies paid by consumers to sugar producers and overhead costs for defence. If one wants to measure the impact of the ‘New World’ and all its ramifications on GDP and not on private wealth, that in my view is an omission. On top of that, I do not think it is correct to include all the trade referred to as a full side effect of the New World slavery. In my view, that clearly leads to exaggeration. Finally, one may wonder whether there would have been alternatives. Can one simply deduct the entire income from the triangular trade from national income in case it would not have existed? Would all its inputs then simply have been idle? The net financial transfer from India to Great Britain during the period from the 1770s to the 1820s at its height amounted to little over one million pounds sterling, that is less than two per cent of Great Britain’s income in manufacturing, mining and building in 1800 and less than half a per cent of Great Britain’s GDP at the time.
To attribute great importance to a relatively small sum, a strategy very popular with those who want to attack the ‘small ratio’s argument’, by claiming e.g. “X may not be much as compared to GDP but it is as compared to gross investment or net investment”, is futile, as it in principle would make every relatively small sum much more important. Here I can refer to Eltis and Engerman, when, in discussing this strategy of ‘magnifying’ the profits Britain made for the slave trade and sugar production, they write: “But what could have been true for the slave trade or sugar could, under the same assumptions, also have been the case for many other economic activities, both at home and abroad.” The claim that “X may not be much as compared to GDP but it nevertheless is very important because it has so many backward and forward linkages” only is a decisive counterargument when other variables that might be important have far less impact in that respect. In this regard, I endorse the position taken by David Eltis and Stanley Engerman: “If the value added and strategic linkages of the sugar industry are compared to those of other British industries, it is apparent that sugar cultivation and the slave trade were not particularly large, nor did they have stronger growth-inducing ties with the rest of the British economy.” There is, however, theoretically at least, a way to support the argument that small incomes from the periphery actually were greater, in the sense that they are more relevant than they appear in pure amounts of money and that is by claiming that early modern Britain, or Europe, had no alternative source of income – or nothing that comes sufficiently close to it – for the income it earned in its periphery. Personally I tend to think that this is exaggerated and that in any case to a substantial extent, alternatives at home or elsewhere could and would have been found. The backward and forward linkages of colonial products like sugar and tobacco were quite small. With cotton, things, of course, were different but in this case from the end of the eighteenth century onwards the independent United States became by far the most important supplier, so Britain simply had to pay the same market prices as everyone else and in that respect had no special advantage over other countries.” [Vries 13:258-62]

5. • “An underlying suggestion in Pomeranz’s comments on the situation in the periphery is that the labor of slaves was cheaper, which made their produce cheaper, and that therefore the British were somehow in a privileged position by having the possibility to buy in a slave periphery of their own. This sounds plausible, but is it true? Should one really expect slaves to produce cheaper than domestic workers, who could be, and normally were, paid wages far below subsistence costs? There were millions of domestic laborers in India at the end of the eighteenth century when this region was becoming a periphery of Britain. There were also millions of them in China. In both countries, as Pomeranz himself indicates, wages were lower than in Europe, and I bet they were lower than the “wages” of slaves in the New World. There is no denying that Britain bought most of its cotton from the South of the United States, and that it did so because for Britain this region was the cheapest supplier. But I wonder whether this had much to do with “non-consensual trade” and slavery. The United States was simply much closer to British ports than were the big Asian producers, and its economy was far more open. Transport inside the United States became relatively cheaper and less problematic than in large parts of Asia because of the extension of railway lines and canals. The plantation system had all kinds of economies of scale, not because it worked with slaves, but simply because plantations were bigger enterprises than most Asian cotton farms. In Asia, in all probability, cotton production would have been cheaper than in the United States.” [Vries 01:430]

6. • “When it comes to the supposedly “perversely large” export markets of the New World, I wonder how large “perversely large” is. Again, the United States was a sovereign country. If people there bought cotton cloth and other things from Britain, it was because they wanted to and had their reasons. The West Indies in any case could never have been a perversely large market. Their population simply was not big enough. In 1801 the British Caribbean was inhabited by 760,000 people. Pomeranz suggests that the market for British goods in slave regions could become larger than “normal” because, among other things, slaves were in no position to produce their own food and clothing. They lacked the time and the freedom to do so. This is an exaggeration. Not all slaves there were working as laborers on cotton plantations, and even those on plantations were not producing cotton most of the time. Contrary to Pomeranz’s assertion we know that slaves in the southern United States were producing quite some grain, vegetables, meat, potatoes, and clothes. So chances are that markets here were not perversely large either.” [Vries 01:432]
; “When it comes to demand from the ghost acreage regions, I will only make some brief comments. The parts of the Atlantic world where the British indeed had and kept political leverage were fairly small and did not have many inhabitants. Slaves formed by far the biggest part of the population of the British Caribbean Islands. On Jamaica, for example, in 1800 they accounted for about 90 per cent. The total number of slave inhabitants of the British Caribbean in 1790, at the height of sugar production by slaves, was 480,000. That is substantial. But can purchases on their behalf really have had the consequences Pomeranz attaches to them? Only half or even fewer of those slaves in the British Caribbean were engaged on sugar plantations. The rest worked on secondary crops, livestock or gardening pens. Exports played a much smaller role in the economies in the Caribbean than has often been suggested. According to Eltis in those colonies the majority of production was focused on reproducing the colony itself and not on exports. Contrary to Pomeranz’s assertion, we know that slaves in the South of the United States also produced some subsistence goods like grain, vegetables, meat, potatoes and clothes for their own consumption.” [Vries 15:389-90]
• “The domestic market of the New World for British exports was important but not as large as Pomeranz claims; in 1820, Europe still remained the major importer of British cotton, and the Americas as a whole never absorbed more than 30 to 35 percent of British cotton exports between 1820 and 1896. Not only was the population of the West Indies small, but many slaves in the South of the United States were also producing their own food and clothes. The expansion in the demand for colonial staples in Europe and for European manufactures in the Americas was largely a function of falling transportation costs brought on by changes in ship design as well as improvements in the handling, sorting, and ware-housing of goods.” [Duchesne 11a:145]

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4. China possessed enormous domestic supplies of raw materials that Europe lacked, including cotton and sugar, and a bigger market.

All the ‘advantageous access’ to resources that anti-Whites claim Europe had in the 18-19th centuries, was in fact possessed to an equal or greater degree by China, who nevertheless lagged behind and did not create an industrial revolution. China had extremely fertile agriculture (section V-1) with enormous domestic production of cotton and sugar, both of which ‘lucky’ Europe had to purchase and import entirely from overseas [1]. China also possessed large amounts of metals, minerals, and coal [2]. Post-1500, China annexed enormous tracts of neighboring lands to its empire and colonized internal ‘frontier lands’ inhabited mainly by non-Han natives. These territories were rich with resources (see next section). There were also plenty of rich lands overseas accessible to China. China had a huge, unified state within a vast continent and a much bigger market than Europe, including Europe’s colonies [3]. The Chinese simply did not develop their available resources and markets to the extent that Europeans did [4].

1. • “Even if we were to accept the “one China” claim – the argument that China has always been unified and that unification has been the “necessary” course of Chinese history – we have to ask: does a resource have to come from the outside to count as “ecological relief”? If England was fortunate to have convenient access to its supplies of coal, what about the southern tropical regions of China that benefited from extensive sugarcane cultivation, particularly Guangdong, Fukien, Sichuan, and Taiwan? What about the enormous quantity of raw cotton that could be grown in many provinces of China thanks to the moist climate? Cotton was brought to China during the Sung era from Indochina and from Turkestan. By the late Ming era, it was firmly established in the Yangtze Delta as well as Shantung, becoming one of the most important fiber crops.“Lucky England” had to cross the Atlantic Ocean to obtain a large proportion of its raw cotton and sugar supplies.” [Duchesne 11a:156-7]
• “Pomeranz himself indicates that in the the eighteenth century Jiangnang Province in China had a cotton production of some 500,000,000 pounds, as compared to Britain’s import in 1815 of 100,000,000 pounds, and in 1830 of 263,000,000 pounds. In 1870 China as a whole produced 1,850,000,000 pounds, which he thinks is at least as much as it was in 1750, when the population was much smaller. Overall cotton consumption per capita in China in the mid- to late eighteenth century is considered to stack up quite well against Europe’s.” [Vries 01:431]

2. • See the [Vries 13:347-8] citation, below; and the [Duchesne 11a:155-6] and [Vries 15:403-5] citations in the next section.

3. • “When it comes to explaining the Great Divergence, the standard claim that ‘the West’ would have had bigger or better functioning exchange networks or markets, which would have then triggered its unique development, has lost much of its credibility. As compared to Qing China, to stick to our favourite ‘test-case’, Western countries were quite small. Their markets, moreover, often were badly integrated. Early modern Britain was something of an exception. No domestic market in Europe was better integrated but as compared to China, and even as compared to several Chinese regions, the number of its inhabitants was anything but impressive. Even if we include all its colonies or even broader all its main trade partners, it still was fairly small. When we focus on the market for consumer commodities, the place, so to speak, where the first industrial revolution was decided, absolute size does not seem to have been what really mattered or made a major difference for beginning industrialisation. Comparing Great Britain and China, Great Britain simply did not have an advantage here.” [Vries 13:422]

4. • “Possibilities to profit from [China’s] new lands as they presented themselves often were not utilised. Government often was reticent to let Han Chinese settle in peripheral zones. It did not exactly promote trade in or with its new territories. There are various examples of government discouraging or even prohibiting the mining of precious metals and minerals in Xinjiang, or the starting of various projects that might help in developing the region. Tibet was known, in any case in the West, to be rich in minerals. This explains Western, i.e. British, interest in the region. The Qing state did not take it upon itself to exploit them, nor did it encourage or help others to do so. During the eighteenth century, it not only tried to strictly regulate migration to Taiwan, it also frequently restricted its trade.
In this respect, what happened in Manchuria or rather what did not happen there is highly interesting and will serve as an example…” [Vries 13:347-8]
; See the [Vries 15:403-5] citation in the next section (5) for details of China’s lack of development of Manchuria’s rich resources.

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5. China obtained a great bounty of de facto colonial acquisitions in the 17th-18th centuries.

China obtained a great bounty of resources in de facto colonies during the 17th-18th centuries [1], while Europe was developing its own colonies. During the Qing era, the Chinese acquired the islands of Taiwan and Hainan and penetrated deeply into their massive tropical territories to the south and west, much to the displeasure of the native inhabitants. The take from these regions included lumber, coal, precious metals, and agricultural goods such as spices and sugarcane [2]. China frequently smashed native rebellions to retain control [3]. China also acquired the vast regions of Outer China rich in precious metals and minerals, i.e. Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia, nearly doubling its size [4]. China’s Manchu overlords also brought in Manchuria, about twice the size of France. Manchuria was an untamed realm of highly fertile farmlands and vast woodlands. It was a major producer of soybeans and fertilizer for the Yangzi delta. Manchuria also contained precious metals such as gold, copper, lead, and tin; as well as rich coal deposits, the subject of the next section [5].

1. • “[Pomeranz at times likes to separate] England from the rest of Europe and writes of her importation of food from Ireland, for example, and of timber and iron from Sweden and Russia, as if this were an indication of England’s inability to satisfy her own needs. As we will see soon, at no time does he separate the more advanced Yangzi Delta region from the rest of China in this way to consider how much this one region may have benefited from the importation of goods from the rest of China and from China’s own colonial acquisitions.” [Duchesne 11a:150 (note20)]
; “Pomeranz’s entire argument is that ecological problems and economic conditions worsened in China after the 1850s, and not in Europe, only because the Chinese did not have the fortune to “internalize the extraordinary ecological bounty that Europeans gained from the New World,” in addition to their cheap underground supplies of coal. “Lucky Europe, Normal China,” says the sinologist Peter Perdue (2000) in his review of the Great Divergence. But once we sift carefully through this book, it becomes clear how tendentious Pomeranz’s geographical/ecological perspective really is. Geography is an important factor in his account only when it can be shown that Europe, and Europe alone, was the beneficiary of internal and external ecological endowments, or, conversely, when it can be shown that China did not enjoy any geographical handouts. Thus, if England achieved a breakthrough in the use of coal energy, it was fundamentally a function of “geographic good luck”. If China was unable to develop steam engines, even though it understood the basic principle of atmospheric pressure, or so Pomeranz would have us believe, it was because its supplies of coal were located too far from its economic centers. If Europe had more slack resources and more room for further growth, this was due to the “ironic benefit” of its earlier inefficient use of land resources. If China had less unused resources and less room for future expansion, this was due to its more efficient use of resources. If Europe had larger amounts of grasslands and pastures that could be converted to arable land, this was because the lands “were sufficiently well-watered” as a “matter of original endowment”. If China was unable to convert its remaining grasslands into arable lands, this was the unfortunate accident of its “semi-arid” climes.
In truth, Imperial China was not one bit normal. On a wide range of environmental factors it was exceptional and far luckier than Europe, both in the internal resources it inherited as a “matter of original endowment” and in the truly massive ecological windfall it enjoyed from its own territorial acquisitions after 1500.” [153-4]

2. • “While the regions of contemporary inner China were under imperial authority by Ming times (1368–1644), at least half of this huge territory was barely colonized by Han migration before 1500, particularly the lands of the southwest: “parts of Guangdong in the east to all of Guangxi, Guizhou, and westward into Yunnan and Sichuan was still largely non-Chinese in population”. This colonial penetration into the jungles of the southwest continued earnestly through the Qing era (1644–1911). While Guizhou, for example, was turned into a province early in Ming times, with considerable Han migration thereafter – sparking major revolts including one that lasted nearly four years (1499–1502) led by a “fierce female rebel leader” from a prominent Yi family – this region still continued to experience intense migratory settlement and exploitation well into the 19th century. Thus Guizhou yielded wood that was floated out on the rivers and had mines that produced lead, copper, iron, silver, cinnabar and gold. The policies pursued by the Qing government to secure this rich and underdeveloped area included summary justice, limitations on the freedom of movement of the non-Chinese, the building of walled towns, implanting military colonies, confiscating tribal lands and giving them to the Chinese, and a deliberate attempt to smash up tribal cultures. There were three large-scale Miao attempts at liberation, two in the course of the 18th century and one in the middle of the 19th century, all of them unsuccessful.
In light of these facts, how much weight should we assign to Pomeranz’s argument that the Chinese were more successful than the Europeans “at finding local palliatives for shortages of land-intensive resources” once we realize that most of these resources came from the colonization and outright annexation of non-Han lands? How revealing are Pomeranz’s attempts to show that the regions of Guangdong and Guangxi were less used up ecologically than France in the period between 1750 and 1850 once we learn that natives were still the majority in Guangxi in 1600, and that during the Ming dynasty there were 218 tribal uprisings in Guangxi alone, and that “refusals to submit to the pressures of Han colonial settlement and Han political over-lordship continued under the Manchu dynasty and were suppressed in some cases with wholesale massacres of the utmost ferocity”?” [Duchesne 11a:155-6]
; “If we consider that Chinese expansion in the Qing era also involved the appropriation of the large island of Taiwan, including Hainan…, we are really left wondering what value there is to the claim that England was a unique beneficiary of colonial resources. Very little, once we consider as well Pomeranz’s own observation that the Lower Yangzi, the very region he insists should be compared to England, imported “huge amounts of primary products,” including 13 to 18 percent of its total food supply from “outside”…” [156]

3. • See the [Duchesne 11a:155-6] citation, above.

4. • “Pomeranz goes through great lengths fabricating the argument that China could not possibly have benefited as much from its long distance “consensual” trade as Europe did from its coercive trade with the New World (242–53). Modern China, we are made to believe, was a society without any imperial ambitions. But one only needs to look at the historical geography of China to know that the People’s Republic of China one finds in maps today is a very recent creation. Outer China, a vast territory roughly the same size as inner China, populated by Mongols and Turkish and Tibetan stock-raising peoples, was taken over politically only during the course of the 18th century.” [Duchesne 11a:155]
• On Outer China’s resources, see the [Vries 13:347-8] citation in the previous section (4).

5. • “[I]t is highly interesting what happened in Manchuria, or rather what did not happen there. We see some ‘filling up’ here too. The ‘frontier’ moved somewhat northward and the region became more or less a developed province, although it never needed to import grain. But considering what happened there after the 1850s, it all was too little too late. According to Yong Xue, Manchuria could have functioned as a huge reservoir of ghost acreage – and also as a provider of coal – for China Proper during the very long eighteenth century. One can only agree with him when he writes: ‘The vast virgin lands in manchuria off ered a real windfall, representing a piece of geographical luck for Jiangnan.’ Manchuria enjoyed extraordinary natural endowments. The breath of its farmland was enormous. I want to remind the reader that Qing Manchuria in its entirety, till the Russians took over part of it in the 1850s, measured about 1.2 million km2. That is a tract of land roughly twice as big as contemporary France. At the end of the nineteenth century a traveller still characterized it as a region that was agriculturally rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Whereas many forests in China Proper had been stripped bare by the end of the eighteenth century, the Manchurian lands remained cloaked in what appeared to be endless woodlands. The region had plenty of fur-bearing animals, fish and oysters. Its soil contained gold and, as discovered late in the nineteenth century, copper, lead and tin. It was famous for its ginseng. But the Qing elite did not really care.
It would of course be incorrect to suggest that nothing happened. The virgin lands in Manchuria did provide China Proper with soybean. But they could have done so much more and much earlier: that would have meant more fertilizer and more pig food. Pomeranz and Li Bozhong do refer to its soybean production and to substantial exports of soybeans to China Proper. According to Xue, however, their estimates of exports are too high. He thinks Manchurian bean-cake exports to Jiangnan were at best 10 per cent of Pomeranz’s estimate and only 4 per cent of that by Li Bozhong, which in the end Pomeranz regards as more likely than his own. So Manchuria according to him (i.e. Xue) did much less to relieve pressure in China Proper than these two experts suggest. He also shows, and that in this context is more important, that even if their estimates were correct, production still was much lower than what the region might have produced if it had been opened and if it had been systematically exploited. That becomes only too apparent after the ‘opening’ of Manchuria, when the region was turned into the biggest soybean producer in the world, producing more than 5 million tons or almost 60 million shi per year, which is three times as much as Li Bozhong’s over-optimistic estimate for Manchuria’s exports roughly a century earlier.
Manchuria could have become a major grain supplier for the capital too. That claim is not an anachronistic assumption. Manchuria had potential: it had excellent soil and enough water for farming. Grain prices there were only half what they were in China Proper. People at the time knew this and made suggestions about how to use the region’s potential. He Qizhong, an imperial censor, for example, did so in the middle of the eighteenth century. Let me again quote Xue:
‘If the Qing government had coordinated a series of agricultural projects in Manchuria instead of prohibiting immigration into the region, if commercial institutions in China had been effective enough to channel the large amount of capital needed to develop the frontiers and establish large plantations as the British did in North America, then a large amount of Manchurian grain could have flowed into Beijing.’
For the nineteenth century, talking about industrialization means talking about coal. That was yet another resource that Manchuria could have supplied to parts of China Proper. He Qizhong, the imperial censor to whom we just referred, in 1745 reported abundant coal resources in Fengtian (modern Liaoning), which were located fairly close to seaports. He urged that this natural bounty be exploited to relieve the shortage of firewood in the region. Nothing of the sort happened. One cannot therefore, with Yong Xue, escape the conclusion that the opportunities provided by Manchuria, which indeed could fittingly be labelled ‘China’s geographical luck’, were squandered. With him one can point at various reasons for that, like tensions between han and Manchus or internal institutional defects of the Ming and Qing states. Fundamental for the subject of this book is the fact that government was unwilling to grasp those opportunities itself or give private entrepreneurs the possibility to do so.” [Vries 15:403-5]
• “[T]he Lower Yangzi, the very region he insists should be compared to England, imported “huge amounts of primary products,” including 13 to 18 percent of its total food supply from “outside” and at least 20 to 30 percent of its “labor-saving” fertilizers from Manchuria.” [Duchesne 11a:156]

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C. Argument: “Europe’s Industrial Revolution was due to the good fortune of Britain having a lot of coal located near industrial areas.”

1. The Industrial Revolution, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, was not dependent on coal.

In fact, Europe’s Industrial Revolution led by Britain was the culmination of over a century of excellence in mechanical science, metallurgy, craftsmanship, and industrial technology. Britain and Europe had been innovative in a wide variety of technologies, many having nothing to do with coal; such as agriculture, food canning, textiles, ceramics, canal construction, shipbuilding, and watchmaking [1]. Up until 1860, half of Britain’s productivity growth came from non-mechanized sectors of the economy, and steam power represented less than half of her motive power. Much of Britain’s Industrial Revolution was powered by water wheels, including her famous cotton mills that drove her textiles industry [2]. Other European nations were highly innovative and industrial, as well [3]. The Industrial Revolution in France was based largely on her advances in water power technology, such as the breast-wheel, curved vanes, and the hydraulic and axial turbines [4]. Other White nations industrialized early despite lacking coal, including Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, and New England in the United States [5].

1. • “It is the issues above that led Deirdre McCloskey a number of years ago in a couple of brief but persuasive surveys of innovation in Industrial Revolution Britain, to argue against the plausibility of incentive based explanations (McCloskey, 1989, 1994). The innovations of the Industrial Revolution occurred across such a diverse range of sectors and activities – new rotations in farming, animal breeding, yarn production, cloth production, canals, railways, steam power, iron and steel, pottery – that they could not be explained by accident, or by cheap coal. There were capital using innovations, and capital saving innovations, fuel using innovations and fuel saving innovations. The economy was transformed by a broad wave of innovation in industries facing very different relative cost shares of labor, capital and energy. The driver of this must be more general than any accidental price configuration.” [Clark 10:8-9]
• “The steam engine… was not an ‘accidental’ solution to a ‘Malthusian’ problem. Britain had a tradition of trying to harness energy in production. One must, moreover, not lose sight of the fact that in Britain: “Innovation was a broad process, pervasively embedded in many industries, even those that were essentially matters of hand technology (and) present across virtually all activities that comprised the British economy at that time”. This broad process of innovation that had already started decades before actual industrialisation contributed substantially to total economic growth in Britain. Up until the second half of the nineteenth century fifty percent of all growth in productivity came from non-mechanised sectors of the economy. It was a precondition for its industrialisation and had no parallel in China. Neither do we see the kind of interaction between scholars, engineers, tinkerers, artisans and entrepreneurs and the ‘Baconian’ efforts to try and apply science in China.” [Vries 10:17]
• “[I]n Cornwall, where coal was expensive, its high cost did not slow down technological progress, but simply re-oriented it into another direction. Indeed, the high cost of coal has been cited as the stimulus for the development of fuel-saving technology in Cornwall. The success of Cornish engineers such as Arthur Woolf in developing fuel-saving engines wherever coal was expensive suggests that what was driving technological progress was something deeper and stronger than cheap coal and high wages, although the latter were affecting the direction into which innovation moved. Coal was important, but it was itself subject to technological progress, and its cost and availability were clearly endogenous to deeper forces. As E.L. Jones (2012, p. 7) remarks, “industry was growing in the North before any significant generation of power using coal, while trades vital for inventiveness — notably clock and watchmakers in South Lancashire — used little fuel.”” [Kelly 14:4]
• See section V-2.F and its sources on how China’s last manufacturing advantages disappeared in the early-mid 18th century as Europeans discovered China’s ‘trade secrets’ or developed alternatives, forging ahead in areas such as ceramics, textiles, metallurgy, and agriculture.
• More on Europe’s advanced industrial technology in section V-5.B.1 and its sources.
• See the sources below on the extensive technological contributions of continental Europe.

2. • “In 1800, the steam engine was still used primarily in mining; only 21 percent of the engines were used in textiles, and most of these were used as accessory devices for pumping water for water wheels. Water power continued to be a cheaper source of energy than steam power as late as the 1840s and 1850s. The famous cotton mills that led the change from cottage to factory were powered by water wheels. Of the 15 million acres of arable land in England, only about 200,000 acres were cultivated by the steam plough in the 1860s. It was only after 1870 that steam power accounted for 50 percent of British industrial motive power. To the degree that this is accurate, however, Pomeranz needs to explain how an economy in which the substitution of mineral for organic and water power was so slow in pace and limited in extent before the 1850s but was still able to increase its industrial output, according to Crafts’s (1989: 66) conservative calculations, at a rate of 2.11 percent per annum between 1780 and 1801 and at a rate of 3.0 percent between 1801 and 1831. Put another way, if Britain’s traditional economy had little room for expansion, how do we account for the fact that up until about 1860, 50 percent of all productivity growth came from the non-mechanized sectors of the economy?
These facts suggest, indeed, that cheap coal was not the only factor allowing Britain to make a major breakthrough in its economic path. There were other, less coal-oriented routes to industrial development. If Britain had not been as lucky in its mineral endowments, it would have relied more heavily on water power. This is exactly what France did…” [Duchesne 11a:148-9]
• See the [Vries 10:17] citation, above.
; “As far as traditional sources of energy were concerned, here too Britain still had room to manoeuvre, although here the situation was tighter. In a way the increase in population was an increase in (human) energy. Right up to the late 1870s the use of water-power increased, the number of horses continued to increase till even after that date. The continuation of all sorts of traditional production processes for so long also indicates that the limits of traditional economic growth had still not been reached. Growth in traditional i.e. non-iron, non-steam sectors of industry would have doubled per capita income in Britain between 1780-1860.” [Vries 03:21]
• “But industrializing processes were well underway [in Europe] prior to any significant utilization of coal, and likewise preceded, and would even make possible, major increases in the import-export trade (Vries, 2001). Coal in the ground counts for little without the technical means and mining skills to extract and process it into usable energy — as appears to have been the case with late Imperial China, which while abundantly endowed with this mineral (ranking third globally in verified reserves), failed to exploit its potential until after the inroads of Western capitalist penetration (and despite having pioneered coke and iron production centuries earlier in the Song period).” [Bryant 06:433]

3. • “The technology that created the Industrial Revolution, then, was not exclusively British: it was European. Taking what Eric Jones has called the “little England” view and focusing on Britain’s Industrial Revolution is a bit misleading. While Britain pulled ahead of the rest of Europe for a while between 1760 and 1820, its technology relied heavily on epistemic bases developed elsewhere in Europe, especially in France, but also in Germany, Scandinavia and Italy. Comparing Europe with China is therefore to some extent misleading: the various European societies complemented one another, and their internal competition gave it a dynamism that China lacked. Thus, for instance, when in Britain chemical and engineering education began to fall behind, its potential competitors on the continent made up the slack. It also tends to divert attention too much to Britain’s special conditions such as its coal and its colonies, while industrialization in the nineteenth century happened in places without coal (Switzerland, New England) and without early colonies (Belgium, Germany).” [Mokyr 03:18]
; “The historical reality was that many if not most of the technological elements of the Industrial Revolution were the result of a joint international effort in which French, German, Scandinavian, Italian, American and other “western” innovators collaborated, swapped knowledge, corresponded, met one another, and read each others’ work. A counterfactual industrial revolution led by Continental economies would have been delayed by a few decades and differed in some important details. It might have relied less on “British” steam and more on “French” water power and “Dutch” wind power technology, less on cotton and possibly more on wool and linen. But in view of the capabilities of French engineers and German chemists, and the removal of many institutions that hampered their effective deployment before 1789, it would have happened. Even without Britain, by the twentieth century the gap between Europe and the rest of the world would have been there.” [Mokyr 02b:7-8]
; “Although [Britain] did lead in some of the most prominent areas of technological progress such as steam power, cotton-spinning, and iron production, many of the other inventions that made the Industrial Revolution a success, especially in chemicals, were imported from France and other places. In industries such as paper, food-processing, chemicals, and even some textiles such as linen and silk, Britain was a student rather than a teacher. But whereas Britain did not have a monopoly in invention, for many decades it dominated in developing inventions made at home or elsewhere, putting new ideas to successful commercial use, and finding new applications for them. French inventions such as chlorine bleaching, the wet-spinning process of flax, gas lighting, food-canning, and the Jacquard loom, introduced to Britain after 1820, found widespread application in the British silk industry.” [Mokyr 09:99]
; “Many of the great insights and ideas that drove technological progress in this age came from the European continent. The silk-throwing mill of Thomas Lombe in Derby, patented in 1718 and erected in 1720, is a case in point, as it was based on techniques “borrowed” from Italy… Britain’s skilled craftsmen and mechanics then invariably invariably experimented in further improvement and refinement. Jean Ryhiner, a Swiss manufacturer visiting Britain, remarked in 1766 that for a thing to be perfect it has to be invented in France and worked out in England. In this, he may have been echoing a common view: Daniel Defoe had made the same point earlier, noting that “the English… are justly fam’d for improving Arts rather than inventing” and elsewhere in his Plan of English Commerce that “our great Advances in Arts, in Trade, in Government and in almost all the great Things we are now Masters of and in which we so much exceed our Neighboring Nations, are really founded upon the inventions of others”. David Hume pointed out that “very improvement which we have made [in the past two centuries] has arisen from our imitation of foreigners… Notwithstanding the advanced state of our manufactures, we daily adopt, in every art, the inventions and improvements of our neighbors”. These statements should be taken with a pound of salt. British manufacturers led in some of the cutting-edge techniques of the period, such as the use of coal, steam, metals, and textiles, but lagged in other areas, above all in chemical knowledge, glass, paper, and high-end textiles.” [106]
; “On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, Britain could rely on a comparatively large number of skilled mechanics and technicians, people who had been selected for their dexterity and mechanical gifts and trained as apprentices. Of course, other countries could count on such people as well, but Britain seems to have been particularly well endowed with them. Continetal Europeans felt envious and frustrated, reflected Leibniz’s prophetic words, written in 1670: “It is not laudable that we Germans were first in the invention of mechanical, natural, and other arts and sciences, but are the last in their expansion and betterment. The French political economist Jean Baptiste Say, a keen observer of the economics of his time, noted in 1803 that “the enormous wealth of Britain is less owing to her own advances in scientific acquirements, high as she ranks in that department, as to the wonderful practical skills of her adventurers in the useful application of knowledge and the superiority of her workmen.” A Swiss visitor, Cesaar de Saussure, had noticed the same seventy-five years earlier: “English workmen are everywhere renowned, and justly. They were to perfection, and though not inventive, are capable of improving and finishing most admirably what the French and Germans have invented”.” [107-8]
• “[I]t is also striking that already the Frenchman Denis Papin (1647–1712) was experimenting with a rude kind of steam engine, i.e. at a time when problems of fuel scarcity were far less pinching than in Britain or China one century later. Apart from Britain, he also worked in France and German where conditions were quite different.” [Vries 13:168]
; “This “industrial revolution” in the wider interpretation of the term also was strongly propelled by new technologies and by coal and iron. But there was more to it. And, whatever the different routes it took, it always materialized in sustained economic growth accompanied by structural economic change. If we accept this broader interpretation of the term and look at it as a take-off into self-sustained growth and structural economic change, the thesis that Western Europe as a whole industrialized while China and the rest of Asia, except Japan, did not, becomes far more acceptable. Belgium and Switzerland industrialized quite early on. A country like France may not have industrialized fast in the coal and cotton sense, but it had sustained economic growth in the nineteenth century. The same goes even for Italy. Germany did not copy Britain, yet it became an industrial giant. The Netherlands and Denmark in the nineteenth century can hardly be called industrialized nations, but their economies modernized, their inhabitants were wealthy and steadily became wealthier.” [Vries 01:444]

4. • “Lacking coal that could easily be converted into coke and facing a geographic situation in which the cost of transport could double or triple the cost of coal, France came to depend on water power “to a much greater extent than did her coal-rich neighbours”. Although Englishmen such as John Smeaton (1724–92) made numerous improvements to waterwheels, the French assumed a leading role in the transformation of this source of energy from a traditional craft into a scientific technology. In 1802, they introduced a new breast-wheel with buckets; in 1823–25, they invented an undershot waterwheel with curved vanes; and in the 1830s, they invented and patented the hydraulic turbine, a highly efficient device that could convert the force of falling water into mechanical energy, followed by Joval’s axial flow reaction turbine in 1841 and Girard’s impulse design in 1850, upon which other scientists improved later. The horsepower provided by hydraulic installations around 1845 was three times the power of steam engines. Yet despite the relative absence of steam power before 1850, the French economy performed quite well, with industrial rates of growth of 2.5 percent per year between 1815 and 1850 and labor productivity increases in industry of 1.5 percent from 1825–34 to 1855–64. It achieved these rates, I might add, together with sustained increases in per capita gross domestic product, despite having lost its North American colonies and despite a sharp drop in French sugar production in the Caribbean from 125,000 metric tons in 1787 to just 36,000 metric tons by 1815.
The French case makes it abundantly clear that substitutes to coal could be found that could serve as supplementary sources of energy for industry.” [Duchesne 11a:149]

5. • “The French case makes it abundantly clear that substitutes to coal could be found that could serve as supplementary sources of energy for industry. After all, a coal-poor country such as Holland was able to achieve exceptional success during the 17th century in many industries by relying almost entirely on peat as a source of heat energy for brewing, brick and tile manufacturing, salt refining, distilling, bleaching, dyeing, and printing textiles.” [Duchesne 11a:149-50]
; “Trade and technological creativity, to borrow Joel Mokyr’s (1993) words, can always “liberate nations from the arbitrary tyranny of resource location”. Just consider how Switzerland, with no coal, no iron, no colonies, and no direct access to the sea, obtained vast amounts of raw materials by meeting the “much-dreaded” English competition on the world market with her highly efficient textile and watch- and clock-making export industries.” [150]
; “His thesis is very clear: in the critical years between 1750 and 1800, Denmark averted “an entropic nightmare” by means of a “green revolution” in agriculture, by utilizing new sources of energy and raw materials and by importing increasing quantities of coal from England, all of which she financed mainly by exporting agricultural products. “In the 1820s,” he writes, “the gloomy prophesies abounding in books and periodicals vanished like the morning dew”. Denmark was ready to follow the industrial path of her more advanced European neighbors. It has been estimated that between 1780–89 and 1840–49, life expectancy at birth increased from 35 to 44 years, and that the gross domestic product per capita (1990 currency values) rose from 1,034 in 1700 to 1,274 in 1820 to 2,003 in 1870 – the best record among Nordic countries. ” [151]
• “[I]ndustrialization in the nineteenth century happened in places without coal (Switzerland, New England) and without early colonies (Belgium, Germany).” [Mokyr 03:18]
; “The Netherlands, which did not have much coal, relied to a great extent on imports from British ports and the price of coal in Amsterdam was not much higher than in London. Switzerland, which had no coal either, specialized in industries that could do without.” [Mokyr 09:102]
• “Switzerland was one of the first industrialized countries. The industralization of Switzerland began, as in Great Britain, with the production of textiles and expanded soon to the construction of machines, to food products and to chemicals and pharmaceuticals…”
• history-switzerland.geschichte-schweiz.ch/industrialization-switzerland.html

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2. Britain’s innovation drove its Industrial Revolution; the location of coal deposits hardly mattered.

Britain’s innovation would have driven its Industrial Revolution regardless of the location of coal deposits [1]. Unlike China, Britain had been developing coal as an energy source for a long time [2]. The lower cost of coal in Britain was due not just to location, but to advances in mining and transportation [3]. If coal deposits had been farther away from her current industrial areas, Britain could have transported or imported it, as for example the Netherlands imported British coal at only a little higher price and successfully ran her industry. As it was, Britain had to import all of the cotton for its successful textiles industry, much of its wood, and quality iron ores from Sweden and Spain [4]. Or, Britain could have built an industry nearer the coal. Britain could also have developed water power further, as France did [5], or used wood for fuel instead of coal. Clark and Jacks (2007) calculated that Britain could have completely substituted Baltic timber for coal to fuel its industry at a cost of only about 4% of GDP as late as the 1860’s [6].

1. • “Steam power, to be sure, was a dramatic change, but the Industrial Revolution did not absolutely “need” steam (and for a long time manufacturing in many areas continued to rely on water power), nor was steam power absolutely dependent on coal (peat and wood could be and were used in engines, even though their physical efficiency per pound of fuel was of course lower). Moreover, materials and minerals could be imported. Raw cotton, after all, could not be grown in Britain and was shipped in, first from Asia Minor, then increasingly from North America. High-quality iron ores were shipped in from Sweden and Spain. Raw wool, silk, and flax were also imported—yet the British technological lead in textiles was as clear as it was in iron and steam. The Netherlands, which did not have much coal, relied to a great extent on imports from British ports and the price of coal in Amsterdam was not much higher than in London. Switzerland, which had no coal either, specialized in industries that could do without…
Britain could have been more thrifty in its use of fuel, specialized in lower-energy industries, and tapped alternative sources such as Baltic timber and more efficient water and wind power. These alternatives would have been more expensive, but Clark and Jacks show that this difference would not have imposed a dramatic cost on the economy (in the order of 2% of GDP). Whatever the precise counterfactual chosen, the inference “no coal, no Industrial Revolution” seems untenable.” [Mokyr 09:101-2]
; “As technology advanced and a movement toward a freer trade became established, the tyranny of distanced was progressively weakened and thus whatever role we assign to geography is reduced. The fortuitous presence of natural resources remained of some importance, but as an explanation of British economic leadership it was at best a second-order factor. If nobody had possessed coal, Britain would have had to find an alternative source of energy, and surely water- and wind power would have played a bigger role. The presence of fossil fuels thus had significant economic and environmental consequences, but did not “cause” economic growth. Ingenuity did.” [103]

2. • “[B]etween the 1560s and 1800 (while her economy was still organic) the output of coal per head of population increased 24-fold from 0.062 tons to 1.504 tons (462). The British were dynamically engaged in finding ways to use coal effectively before the invention of steam engines. The English economy was changing during the lifetimes of the classical economists, “becoming less and less organically based [and]…for more than two centuries in England, coal had been replacing wood as the prime source of [heat]” (477). The mechanical knowledge nurtured by Newtonian science was not only a necessary condition for the utilization of coal as mechanical energy but was also the conscious human element which made its use possible in the first place.” [Duchesne 11a:148 (note 17)]
• “Coal already in 1700 provided 50 per cent of total energy consumption in England and Wales. The problems associated with converting heat into motive power had been gradually overcome with the invention and development of the Newcomen atmospheric engine (1712) and later of Watt’s steam engine (1769). Britain was already experimenting with new ways of producing energy when population pressure still was quite low. Wood scarcity was often a problem because demand was so high, not because supply was so low. Just think, for example, of the requirements of the Royal Navy and various sectors of manufacturing…
Like Britain, China faced wood shortages. But hardly anything was done to substantially increase coal production, either by private entrepreneurs or by government.” [Vries 12:13]
• More on China’s lack of development of its coal resources in the next section (3).

3. • “Mokyr also points out that the low price of coal in England in the eighteenth century at locations even a modest distance from the pitheads was largely a function of low transport costs (p. 270). The share of the cost at the pithead in the northeast in the total cost in London in the late eighteenth century, for example, was only about 25%. This implies two things. One is that the cheapness of coal in the English economy was largely an endogenous function of the efficiency of the transport and distribution system which delivered coal to consumers. The second is that since coal was shipped by sea to many consumers, places like Ireland and the Netherlands would have access to British coal on very similar terms…
Coal eventually became very cheap in England, in the late Industrial Revolution period. But as Mokyr observes, this was largely a function of declining transport costs with improvements in shipping, and the building of canals and railways, though reductions in coal duties were also
important.” [Clark 10:6-7]
; See the [Clark 07b:23-4] citation, below.

4. • See the [Mokyr 09:101-2] citation, above.
• “The much more important cost [than mining] from having to rely on coal imports would have come from higher coal prices to final consumers as a result of greater transport costs. But much of the coal mined in England was already shipped considerable distances to final consumers. Between 20% and 33% of all coal mined in England before 1870 reached consumers after a sea voyage, and other coal was carried some distance by canal and rail. Suppose we assume that coal consumption 1740-1869 was as we observe, but all of it had to bear the expense of a sea voyage from another country whose cost was the same as the Newcastle-London voyage. In that case the additional cost of coal to consumers would be a fairly consistent 3.9% of English GDP throughout the years 1740 to 1869 (much more coal was consumed in later years but the transport costs had fallen). This reduction in GDP would not fundamentally change the course of the Industrial Revolution.
Since the coal costs for industries such as iron making or salt making which were very energy intensive and located close to the pits would have been much greater the growth of these industries might have been much more limited. But even if England had not developed a substantial iron industry in the Industrial Revolution era, the productivity gains from iron working were again a minor contributor to the Industrial Revolution. And the less coal was imported for iron making, the lower the extra transport cost identified above. Textiles were where the major productivity gains occurred. And the share of energy costs in textile production was small. In a counterfactual world where the coal reserves were located in Ireland or Scotland or elsewhere in northwest Europe the history of Industrial Revolution England need not have resulted in much slower economic growth.
Equivalently the absence of coal in Ireland, the Netherlands or northwest France does not explain why the Industrial Revolution did not occur there. Throughout this period coal from the Tyne went not just to London but to the rest of northwest Europe. Ireland was the recipient of
supplies from Cumbria and other West Coast English coal fieds. Thus countries like the Netherlands and Ireland had access to coal at prices little higher than those of most of southern England through most of the Industrial Revolution period.” [Clark 07b:23-4]
• “The French understood [the value fossil fuel-based energy], which is why they began to import a growing share of their coal consumption and, shortly after Watt invented his engine, obtained a concession from Watt to make engines in France, soon making models that required less fuel than those made in Britain.” [Duchesne 11a:150]

5. • See the [Duchesne 11a:149] citation in the previous section (1).

6. • “It is often argued that the growing use of coal and the development of coal-using techniques were determined by the exhaustion of timber supplies. Had Britain not been fortunate enough to find itself located on top of a mountain of coal, it is believed, its economic history would have looked quite different. Britain was, throughout the period, a heavy user of timber, and there is no doubt that contemporaries were concerned that it was running out of trees. However, the evidence on the price of timber, as Michael Flinn has shown, does not suggest a serious timber scarcity in the eighteenth century. Charcoal in Britain was not getting much more costly in the half century prior to Abraham Darby’s first commercial use of the coke-smelting process in the eighteenth century, and hence its rising price could not have stimulated the use of coke as a substitute. Had such a scarcity become truly felt, rising prices of timber would have induced British farmers to plant more trees than they already did, or imports of timber from the Baltic region would have been much larger… To some extent, this is what happened: the value of timber imports increased almost 11-fold between 1784-86 and 1854-56, and grew from 4% to 6.4% of imports. Just as Britain depended on American cotton, it could have industrialized using more Baltic and Canadian timber—at a cost, to be sure, but not a prohibitive cost.” [Mokyr 09:103-4]
• “Without coal, water power, wind power and firewood would have alone served the energy needs of the Industrial Revolution economy. In England by the 1860s 22 million tons of coal was used for domestic purposes – heating, cooking and lighting. The value of this coal at the point of consumption was about 2% of GDP. All of that would have to have been replaced by firewood and oils…
… There was, however, in the Baltic region alone a lot of wood available to the English economy throughout the Industrial Revolution era…
…This would have represented in any year a loss of at maximum about 2% of GDP by the 1860s, which is not a dramatic difference. Also with higher energy costs there would have been more efficient use of fuel for heating, cooking, and lighting.
This just looks at the extra costs to domestic consumers. The other 65% of coal went into industrial uses by the end of the Industrial Revolution era – iron and steel making, salt pans, and brick making. If all of these sectors had used as much energy as before then we would need to add at least another 4% of GDP to the losses in the 1860s from not having coal. Also the demand would have reached the upper limit of sustainable output from the Baltic region, raising production costs at the source. Thus by the 1860s England would be reaching the upper limits of energy use using sustainable wood sources in Europe, had it tried to replicate its history exactly as with coal. But higher energy costs would again have led to more economical usage of energy in production and for domestic purposes. The Cornish mining industry, for example, developed much more fuel efficient steam engines in the nineteenth century in response to the high coal costs there.” [Clark 07b:24-7]

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3. China had more coal deposits than Britain and every opportunity to develop them.

China had far more coal reserves than Britain and the same opportunity to develop coal as an energy source. China currently ranks third worldwide in verified coal reserves with 114 billion tonnes, while Britain ranks twentieth with 3 billion [1]. In the mid 18th century, He Qizhong, an imperial censor, reported abundant coal resources in the northeast province of Liaoning, located fairly close to seaports. He advised that this bounty be exploited to relieve the shortage of firewood, but nothing came of it [2]. In the early 19th century, China’s coal-rich northern province of Shanxi was home to the famous Shanxi bankers; it was a fairly wealthy, capital-rich region. But, China did not develop industry there [3]. China not only lacked Europe’s mechanical and industrial technology; its mining operations and transportation infrastructure were in sorry shape [4]. China’s regime even prohibited new mines from opening and wanted some of the existing ones shut down [5].

1. • China ranks third globally in verified coal reserves with 114 billion tonnes, while the UK ranks twentieth with 3 billion tonnes.
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_by_country
• “Coal in the ground counts for little without the technical means and mining skills to extract and process it into usable energy — as appears to have been the case with late Imperial China, which while abundantly endowed with this mineral (ranking third globally in verified reserves), failed to exploit its potential until after the inroads of Western capitalist penetration (and despite having pioneered coke and iron production centuries earlier in the Song period).” [Bryant 06:433]

2. • “[I]t is highly interesting what happened in Manchuria, or rather what did not happen there. We see some ‘filling up’ here too. The ‘frontier’ moved somewhat northward and the region became more or less a developed province, although it never needed to import grain. But considering what happened there after the 1850s, it all was too little too late. According to Yong Xue, Manchuria could have functioned as a huge reservoir of ghost acreage – and also as a provider of coal – for China Proper during the very long eighteenth century. One can only agree with him when he writes: ‘The vast virgin lands in manchuria off ered a real windfall, representing a piece of geographical luck for Jiangnan.’…
For the nineteenth century, talking about industrialization means talking about coal. That was yet another resource that Manchuria could have supplied to parts of China Proper. He Qizhong, the imperial censor to whom we just referred, in 1745 reported abundant coal resources in Fengtian (modern Liaoning), which were located fairly close to seaports. He urged that this natural bounty be exploited to relieve the shortage of firewood in the region. Nothing of the sort happened. One cannot therefore, with Yong Xue, escape the conclusion that the opportunities provided by Manchuria, which indeed could fittingly be labelled ‘China’s geographical luck’, were squandered. With him one can point at various reasons for that, like tensions between han and Manchus or internal institutional defects of the Ming and Qing states. Fundamental for the subject of this book is the fact that government was unwilling to grasp those opportunities itself or give private entrepreneurs the possibility to do so.” [Vries 15:403-5]

3. • “Like Britain, China faced wood shortages. But hardly anything was done to substantially increase coal production, either by private entrepreneurs or by government. Pomeranz’s Great Divergence argues that the biggest coal deposits in China lay in the Northwest, too far away from the fuel users in the economic heart of the country. Several scholars rightly claim that the problems involved in transporting coal from there to places where it was neeeded could have been solved. The weakness of the Chinese state and the fact that it had other priorities are important reasons why they weren’t. Moreover, even if the Northwestern province of Shanxi had been the only place with large known coal fields, this province happened to be home to the famous Shanxi bankers and for many decades into the nineteenth century actually was a fairly wealthy and capital-rich region, not a backwater, as Pomeranz wants to suggest. As a matter of fact there was coal, and there were coal mines in several other parts of the country. It apparently has been claimed that “…coal had been much more used than wood as energy resource by the Chinese since the end of the Ming Dynasty”. To make things even worse for the Californian position, Loren Brandt, Debin Ma and Thomas G.Rawski have come upwith data that throw very serious doubts on the Californian claim that China lacked cheap coal. The reason Pomeranz gives for explaining why China did not develop steam pumps and steam engines is questionable too. In Britain, those pumps were first developed and used to drain mines. According to Pomeranz, Chinese coal mines had much less of a water problem. That is not true: the Chinese encountered serious problems of drainage in their mines too. Such problems also existed in many copper mines that were of enormous importance for China’s economy and China’s state, since they provided the country with its daily money. But it looks as if “the Chinese avoided mines with the underground flooding problem altogether.” Steam engines could have been put to good use in Chinese mines for ventilation or fire prevention. There would, moreover, have been plenty of room for inventions in early modern China to save labour or resources outside the mining sector, for example in irrigated agriculture. As long as humans’ material desires are not satiated, there always is a potential demand for new, better, and more cost-effective technologies. Yet for half a millennium almost nothing was done to improve on the methods inherited from the past. In brief, there existed several very good reasons to invent pumps and steam engines in China. The challenge was not taken up. China’s mining technology when it came to mining coal, gold or silver was and continued to be very primitive as compared to Europe’s in the early modern era.” [Vries 13:166-8]

4. • See the [Vries 13:166-8] citation, above.
• On the sorry state of Chinese mining, see section V-2.G.7 and its sources.
• “According to Horesh, ‘Yunnan copper mining [in 18th century China] does not seem to have incorporated waterpower devices, horsepower, or mechanized intervention.’… The differences with Britain are striking: in British copper mining in Cornwall and Devonshire the use of Newcomen fire engines and subsequently of Watt’s steam engines was frequent and the use of coal as fuel important. Watt and Boulton had actually experimented with their machines in those mines.” [Vries 15:257]
• On China’s deteriorating infrastructure in the 19th century, see section II-8.F and its sources.

5. • “When it comes to coal mining, the Qing often prohibited opening mines in the first place or wanted those already opened closed down. Initiatives by government itself to open mines or to ‘modernize’ them are absent. When it comes to the exploitation of newly incorporated territories or of Manchuria, we can only conclude that many chances were not utilized, or rather not even considered.” [Vries 15:405]

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D. Argument: “Britain’s industrial success was due to its cheap energy and high wages that induced the replacement of human labor with machines.”

1. Britain’s industrial success was due to the innovation and skill of her people; its wages were high because its labor productivity was high.

This argument is basically the coal argument that was refuted in the previous section, with the added claim that Britain had expensive labor that was somehow an extra, fortuitous advantage. The accomplishments of British mechanical scientists, engineers, innovators, and craftsmen—their abilities renowned throughout Europe since long before the Industrial Revolution [1]—are dismissed as an incidental byproduct of Britain’s “unique wage and price structure”. In fact, Britain’s industrial success and high-wage labor were co-effects of her creative people and technological prowess [2]. Britain made a wide variety of technological innovations, many unrelated to coal and not labor-saving [3]. Britain’s labor wasn’t really expensive, despite its high wages, because its very high labor productivity more than compensated [4]. The evidence shows that industrial innovation led to high(est) wages, rather than vice versa [5]. Labor-saving innovations can undercut even cheap-labor manufacturing, which is why industrialization is sought as the key to prosperity everywhere. And expensive labor is actually a competitive disadvantage for industry, which is why capital and industry often move across borders [6].

1. • See section V-4.D.2 and its sources, below.

2. • “High wages were little more than a symptom of much deeper differences between Britain and the rest of Europe. The very factors that made Britain’s workers more productive may well have also been important in generating the inventions, and (equally important), in disseminating and absorbing new knowledge and putting it to good use. We will show a number of things. One is that the differences in productivity between British and French workers were sufficient to cast doubt on the assumption that unit labor costs in Britain were higher than in France. Another is that this higher quality of labor helps explain the British Industrial Revolution without having to rely on induced innovation. In this case the high wage is not the cause of invention, but a symptom of deeper factors that drive both wages and technological creativity.” [Kelly 14:4-5]

3. • See section V-4.D.3 and its sources, below.

4. • See section V-4.D.2 and its sources, below.

5. • See section V-4.D.3 and its sources, below.

6. • “From a global perspective, even those wages in Britain’s industrialising North were high but in my view it is clear that the fact that industrialisation did not begin in Britain’s high wages regions makes Allen’s explanation less obvious and convincing. That many experiments with steam engines e.g. by Thomas Newcomen (1683–1729), James Watt but also by Richard Trevithick (1771–1833), took place in Cornwall in tin or copper mines where wages were low and coal was expensive also does not really support Allen’s factor-endowment thesis. Neither does the fact that regions such as Scotland and the Northeast that were well endowed with coal and industrialised quite early, contributed very few ‘labour-saving’ innovations and had relatively low wages. The problem is that one might also set up a fairly obvious and convincing argument in which low wages would facilitate industrialisation as Joel Mokyr, without any doubt just as capable and respected as an economic historian as Robert Allen, indeed has done:
‘…it is clear [sic] that the successful economies relied on a reservoir of cheap, elastically supplied labour … The lesson to be learned from the experience of European countries during the Industrial Revolution is that low wages, all other things being equal [sic!], facilitated the accumulation of the capital necessary for the diffusion of the new technologies, and that eventually these new technologies raised wages, thus eventually eliminating the conditions that made their acceptance possible. Rising wages and living standards are the reward that society reaps for the diligence, abstinence and ingenuity of past generations.'” [Vries 13:209]
; “Relative factor-costs certainly played a role but they certainly do not provide the entire story. Joseph Needham (1900–1995) already pointed out that imperial China with its dense population developed numerous labour-saving technologies much earlier than its European counterpart and added: “…it is remarkable that we have never so far come across any important instance of the refusal of an invention in Chinese society due to fear of technological unemployment before the nineteenth century.” [211]
; “Allen persistently claims that low wages create a poverty trap. But are low wages by definition bad for innovation? One can easily think of exceptions and, as we saw, Joel Mokyr with his claim that “successful economies relied on a reservoir of cheap, elastically supplied labour” would think those ‘exceptions’ are the rule. What about a situation, for example, where labour to all intents and purposes is cheap but machine-production nevertheless wipes out non-machine production, as was the case in the second half of the nineteenth century when British machine-produced yarn began to undercut Chinese hand spinning? Would that not provide China’s businessmen with an incentive to invent or adopt machinery to raise productivity? Maybe the Chinese situation was not very well suited to being first but one would tend to think that with its ‘unlimited supplies of labour’ it was quite suited to catching up à la Arthur Lewis. It may well be that for a Chinese entrepreneur investment in machines at the time, it was extremely expensive, as it indeed was. But that would ceteris paribus of course not be the case for an entrepreneur from let us say Britain investing in China. Ceteris paribus those same machines in any case would be even more productive and profitable with cheap labour. According to E.A. Ross in 1914 “The cheapness of Chinese labour is something to make a factory owner’s mouth water.” Ceteris paribus one would expect an enormous drain of investment from high-wage to low-wage countries that as a rule have ‘unlimited supplies’ of labour. Not by accident most (neo) classical economists have always liked to predict global economic convergence. There indeed are many examples of situations where this actually occurs, which shows that low wages can be an advantage and attract investment.” [212]
; “Before foreign machine-made goods massively entered their country, China’s entrepreneurs basically competed amongst each other or, at best, with other entrepreneurs who also lacked modern machinery. I fail to see why the simple fact that Chinese wages, where low, in themselves, would then be a serious, overall disincentive for them to try to invent or at least use almost any new machinery or implement, considering the enormous domestic market for Chinese goods. Even if something like a high-level equilibrium trap had existed, does that mean profitable innovation of any kind would have been unthinkable? Can one not think of any innovation that would have given Chinese producers an opportunity to simply cut their costs and even undercut their competitors – almost without any exception Chinese who had to pay ‘Chinese’ wages – on the Chinese market – that was all but closed to foreign commodities – just as it did for British entrepreneurs in their county, where wages were higher? Were ‘profitable’ labour-saving innovations impossible simply because labour was cheap? There are good reasons to doubt that. For various sectors of Qing China’s economy such as copper mining and irrigation and even coal mining, innovations could have been profitable even with the existing low wages. Even Mark Elvin, who coined the expression ‘high-level equilibrium trap’, and convincingly explained its logic, admits that he wonders why Qing China had so few innovations. It was not struck in a poverty trap. It was not per se starved of capital. In principle again, ceteris paribus, it should in any case have been very attractive for foreign investors to move their machines from their high-wage home countries to countries like China. ” [213-4]
; Vries reviews regions that previously had high wages but declined industrially, including Holland, Northern Italy, and Spanish Amercia, in [Vries 13:207-8]; “As we already indicated for Northern Italy and for the Dutch Republic as well, where real wages were almost frozen from 1680 to 1820, high wages became something of a trap. They have done so in many regions over time.” [212]
• Clark reviews how limited are the conditions under which high wages might tend to induce innovation: “As Mokyr points out, a high relative price of labor will not increase the rate of innovation in a society, except under special circumstances. It has to be the case that producers pay attention to the relative scarcities of factors in deciding where to devote energy to innovation, and that there are inherently more potential gains through local “learning by doing” from labor saving technological change than from saving on other inputs. It also has to be the case that labor saving technological advances occur in small increments, so that they are only initially profitable in high wage/low energy cost countries, but then through local learning by doing become much more effective. And producers cannot anticipate the learning effects, otherwise even those with lower labor costs will see that after a few years they will gain from such innovation. Even finding specific innovations of the Industrial Revolution that meet the first condition – profitable in England but not in lower wage economies like France – is difficult…” He explains why the one example given by Allen from Britain’s industry that even begins to satisfy the conditions —a cotton-spinning jenny supposedly not economical in France with its supposedly cheap labor— is highly dubious. [Clark 10:5-6]
• Several flaws in Allen’s argument are reviewed in [Kelly 14:3-4], e.g.: “Ugo Gragnolati, Daniele Moschella, and Emmanuele Pugliese (2011) demonstrate that on Allens’s own numbers, the jenny, while more profitable in Britain than in France, would under reasonable assumption also been profitable in France from the onset (for a similar view, see Charles Foster and Eric L. Jones, 2013, pp. 103-04).”

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2. The skill of British craftsmen was renowned throughout Europe, and they commanded higher wages everywhere.

Britain’s craftsmen, her engineers, mechanics, artisans, metalworkers, instrument makers, etc., were widely recognized as the best in Europe in the 18th century [1]. British craftsmen were often able to take basic inventions made by Continental Europeans and improve their practical value through superior design and construction. This is why the Industrial Revolution was spearheaded by Britain, though all of northwestern Europe greatly contributed [2]. British workers had higher productivity in general than others, and not only in the mechanized industries. Thus, their wages were high and remained so despite Britain’s rapidly increasing population; but their labor was *not* expensive [3]. British workers commanded higher wages wherever they went in Europe. If wages were actually higher per work unit in Britain, then French workers would have migrated to Britain to earn them; instead, just the opposite happened. British workers migrated to France where they could earn twice the wages as locals doing the same job, despite British laws that barred such movement to protect its advantage [4].

1. • “Jean Ryhiner, a Swiss manufacturer visiting Britain, remarked in 1766 that for a thing to be perfect it has to be invented in France and worked out in England. In this, he may have been echoing a common view: Daniel Defoe had made the same point earlier, noting that “the English… are justly fam’d for improving Arts rather than inventing” and elsewhere in his Plan of English Commerce that “our great Advances in Arts, in Trade, in Government and in almost all the great Things we are now Masters of and in which we so much exceed our Neighboring Nations, are really founded upon the inventions of others”. David Hune pointed out that “very improvement which we have made (in the past two centuries) has arisen from our imitation of foreigners… Notwithstanding the advanced state of our manufactures, we daily adopt, in every art, the inventions and improvements of our neighbors”. These statements should be taken with a pound of salt. British manufacturers led in some of the cutting-edge techniques of the period, such as the use of coal, steam, metals, and textiles, but lagged in other areas, above all in chemical knowledge, glass, paper, and high-end textiles.
When it did not lead, however, Britain displayed an uncanny ability to recognize the discoveries of others, make them work by eliminating the bugs and problems, and then exploit them profitably. When it imported an invention, such as the Leblanc’s soda-making process, continuous paper-making, food canning, or chlorine bleaching, it improved it by a sequence of microinventions. An earlier example is that of the reverberatory furnace, first described by Vinoccio Biringuccio in 1540 in glassblowing, and adopted in Britain in the early 17th century. By 1700, this device had been adapted successfully to non-ferrous metals by unknown British skilled workmen before its famous adaptation to iron-puddling. Even the Lombe mill, cited above, relied on domestic competence for its finer details. The Derby engineer George Sorocold, much experienced in the construction of water works and one of the most active engineers of the first half of the eighteenth century, was involved in its construction. A century later, British textile mechanics absorbed and improved two of the most important French inventions in the textile industry, De Girard’s wet-spinning process of flax, and Jaquard’s loom.
In part, the explanation of British leadership is simply that in the crucial years between 1780 and 1815 the Continent was thrown into turmoil, while British while British society kept the peace (albeit not without some harsh measures), its government staunchly supported innovators against technological conservatism, and its institutions provided a more effective (if far from watertight) system to reward enterprising and ingenious individuals. Moreover, the British system made it easier for enterprising and ingenious individuals to use the market to exploit their ideas. The weakness of craft guilds, controlling and constraining how individual craftsmen could exrersise their skills, coupled with personal freedom and mobility, provided opportunities for resourceful and ambitious young individuals.
Effective use of knowledge, however, required not only access and incentives to create and access new technology, but also the competence to make use of it and to carry out the “instructions” contained in the blueprint of the technique. Much of the knowledge employed by artisans and engineers was “tacit,” that is, not formally written down in the “recipe” used for production, but little tricks and know-how based on experience or imitation. John Harris describes tacit skills as “unanalysable pieces of expertise, the ‘knacks’ of the trade,” a point made long ago by Michael Polanyi. Harris’ view may have been conditioned by his knowledge of the coal and iron industry, but much of the same was true in hardware, textiles, instrument-making, and engineering. He notes that such skills at the time were taken for granted at home and thus noted mostly by foreign visitors, including industrial spies. Harris singles out the competence of the British puddler, requiring not only skills but experience and “almost artistic judgment”. He adds that foreigners would have a hard time importing this competence, because the British skilled worker was the repository of the knowledge. He absorbed the skills needed to work with coal and iron “with the sooty atmosphere in which he lived” and would find it hard to know what even needed to be explained. John Kennedy, a Manchester cotton manufacturer, wrote in 1824 that it was impossible to use machinery “without having at hand people competent to its repair and management”.
On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, Britain could rely on a comparatively large number of skilled mechanics and technicians, people who had been selected for their dexterity and mechanical gifts and trained as apprentices. Of course, other countries could count on such people as well, but Britain seems to have been particularly well endowed with them. Continetal Europeans felt envious and frustrated, reflected Leibniz’s prophetic words, written in 1670: “It is not laudable that we Germans were first in the invention of mechanical, natural, and other arts and sciences, but are the last in their expansion and betterment. The French political economist Jean Baptiste Say, a keen observer of the economics of his time, noted in 1803 that “the enormous wealth of Britain is less owing to her own advances in scientific acquirements, high as she ranks in that department, as to the wonderful practical skills of her adventurers in the useful application of knowledge and the superiority of her workmen.” A Swiss visitor, Cesaar de Saussure, had noticed the same seventy-five years earlier: “English workmen are everywhere renowned, and justly. They were to perfection, and though not inventive, are capable of improving and finishing most admirably what the French and Germans have invented”. The great engineer John Farey, who wrote an important treatise on steam power, testified a century later that “the prevailing talent of English and Scotch people is to apply new ideas to use, and to bring such applications to perfection, but they do not imagine as much as foreigners.” He added that this was the case because “the means of executing and applying inventions abroad are so very inferior to ours.” Perhaps a more accurate assessment would be that foreigners—at least in the North Atlantic economies—did not imagine less than the British, but that the economic environment in which they operated did not provide the opportunities and incentives found in Britain.
What provided the opportunities was the large number of competent skilled craftsmen found in Britain. Josiah Tucker, a keen contemporary observer, pointed out in 1758 that “the Number of Workmen (in Britain) and their greater Experience excite the higher Emulation, and cause them to excel the Mechanics of other Countires in these Sorts of Manufactures”. A volume (originally written by a Frenchman but updated by an Englishman) published in the mid-eighteenth century crowed that “None has more improved the mechanic arts… here (in England) are made the best, Clocks, Watches, Barometers, Thermometers, Air Pumps, and all sort of Mathemetical Instruments… they have invented the use of cane chairs and several engines for printing stuffs and linen &c. Glass, Tin, Copper, Brass, Earthen and Hornware, they have improved to admiration… they excel all nations in polishing iron and making many useful and bright utensils thereof”.
A few of these highly skilled industrialists, engineers, and artists are justly famous, even if they did not quite become national celebrities like James Watt and Richard Arkwright. We should mention above all the Darbys of Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, ironmasters, who supplied the cylinders for many Newcomen engines and built the great Iron Bridge over the Severn that opened in 1781, one of the most prominent technological “events” of the Industrial Revolution. There was John Wilkinson, whose Bradley works pioneered new boring machines that were able to produce the cylinders that Boulton and Watt needed for their engines with unrivaled accuracy and who was one of the first to install an industrial steam engine to drive his bellows. There was Charles Gascoigne, who took over the failing Carron ironworks in Falkirk (Scotland) in the 1760s and rescued it through relentless improvement and prudent management. Gascoigne ended up running an ironworks in Russia, but the Carron works had turned into the largest ironworks in Europe in 1814, employing over 2,000 workers, and making the famous cannon known as carronades that helped defeat Napoleon. We should also mention Arthur Woolf, the Cornish engineer and inventor of the compound steam engine, and Bryan Donkin, famour for his improvements to the mechanized papermaking machine, who was also the inventor of the tachometer, a steel nib pen, and the metal tin for canned food. In the machine industry, most notable were the mechanics Joseph Bramah and his gifted apprentice Henry Maudslay, often regarded as the fathers of British machine tool industry.
Some other skilled craftsmen, not quite as famous, were important or inventive enough to have left a record. Among them were mathemetically sophisticated instrument makers such as the optician John Dollond (1707-61), who started off as a silk weaver and amateur optician, and ended up winning the Copley medal (1761) for his work on achromayic lenses; Francis Hauksbee (1688-1763), who was active as an instrument maker as well as a scientific lecturer and entrepeneur; John Hadley (1682-1744), a mathematician who built a new and more accurate navigational instrument named Hadley’s quadrant (or actant); Thomas Yeoman, a civil engineer, millwright, and instrument maker whose technical competence helped make Stephen Hales’ invention of the ventilator a reality; Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800), a top-notch instrument maker who designed surveying and measuring instruments of unprecedented accuracy and user-friendliness; and Edward Troughton (1753-1835) who became the best instrument maker in London. William Murdoch was Watt’s trusted lieutenant and an extraordinary engineer. His inventions include, beside gas lighting and iron cement, major improvements to steam power and air-compressed pumps. Finally, consider Benjamin Outram, a Derbyshire engineer and entrepeneur, whose fame is based on his advocacy of iron rails as means of transportation, to the point where it was erroneously believed that the word “tram” was derived from his name. These persons were examples of the second layer on which the Hall of Fame inventors could rely.
An impressive degree of competence was achieved by millwrights. British (and especially Scottish) millwrights were often highly sophisticated engineers. William Fairbairn, himself trained as a millwright, noted that wighteenth-century British millwrights were “men of superior attainments and intellectual power,” and that the typical millwright would have been “a fair arithmetician, knew something of geometry, levelling and mensuration and possessed a very competent knowledge of practical mechanics”. John Rennie (1761-1821), who introduced tha sliding hatch to the waterwheel and built some of London’s greatest bridges, began his career as a millwright, as did his apprentice Peter Ewart (1767-1842), a millwright who worked for Boulton and Watt and later for the cottom spinner Samual Oldknow, and who ended his career as Chief Engineer in His Majesty’s dockyards. William Hazledine (1763-1840), a pioneering Shropshire ironmaster, whose works supplied large iron castings for structures, and Andrew Miekle, the Scottish inventor of the threshing machine, were also trained as millwrights.
Below them was a much larger third layer, an army of mostly anonymous artisans and mechanics, the unsung foot soldiers of the Industrial Revolution whose names do not normally appear in biographical dictionaries but who supplied that indispensable workmanship on which technological progess depended. These were craftsmen blessed by a naturalo dexterity, who possessed a technical savoir-faire taught in no school, but whose experience, skills, and practical knowledge of energy and materials constituted the difference between an idea and a product. They were mechanics, highly skilled clock and instrument makers, metalworkers, woodworkers, toymakers, glasscutters, and similar specialists, who could acurately produce parts of the precisely correct dimensions and materials, who could read blueprints and compute velocities, and who understood tolerance, resistance, friction, lubrication, and the interdependence of mechanical parts. These were the applied chemists who could manipulate laboratory equipment and acids, the doctors whose advise sometimes saved lives even if nobody yet quite understood why, the expert farmers who experimented with new breeds of animals, fertilizers, drainage systems, and fodder crops.
A few of these artisans have been rescued from their undeserved obscurity by diligent scholarship; one example is Alexander Crisholm, who served for three decades as the technical assistant of the itinerant lecturer William Lewis and then placed his skills as an experimental chemist and factory assistant at the service of Josiah Wedgwood. A large number of these engineers and mechanics have been immortalized by Skempton et al. (2002) and these biographical compilations illustrate the unusual and impressive supply of dexterous and able men that Britain could count on. In a few cases, we can look into the management of a firm, to provide us with a glimpse of this phenomenon. When Newcomen came to the Midlands to install his steam-powered engine, he and his assistant were “at a loss about pumps, but being near Birmingham and having the assistance of so many ingenious and admiable workmen, they some came to methods of making the pump-valves, clacks, and buckets”. At the Boulton and Watt workshop in Soho, on which a fair amount is known, the highly skilled “turners” and the equally skilled “fitters” would require many years of apprenticeship and work as assistants before allowed to operate the equipment on their own. One example is John Southern, an able draftsman and mechanic, who worked his whole life for Boulton and Watt, where he was Watt’s right-hand man. James Lawson was another trusted Soho employee given many important tasks despite poor health. Reflecting on the supply of craftsmen he employed, Watt noted in 1794 that many of them had been trained in analogous skills “such as millwrights, architects, and surveyors,” with the practical skills and dexterity spilling over from occupation to occupation. The British economy, with its absence of restrictions on labor mobility, was unusually well suited to take advantages of these opportunities.
Britain was thus fortunate to possess a class of able and skilled people, larger and more effective than anywhere else. Techniques could not be realized without subcontractors who could supply parts and materials made accurately to specifications, and workers sufficiently “good with their hands” to be able to carry out plans from blueprints not just once but over and over again. In addition, the best of these anonymous but capable workers produced a cumulative flow of small, incremental, unrecorded, but indispensable microinventions that adapted inventions to local needs and circumstances and made them work better. Without them, Britain would not have become the workshop of the world. Not all of these artisans were in any observable way affected by the Industrial Enlightenment, of course. Many were interested in the technical details of their trade and little else. Much as in our own time, engineers were rarely intellectuals. Others were poorly educated craftsmen who became well known through their prodigious practical skills. Matthew Murray, one of the most brilliant mechanical engineers of his age and James Watt’s arch-rival, was described as “structurally illiterate” but he was probably an exception. Competence and new ideas were complementary, the country needed both. And yet a surprising number of people who did the heavy lifting in production were well educated and published articles on a variety of topics. John Kennedy (1769-1855), one of the most successful cotton manufacturers of Lancashire in the first decades of the nineteenth-century and a skilled and inventive engineer himself, was an active member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and published among others a paper on the Poor Law and the effect of the cotton industry on the working classes.
The difference between Britain and other nations was not only in the level or prevalence of mechanical skills but in their allocation as well. On the Continent, the state (primarily the military) absorbed the lion’s share of engineering talent. The crucial elements of Britain’s technological leadership was both the presence of technical competence and their aganda. The British state did not usualy take an aggressive position on what such persons should be doing. On much of the Continent, engineers served above all the state in the military, the civil service, teaching, and administration. An “engineer” in France was a military man. In Britain, men of comparable interests and abilities had to find employment in the private sector, designing more efficient mills and lighthouses, making more accurate watches, more efficient spinning machines, and looking for seams of coal. British science and scientists occupied a different position in society. The contrast between pragmatic scientists in the tradition of Bacon and the theororetical and abstract bent of French science in the Cartesian tradition is still considered valid by some historians. Such generalizations are inevitably hazaedous: many French intellectuals and scientists, above all the great Denis Diderot, admired Bacon and his work. By 1750 the empirical tradition advocated by the Anglophile Voltaire and his followers was triumphing everywhere in Europe, even if national styles differed. The commitment of French scientists such as Reaumur, Laplace, and Lavoisier to experimental and applied work renders such gernalizations abojut national differences in scientific style questionable.
To sum up: in Britain the high quality of workmanship available to support innovation, local and imported, helped to create the Industrial Revolution. It was especially in their competence, in the application, adaptation, and tweaking stages of invention, that Britain’s skilled mechanics and engineers excelled. These skills were often tacit and could not be readily transferred from country to country. The French scientist and industrialist Jean-Antoine Chaptal noted that in many branches of manufacturing the Britisg had become dominant, but that even after importing the machinery the French could not compete and sold at twice the price of the British because they lacked the immense details, the customs, and the “turns of hand” (dexterity) and that while the slow progess of industry could be accelerated by learned men, there was no substitute for experience.
The supply of skills, moreover, seems to have been sufficient to cope with the increased demand for skills that the many new machines and mechanixal devices required. If the Industrial Revolution was what economists call skill-augmenting, that is, the new tecgniques required more skills, and the supply of these skills had been limited, we would have observed a sharp increase in the so-called skill premium in the wages commanded by highly trained workers. The problem is of course that without estimating a complete model of the market for skills, the historical course of that ratio cannot be readily attributed to demand or supply factors. If, however, we assume that technology was the prime mover in this market and we keep in mind that the supply of skills will at best lag considerably behind a rise in wages (since the acquisition of skills takes time), it would stand to reason that if the Industrial Revolution led to a net increasein the demand for skilled labor, an increase in the skill premium at that time should have been observed. Yet what is known about the ratio of the wages of skilled workers to unskilled ones indicates clearly that the skill ratio declined dairly significantly between 1750 and 1850. Indeed, research into the wage premium has established that it changed little over the long haul between 1450 and 1900, yet it was much lower in Western Europe than in either Southern or Eastern Europe or Asia, indicating perhaps that Europe was more capable of generating the kind of skills and abilities we associate with human capital in an age in which literacy mattered less. This was true a fortiori in Britain. Clearly, the supply of “skills” as a factor of production was quite elastic, but is is also consistent with an interpretation that British inventors and engineers were able to design equipment that front-loaded the ingenuity in the design and the tasks of a small number of highly trained workers, whereas the majority of operatives could be unskilled.
One key to British technological success, then, was that its rich endowment of competent skilled artisans gave it a comparable advantage in the adoption of new techniques and their improvements through microinventions…” [Mokyr 09:106-13]

2. • See the [Mokyr 09:106-13] citation, above; and the [Kelly 14:16-7] citation, below.
• On the extensive contributions of continental Europeans to the Industrial Revolution, see section V-4.C.1 and its sources.

3. • “It was noted in a passage by Arthur Young commenting on the low cost of French labor: “labour is generally in reality the cheapest where it is nominally the dearest. The quality of the work, the skill and dexterity of performance come largely into account” (Young, 1790, p. 311). In 1824 Thomas Malthus made the same point: “Generally, my opinion is, that the efficiency of labour in France is less than in England, and that that is one of the principle causes why the money price of labour is lower in France than in England”.” [Kelly 14:3]
; “There is no dispute on the main fact underlying this debate: English wages were considerably higher than French ones on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Allen calculates that the real wages of building craftsmen in London in 1780 were 83 per cent higher than those in Paris, while those of laborers were 80 per cent higher. It is, however, invalid to conclude that English labor was therefore expensive, until we compare productivity and can thus infer unit labor costs. Some indication of the differences in productivity can be attained from data in agriculture by comparing day rates and piece rates. The average time needed to reap an acre of wheat in early nineteenth century England was 2.9 man-days per acre, or 7.2 days per hectare. This compares with France where the average cost ranged from 9.3 to 16.3 man-days per hectare, giving an average, weighted by regional output share, of 12.9 man-days per hectare. Reaping and threshing were manual activities with almost no capital input and fairly little skill. Even allowing for considerable measurement error, the roughly 65-75 per cent productivity advantage for English workers suggests a real difference in the physical quality of labor…
Our argument, then, is that British workers were of higher quality than French ones. This would not only explain their higher wages, but also provide a critical link that explains why British workers were able to take advantage of the technological opportunities emerging in the eighteenth century. This is not a traditional human capital argument: as is well-known, in this period Britain led Europe neither in the quality and quantity of its educational system nor in observed literacy rates. Instead of human capital in its conventional, narrow sense of rates of literacy and schooling, we want to focus on the wider concept of what Heckman (2007) has termed human capability. Human capability is the triad of cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills (for example self control, perseverance, time preference, risk aversion, preference for leisure), and health. ” [7-9]
; “[W]e want to focus on a different form of human capital, namely the idea of competence introduced above. The basic idea is that technology, much like the performing arts, is an implementable form of culture; much like music and theatre it takes one person to write the original, but another to be “performed” — that is, carried out or executed by competent individuals. Those skills, however, do not necessarily include creativity and originality. Britain and France could both count on a considerable supply of original genius as attested by the fact that a substantial number of the great inventions made during the Industrial Revolution originated in France even if they were first implemented on a large scale in Britain. Britain had an advantage in skilled artisans, what Meisenzahl and Mokyr have terms “implementer and tweakers”. This was surely something that historians and contemporaries were convinced of. A French visitor in 1704 noted that the English were “wanting in industry excepting mechanicks wherein they are, of all nations, the greatest improvers”. The idea that the British were above all good imitators thanks to their skilled labor force was reiterated by none less than David Hume, who opined that “every improvement which we have made (in the past two centuries) has arisen from our imitation of foreigners … Notwithstanding the advanced state of our manufacturers, we daily adopt, in every art, the inventions and improvements of our neighbours”. Other such quotes can be found (Mokyr, 2009, pp. 107–08) and for a while it became something of a consensus amongst British economists to attribute the country’s technological leadership to its advantage in skills.” [16-7]
; See the comparisons of the productivity and wages of British and French workers in the [Kelly 14:17-20] citation, below.
; Kelly et al review Britain’s superior agricultural productivity and food distribution in [24-5], and Britain’s superior apprenticeship system in [25-7]; “Access to food and the Poor Law may have shifted the entire distribution of labor quality to the right, but cannot explain the unusual quality of the British skilled artisans. The main source of English high level of technical competence lay in its system of professional training through apprenticeship: in 1700 over a quarter of males aged 21 had completed an apprenticeship. As noted earlier, the English school system was not impressive by contemporary standards. However, the decisive group during the Industrial Revolution was artisans, and nearly all artisans were trained as apprentices by other artisans. The question is why the English system of apprenticeship worked better than elsewhere…”
• “Another important point raised by Mokyr is that we cannot assume that day wages across societies reflected the cost per unit of labor: “high wages do not necessarily imply dear labor”, or in the classic quote of Arthur Young, “labour is generally in reality the cheapest where it is nominally the dearest”. Not all industries were transformed by innovations in the Industrial Revolution. Boots and shoes, for example, were still made by handicraft methods well into the late nineteenth century. Given high British wages, we would expect such goods to be mainly imported into Britain by 1860. Yet as Peter Temin points out, even in such untransformed manufacturing sectors Britain was largely self sufficient as late as 1856. The implication is that these industries in Britain must have been more efficient than their foreign competitors. Whether this was a greater efficiency by workers, or better organization of production we do not know. However, we do know that in the early nineteenth century high wage English and Scottish farm workers had high rates of output in basic farm tasks, such as hand threshing grain, compared to many of their low wage European counterparts.” [Clark 10:7-8]

4. • “One piece of evidence that suggests that Britain collected some kind of rent from her higher level of skills is that the mercantilist policy makers of the eighteenth century felt that the exportation of machinery and the emigration of skilled artisans endangered these rents. The laws that prohibited the emigration of artisans and the exportation of machinery were first passed in 1696, and repeatedly amended in the eighteenth century. They remained on the books till the mid 1820s, although enforcement was at best spotty. The illegal export of machinery, for instance, was almost impossible to prevent; after all customs officers lacked the technical expertise and the staff to inspect large cargoes. By the early nineteenth century the laws against machinery exportation were weakened and after 1815 barely enforced at all. All the same, they reflect a clear-cut view of what advantage Britain enjoyed in comparison with its main competitors. This view was shared by Continental nations, who throughout the period sent a variety of industrial spies to Britain to try to transfer its expertise to the Continent.
Decisive evidence on the relative quality of English workers comes from the direction of labor migration. If the expensive English labour hypothesis were true, we would expect the flow to have been from France to England, in the form of Continental workers taking advantage of higher English wages. In fact, the flow was in the opposite direction, and composed of English and Scottish skilled artisans. Interestingly, this flow of artisans to France precedes the Industrial Revolution, implying that the advantage that England enjoyed in the area of technical competence predated its technological achievements. Thus, for instance, John Holker, an English mechanic and political refugee in France, set up a textile manufacturing plant in 1752 and, despite the risks as a Jacobite refugee, returned to recruit many of his skilled workers in Britain. By 1754 he employed twenty English artisans who were allocated among French workers so that skills could be disseminated in the most effective fashion. The Industrial Revolution strengthened this connection and, after 1815, a large number of British technicians found their way to the Continent, where they installed, maintained, and managed new equipment and instructed local workers how to use it. Such an advantage was to some extent fleeting: as a French memorandum of the late 1780s pointed out, when English experts and workmen had come over in recent times, the French soon became keen to emulate them in the machine and hand tools they used. As Robert Fox has observed, the French learned quickly, and as soon as local workmen had acquired the basic skills, the senior British operative became more of a rarity. But the technology itself was changing rapidly, and the flow of emigrants had to continue until deep into the nineteenth century to work with more recent vintages of machinery.
How big were these flows? The laws prohibiting emigration resulted in a Parliamentary investigation, which has yielded a rich if largely anecdotal and impressionistic body of evidence supporting the size of the flow due to the higher quality of British labor. A Mr. Alexander testifying in estimated that in the years 1822 and 1823 alone, 16,000 artisans moved from England to France. This figure seems exaggerated; a year later an engineer named Alexander Galloway estimated the stock of English workers in France at 15,000-20,000 workers. In 1830, a report cited the number of English living in France at 35,695 of whom 6,680 were “mechanics”. Allowing for other skilled workers, this estimate seems to be in the right order of magnitude. Why they were there was quite clear: they were paid more. Thus it was maintained that an English engineer, turner, or iron founder, working in France, will make twice as much as a French one. “The English workmen, from their better methods, do more work and better than the French…and though their wages are higher, yet their work does not cost more money in France than when done by Frenchmen, though their wages are lower”. The great inventor and mechanical genius Bryan Donkin noted that a worker in the paper industry who might have made 18-20 shillings a week in Britain, was hired at 50 shillings in France. Galloway felt that a person of similar qualifications would make 22 shillings in Paris and 36 shillings in London — but then added that English workmen in Paris would make twice what the locals would make (2 guineas), indicating the difference in the perceived quality of the workmen. John Martineau testified similarly that a French blacksmith would make in France 4 francs a day, while an English smith in Paris would make 10– 11francs. Clearly, the much higher wages secured by skilled British workmen on the Continent is a reflection of the different scarcities. Another witness who had spent time working in Alsace recounted that the British machine-maker Job Dixon had to send to England for experts to set up the spinning machinery he had made. “Our spinners,” he added, will do as much in six hours as theirs in twelve.
Early Continental adoption of the new techniques needed British skilled workmen in its early stages. Philip Taylor, an engineer, pointed out that in Wurzburg, establishment of manufacturing ran into great difficulties, because “things that would have come to the hands of workmen in this country instantly, were with great difficulty obtained”. In 1841, Grenville Withers, an engineer residing in Liège, testified that he had some self-actors at Verviers made by Sharpe and Roberts, the best he could find, and installed the same way as in Manchester, yet productivity was only two-thirds what he could get in Manchester. Clearly, the superior quality of English artisans, the complementarity of skilled workmen and machinery made or designed in Britain, and the need to teach local workers, implied continuing migration of skilled workmen. The higher competence of British workers is confirmed by the reverse flow of trained Continental engineers who came to study with or spy on British engineers. Among the many Germans who came to Britain to acquire technical expertise, we can mention Wilhem von Reden, sent to study British coal mining techniques in 1776; Johann Gottfried Brügelmann who traveled to study Arkwright’s famous Cromford mill in 1794, before setting up his own mill near Düsseldorf; F.A.J. Egells, a Westphalian locksmith sent by the Prussian government to England in 1819 to study machinery engineering; Jacob Mayer, who worked for a time at Sheffield before opening a cast-steel mill near Cologne, and quite a few others.” [Kelly 14:17-20]

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3. Britons innovated irrespective of labor costs, and Britain’s highest wages shifted to areas having more innovation and industry.

Britons innovated prolifically regardless of the labor costs of a technology or a region, and innovation and industry led to higher wages, rather than vice versa. Britons innovated across a wide variety of fields, many of which were neither mechanized nor labor-saving [1]. Some innovations just replaced one type of non-human power (horses or watermills) with another (coal) [2]. Studies of patents and macroeconomic trends have found that only a minority of British innovations were labor-saving; some were fuel-saving and some created entirely new products [3]. Innovators have a range of motivations, from hope for profit and awards to fame and personal satisfaction; seldom do they carefully appraise economic conditions [4]. Key innovations in the steam engine took place in tin or copper mines in Cornwall, where wages were relatively low and coal relatively expensive [5]. Industry such as clock-making had been growing in relatively low-wage northern British towns such as Lancashire since before coal became a significant power source (while the south reaped more trade profits and had higher wages), and this industrialization shifted Britain’s highest wages north [6].

1. • On Britain being innovative in a wide variety of technologies, many having nothing to do with coal or mechanization, see section V-4.C.1 and its sources.
• “[W]e must keep in mind that new techniques were emerging along a broad front of production [in Britain’s Industrial Revolution], and that many are hard to classify as either labor- or capital saving, as they involve entirely new or vastly improved products or services, from canned food to marine chronometers to vaccination.” [Kelly 14:3]
• See the sources below in this section, on innovations that were not labor-saving and that took place in relatively low-wage areas.

2. • “[S]team power, the paradigmatic technology in which fossil energy supposedly replaced labor, was often used to replace horses or watermills. This indicates that the Industrial Revolution, rather than simply substituting resources for labor, replaced one form of resources by another. It is telling that in Cornwall, where coal was expensive, its high cost did not slow down technological progress, but simply re-oriented it into another direction. Indeed, the high cost of coal has been cited as the stimulus for the development of fuel-saving technology in Cornwall. The success of Cornish engineers such as Arthur Woolf in developing fuel-saving engines wherever coal was expensive suggests that what was driving technological progress was something deeper and stronger than cheap coal and high wages, although the latter were affecting the direction into which innovation moved. Coal was important, but it was itself subject to technological progress, and its cost and availability were clearly endogenous to deeper forces. As E.L. Jones remarks, “industry was growing in the North before any significant generation of power using coal, while trades vital for inventiveness—notably clock and watchmakers in South Lancashire—used little fuel.”” [Kelly 14:4]

3. • “Finally, it may be added that the evidence for technological progress during the Industrial Revolution being on the whole labor-saving, as the induced innovation hypothesis would contend, is mixed at best. The macroeconomic record, questionable as the data are, is summarized by von Tunzelmann (1994, pp. 289-91). Apart from a short period during the Napoleonic Wars, he found little evidence that technological change in Britain as a whole was on balance labor-saving before 1830. Even after that year, in his view, when there was a clear-cut shift toward more labor-saving machinery, it was dampened by “the continuing labour-surplus of males”. The microeconomic evidence from the patent records, assembled by Christine MacLeod (1988), is equally troubling for the labor-saving inventions hypothesis. She calculates that labor saving was a stated goal of patentees in only 4.2 percent of all patents taken out between 1660 and 1800, whereas capital saving was the goal in 30.8 percent of all patents. Looking at what patents actually achieved, only 21 percent of all inventions can be said to have saved labor, compared to the 30.8 percent that were said to save on capital.” [Kelly 14:4]

4. • “Economists, of course, are fond of pointing to those institutions that provided the “correct” incentives to innovate, and which induce the direction of innovation in a particular direction. During the Industrial Revolution, Britain provided many such incentives. Even when inventors were failed by the patent system, some of the more notable ones were voted pensions and grants by parliament and others maintained serious hopes that such compensation would be forthcoming. The Society of Arts awarded small prizes to successful inventors who had not secured patents, and other rewards were handed out or petitioned for by grateful colleagues to inventors who made unusual contributions to a particular industry. Some well-known prize contests challenged the best and the brightest to resolve technological bottlenecks, of which the Board of Longitude and the 1825 Rainhill competition are the best known. What mattered further to would-be innovators were access to credit and markets to turn ideas into business ventures, both of which were especially strong in Britain. It is also clear, however, that not all inventors were as patent-hungry as Boulton and Watt who lobbied long and hard for the extension of their patent until 1800. Many of the important inventions were made by scientists whose culture was much more like open-source in our day, and who were interested in credit, not profit. Greed was only one motive for the innovators of the Industrial Revolution: ambition, altruism, and curiosity also played roles.” [Mokyr 07a:9-10]
• “One can find many efforts to save coal via more efficient machines even though it was relatively cheap. But there are also examples of coal being wasted because it was cheap. Inventors themselves did not regard saving labour their main goal.” [Vries 13:211]
• “The argument that economic incentives were the driving force behind the invention and patenting of a majority of novel artifacts is not persuasive. Although many inventors were motivated by the unrealistic belief that their particular gadget would earn them a fortune, others pursued novelty for the psychic rewards it brought. In neither instance, however, do we find inventors working to supply pressing human needs or carefully appraising economic conditions, calculating precisely what innovations are most likely to bring the higher financial returns. For this reason, many patent holders belong in the company of the technological dreamers who repeatedly, enthusiastically, and ingeniously provide solutions to problems that are mainly of concern to themselves.” [Basalla 88:71]
• On Whites’ explorative/recreational motive for experimentation and invention, see section IV-2.A-B and its sources.

5. • See the [Kelly 14:4] citation (“It is telling that in Cornwall…”), above; and the [Vries 13:208-10] citation, below.

6. • “[I]ndustry in Britain did not initially arise in its highest-wage regions, i.e. London and more in general the South, but in regions where wages were, for British standards, quite low.
As E.H. Hunt, an expert in the field, writes: ‘Major regional differences in wages already existed at the beginning of the classic industrial revolution. Because industrial growth focused on parts of the North where wages were low, industrialization initially eroded the pre-industrial pattern of wage differentials.’
From a global perspective, even those wages in Britain’s industrialising North were high but in my view it is clear that the fact that industrialisation did not begin in Britain’s high wages regions makes Allen’s explanation less obvious and convincing. That many experiments with steam engines e.g. by Thomas Newcomen (1683–1729), James Watt but also by Richard Trevithick (1771–1833), took place in Cornwall in tin or copper mines where wages were low and coal was expensive also does not really support Allen’s factor-endowment thesis. Neither does the fact that regions such as Scotland and the Northeast that were well endowed with coal and industrialised quite early, contributed very few ‘labour-saving’ innovations and had relatively low wages. The problem is that one might also set up a fairly obvious and convincing argument in which low wages would facilitate industrialisation as Joel Mokyr, without any doubt just as capable and respected as an economic historian as Robert Allen, indeed has done:
‘…it is clear [sic] that the successful economies relied on a reservoir of cheap, elastically supplied labour … The lesson to be learned from the experience of European countries during the Industrial Revolution is that low wages, all other things being equal [sic!], facilitated the accumulation of the capital necessary for the diffusion of the new technologies, and that eventually these new technologies raised wages, thus eventually eliminating the conditions that made their acceptance possible. Rising wages and living standards are the reward that society reaps for the diligence, abstinence and ingenuity of past generations.’…
Industrialisation triggered an economic reallocation in which the heart of England’s economy shifted to the North. Lancashire, the West Riding, and the West Midlands, in that order, led the development of modern industry in England for decades: they all were among the poorest and most backward regions of the country in 1660 and even at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Lancashire, the symbol par-excellence of industrialisation, was amongst the very poor regions of England during the Middle Ages and the Restoration period in terms of wealth assessed for tax. It was the second wealthiest region of the entire country in 1843. In the period 1767–1770 Lancashire and the West Riding were among the eleven countries with the lowest wages in Britain. Those mostly were in Northern England. By 1794–1795, however, the regional picture of wages had already been reversed completely. Then six of the eleven countries with the highest wages were in the North, with the West Riding having the highest wages of them all. In 1843, when Lancashire was the second wealthiest region of the entire country, its wages were the third highest. Scotland, known for its very low wages in the eighteenth century, quickly caught up with the industrialising regions, i.e. it industrialised fast and in the process saw its wages increase. One might argue that already in the 1840s it had become more industrialised than the rest of Great Britain.
Would not all this suggest that, in Great Britain and in British circumstances, industry caused high wages in industrializing regions rather than the other way around?” [Vries 13:208-10]

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E. Argument: “China’s decline was due to European opium trade and the Opium Wars, and the consequent drain of China’s silver.”

1. China’s decline had been going on for centuries, the trade wars were short, and China was largely responsible for opium proliferation.

In fact, China’s stagnation and decline had been going on since long before the so-called Opium Wars, the Anglo-Chinese Wars of 1840-60. By the late 18th century China trailed Europe in every economic respect (section V-4.A.1), and China’s government and infrastructure were crumbling (section II-8.F). China’s heyday had long since passed (section V-2.B). Because China was in such sorry shape, Britain was able to quickly whip this colossal state with a few expeditionary troops half a world away from home. The first trade war (1839-42) cost China 30 million taels; a tenth as much as its late 18th century military campaigns; also a tenth as much as its suppressions of domestic rebellions between 1850 and 1868 [1]. China’s 19th century trade deficits, silver drain, and foreign debts including war indemnities and reparations, were tiny compared to what Britain and other European nations successfully coped with on a regular basis [2]. Narcotics importers caused various problems in China, as they do today in the U.S., but cannot be blamed for a regress of Chinese civilization. And the Chinese demand for opium and their distribution (and domestic production) of it throughout the country were largely responsible [3].

1. • “According to a calculation by Peter Perdue, the major Qing campaigns between 1747 and 1805, in total, cost about 300 million taels… The seven-year campaign of the Yongzheng emperor (1723–35) against the Zunghars, according to a high estimate, cost nearly 130 million taels. In the first half of the nineteenth century the costs of military campaigns appear to have decreased substantially. The costs of the Qing defence campaigns during the First Opium War till the Treaty of Nanking (1842) were 30 million taels or £10 million in total. The total recorded amount of money spent by the Qing central government to repress domestic rebellions in the period between 1850 and 1868, by way of comparison, was 300 million taels of silver.” [Vries 15:189]
; “These figures also point to another quite interesting fact: military spending apparently was much higher during the campaigns of the Qianlong emperor in the eighteenth century than during, and directly after, the First Opium War. Chinese commentators in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, who claimed they were living in peaceful times, were not as mistaken as Westerners, who are convinced that China must have been shaken by that war, may think. Under the Daoguang emperor [1820-50] military expenses were only 70 per cent of those of the early Jiaqing period [1796-1820] and only 50 per cent of those of the late Qianlong era [1735-96]. In the light of the figures presented here on the costs of waging war and on pages 234–6 with regard to the height of war reparation payments, it is not exactly convincing to suggest as Rosenthal and Wong, and the less outspoken Westad, do, that the problems of China in the nineteenth century would have been triggered by its high costs of preparing and fighting (and losing) conflicts with foreigners.” [190]
• “More troubling, however, are several analytical decisions that underpin revisionist mathematics:… a decision not to adjust for the massive mortality crises associated with major famines or the many violent popular uprisings, such as the White Lotus (1796–1804), Celestial Order (1811–14), Eight Trigrams (1813), Taiping (1850–64), Nian (1853–68), Miao (1850–72), and Muslim rebellions (1855–74), the inclusive casualty toll for which ranges from an estimated low of 60 million to a high of 118 million.” [Bryant 06:425]

2. • “One, moreover, may also wonder why, if China’s economy indeed was as highly developed as Californians like to claim, it did not manage to come up with other new products to make up for the famous silver drain that started to hit the country, in particular during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. That drain that is referred to in every text discussing China’s predicaments indeed caused big problems. That is also surprising: in terms of value, it was quite small as compared to GDP. The fact that so much silver left the country and therewith depleted China’s ‘monetary’ stock could have been dealt with more effectively. A drain like the one China was confronted with need not have been a problem if the country had had a well-organised efficient state. Britain dealt with far bigger export deficits in its commodity trade. The same goes for the costs of war, including the reparations that had to be paid. Over the entire period between 1843 and 1899, China’s war reparations totalled 713 million taels. On average that boils down to some twelve million taels or one to one and a half grams of silver per capita per year. Government’s foreign debts at the time, also a topic that has elicited huge debates and has often been considered a major problem at the time and in historiography, in the period from 1861 to 1898 increased to some 270 million taels in total. That is considerably less than a tael, i.e. considerably less than thirty-seven gram of silver per capita. As compared to what had become ’normal’ in the West, the sums of money involved are absolutely tiny.[Note 1295- See below] Relatively minor financial claims and losses, however, in Qing China led to huge problems because of inadequate institutions. What was really disastrous for China’s economy was the Taiping Rebellion, which would have been a major disaster for every economy and society. We will not even discuss the fact that the Qing, ruling over an empire with some 400 million people, could not simply kick out the British attacking them with a couple of thousand people over a distance of a couple of thousand miles during the First Opium War.
Note 1295: France after Waterloo had to pay reparations that, including additional payments and interest, amounted to some twenty per cent of its GDP i.e. some 300 grams of silver per capita. Another example would be the payments of Prussia to Napoleon. There are varying estimates of the total amount of money that Napoleon ‘collected’ in Prussia between 1806 and 1812. But it was at the very least half a billion francs. That boils down to at the very least 225 grams of silver per inhabitant of Prussia. In Great Britain, just after the Napoleonic Wars, public debt amounted to over 800 million pound sterling. Per inhabitant of England Wales, Scotland and Ireland that was some 4400 grams of silver.” [Vries 13:404-5]
; “According to [propagandists], it was only in the nineteenth century with foreign intervention and in particular when the country had to pay war reparations – especially those after the war with Japan – that things began to go wrong. At a time when the West became less bellicose and its costs and damages of war decreased, so they claim, China in contrast had to invest more in, and suffered more from, war. That is a quite idiosyncratic perspective. To begin with, the many military campaigns of the Qianlong Emperor were more expensive than the First Opium War and in any case military conflict and its costs in China were miniscule compared to those of, for example, the Napoleonic Wars for the European states involved. As indicated, by far the most devastating conflict China was involved in during the nineteenth century was the Taiping Rebellion for which one cannot primarily blame the Westerners, although Western powers did interfere after it had broken out … to save the Qing regime. When it comes to the war reparations that so often are referred to as a major cause of Chinas predicament, we already indicated that on a per capita basis they were tiny compared to what countries losing wars in Europe had to pay.” [407]
; “I already mentioned Perdue’s calculation of the total costs of the major Qing campaigns between 1747 and 1805. Those were about 300 million taels. If we add regular costs of the military, an estimated 30 million taels a year, that brings the total to some 2,100 million taels. In silver, that is the equivalent of £700 million. On average, we are then talking about the equivalent of less than £12 million per year; i.e. over that entire period on average some 6 grams of silver per inhabitant of China… As a reminder: Great Britain’s total military expenditure in the period 1793–1815 amounted to some £1,000 million. Per year, that on average is £43 million. That boils down to roughly £3.40 per Briton, the equivalent of over 370 grams of silver.
These differences in thinking about deficits and, especially, in the ability to deal with them, became quite glaring in the nineteenth century. I cannot remember having ever read a book on the history of China during that century in which war indemnities and reparations were not mentioned among the main reasons why China’s state and economy faltered. However, when one looks at the actual figures and compares them to figures we have for Europe, one simply has to conclude that, comparatively speaking, they were surprisingly low. What caused the problems in China at the time cannot have been the amounts of money involved as such. They must at least to a large extent have been caused by the incapability of government to tap the country’s resources.
In the following paragraphs I will present various figures with regard to war reparations and indemnities, (foreign) debts and the famous ‘silver drain’ that occurred in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and that also always figures prominently in explanations of China’s nineteenth-century predicament. They will all be presented in terms of grams of silver per capita. To get a better sense of order of magnitude: during that second quarter of that century 2 grams of silver more than sufficed for the subsistence of one adult male per day. At the treaty of Nanking that was ratified after the first Opium War in 1843, it was stipulated that China should pay ‘reparations’ amounting to $21 million. In silver that is about 1.5 grams per Chinese. Over the entire period between 1842 and 1900, China’s war reparations totalled 713 million taels. That boils down to on average some 12 million taels or 1–1.5 grams of silver per capita per year. Government’s foreign debts at the time also are a topic that has caused huge debates. They have often been considered a major problem at the time and in historiography. For the period 1853–1911, total foreign debt of state and provinces amounted to 227 million taels, less than 20 grams of silver per capita. In the period discussed in this book, the Qing state did not incur any public debts at all. In Europe reparations and (foreign) debts of the magnitudes just referred to would have been considered irrelevant.
Apparently China’s public economy could not cope with challenges that would have been considered relatively minor in north-western Europe. That there was something wrong with China’s financial system, and, I should add, with its monetary system, on which more will be said later on, also shows in the effects of the famous ‘drain’ of silver that became apparent from the 1820s onwards and that is always presented as a major cause of the hard times that befell China’s economy. That this drain turns out to have been much smaller than has long been claimed, only adds to this view. It in any case was not large on a per capita basis… In this calculation she includes the outflow of silver from China to India of about 11 million taels in the period 1808–14. If we ignore the first ten years of the period for which Lin presents data and focus on the years 1825–56, when the drain on average was much higher, we find an average leakage of about 7 million taels per year. That is less than a gram per year per inhabitant of China. In terms of value this is absolutely tiny, less than one-hundredth of a pound sterling, to put it in international perspective, and less than the amount of money an adult Chinese at the time would need for subsistence. It is hard to imagine how such a drain in terms of value can have been the cause of a major crisis for China’s government and for the country. New estimates by, among others, von Glahn come up with even lower figures. As he points out, the United States for several years sent substantial amounts of silver to China when the inflow from Britain – on which so many researchers always focused – had stopped. Besides, during the period of drain China indeed massively exported silver but imported substantial amounts of silver coins. On top of that he suggests mistakes have been made in several calculations. For the period 1818–54 he estimates total net outflow at some 94 million taels (i.e. on average some 2.5 million taels per year). That is less than one-third of a gram per Chinese per year. The debate is still going on but its conclusion can in my view not be doubted: in terms of value the silver drain cannot have caused the drastic effects commonly ascribed to it.
A comparison with the situation at the time in Britain may, again, be instructive here. Strikingly enough Britain had a trade deficit in its commodity trade that was much higher than that of China in the period from the 1820s to the 1850s. Its average annual imports for the period 1834–6 amounted to some £70 million. For the years 1844–6 they had risen to some £91 million. Total exports in these two periods, including re-exports, were £46 million and £58 million respectively. That leaves a gap – a drain – of £24 million and £33 million respectively. In taels, that would have been three times as much. Per capita, this is the equivalent of an annual silver drain of at least 150 grams in the first, and about 200 grams in the second, period. Apparently, a healthy economy and a healthy state could deal with this. Actually no such drain occurred. The British made up for this huge deficit in commodity trade by exporting services and capital. This ‘solution’ shows the enormous importance of the service sector for their economy, an importance that simply cannot be explained without extensive reference to the growth of the fiscal-military state. And it makes one wonder whether it have been possible for the Chinese to try and earn more money by providing services and investment to foreign countries.” [Vries 15:235-7]

3. • See sections V-4.E.3-4, below.

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2. The amount and effects of China’s silver drain due to opium are much exaggerated; China’s real currency problem was its lousy monetary system.

The amount and negative effects of China’s silver drain due to opium trade have been greatly exaggerated [1]. China’s entire silver loss amounted to perhaps a third of a gram to one gram per year per person [2]. Most of the silver that British opium traders obtained was promptly traded back for Chinese commodities such as tea [3]. China’s supply shrank in part because silver was hoarded and hidden by the Chinese people to avoid confiscation [4]. And China’s silver ingots (sycee) were traded at a discount for the more reliable foreign-minted silver coins [5]. The chief problem with China’s currency, acknowledged by some Chinese bureaucrats, was the limited and unreliable nature of China’s money; due to lack of standards, debasement, counterfeiting, and lack of trust in government [6]. The Chinese state was also foolish enough to close some silver mines and impose duties on silver imports [7].

1. • “Apparently China’s public economy could not cope with challenges that would have been considered relatively minor in north-western Europe. That there was something wrong with China’s financial system, and, I should add, with its monetary system, on which more will be said later on, also shows in the effects of the famous ‘drain’ of silver that became apparent from the 1820s onwards and that is always presented as a major cause of the hard times that befell China’s economy. That this drain turns out to have been much smaller than has long been claimed, only adds to this view. It in any case was not large on a per capita basis. The extremely high estimates by contemporaries are no longer believed in serious research. Lin Zexu, the commissioner who played such an important role in the outbreak of the First Opium War, thought that several hundred million ounces of silver had left his mother country through the years, in his view all because of opium. In 1837 a censor claimed that the annual drain amounted to in total 60 million taels. With the passage of time estimates have tended to get lower. Morse, late in the nineteenth century, estimated that in the second quarter of the nineteenth century there was a net silver drain from China of over 200 million taels. For the period 1826–40, Dermigny in 1964 estimated it at some 48 million taels. Hao, almost a century after morse, wrote about a net outflow between 1827 and 1849 of some 95 million taels. A couple of years later Kindleberger came up with an almost identical estimate for that period. In 1990, Lin claimed that for the period 1814–50, the net outflow was in the order of 100 million taels. In her China Upside Down, she came up with a new estimate: the net outflow of silver from China in the period from 1808 to 1856 would have been some 270 million taels. In this calculation she includes the outflow of silver from China to India of about 11 million taels in the period 1808–14. If we ignore the first ten years of the period for which Lin presents data and focus on the years 1825–56, when the drain on average was much higher, we find an average leakage of about 7 million taels per year. That is less than a gram per year per inhabitant of China. In terms of value this is absolutely tiny, less than one-hundredth of a pound sterling, to put it in international perspective, and less than the amount of money an adult Chinese at the time would need for subsistence. It is hard to imagine how such a drain in terms of value can have been the cause of a major crisis for China’s government and for the country. New estimates by, among others, von Glahn come up with even lower figures. As he points out, the United States for several years sent substantial amounts of silver to China when the inflow from Britain – on which so many researchers always focused – had stopped. Besides, during the period of drain China indeed massively exported silver but imported substantial amounts of silver coins. On top of that he suggests mistakes have been made in several calculations. For the period 1818–54 he estimates total net outflow at some 94 million taels (i.e. on average some 2.5 million taels per year). That is less than one-third of a gram per Chinese per year. The debate is still going on but its conclusion can in my view not be doubted: in terms of value the silver drain cannot have caused the drastic effects commonly ascribed to it.
A comparison with the situation at the time in Britain may, again, be instructive here. Strikingly enough Britain had a trade deficit in its commodity trade that was much higher than that of China in the period from the 1820s to the 1850s. Its average annual imports for the period 1834–6 amounted to some £70 million. For the years 1844–6 they had risen to some £91 million. Total exports in these two periods, including re-exports, were £46 million and £58 million respectively. That leaves a gap – a drain – of £24 million and £33 million respectively. In taels, that would have been three times as much. Per capita, this is the equivalent of an annual silver drain of at least 150 grams in the first, and about 200 grams in the second, period. Apparently, a healthy economy and a healthy state could deal with this. Actually no such drain occurred. The British made up for this huge deficit in commodity trade by exporting services and capital. This ‘solution’ shows the enormous importance of the service sector for their economy, an importance that simply cannot be explained without extensive reference to the growth of the fiscal-military state. And it makes one wonder whether it have been possible for the Chinese to try and earn more money by providing services and investment to foreign countries…
Lin’s claims that from 2006 that there would have been a net outflow of silver of 270 million taels between 1808 and 1856, would mean that, according to her, 19 per cent of China’s silver supply – not its total monetary supply – would have left the country. She estimated that this silver supply would have amounted to some 2,000 million dollars/ 1,400 millions taels. The net outflow estimated by von Glahn would imply a drain of substantially below 10 per cent as compared to a stock of some 1,400 million taels in 1814. His reference to Li suggests a somewhat lower silver stock at the beginning of the drain. Wenkai He accepts an estimate that, because of the drain, China’s silver stock would have shrunk between the 1820s and the 1850s by some 40 per cent. He refers to a publication by Wang from 1981, which I could not check. This is the same author who, in 2002, claimed China’s silver stock in 1830 amounted to 1,140–1,330 million taels. A 40 per cent drain would then be an outflow of some 500 million taels. That is really not very plausible. The central question, of course, is can such an outflow of 10 per cent, 20 per cent, maybe even somewhat more of one of its currencies, over several decades, have been the cause of, or a main contributing factor to, China’s economic predicament from the 1820s onwards? To me as such it cannot…
What does become clear though is that China never had much silver. According to Lin’s high estimate, China’s total silver supply in 1814 would have been about 1,400 million taels. This would mean that at that moment in time, before the ‘drain’ began and after many decades of supposedly enormous imports, when the stock must have been bigger than ever during the very long eighteenth century, China still only had a silver supply of at best some 140 grams per capita. As we will see, the silver supply and more in general, and more importantly, the money supply in Western European countries per capita was much bigger. If, as all the more specialist literature suggests, silver in fact continued to be quite scarce in China over the entire period it was imported, the question becomes even more pressing why government in China before its drain had not much more seriously and systematically implemented policies to either get more silver into China and/or end China’s dependency on imported silver. It also makes one curious about the strategies China’s government implemented to do something about the drain – or in any case about its effects – when it actually occurred and why these strategies apparently were not very successful.
Whatever the exact figures may be, it is far from obvious that a drain of the relative size suggested by Lin and von Glahn would turn China ‘up-side down’. It is not mysterious how things actually worked out and how the ‘drain’ triggered something more drastic: the fact that silver left the country led to price deflation, which caused hoarding, which in turn made monetary problems more serious…
But one may well ask whether all this was ‘inevitable’. Silver was only one of the (semi-)precious metals that might be used as money: what about those other metals and what about paper money and credit? Silver scarcity was a global problem in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Why were its effects so disastrous in China, whereas in many other countries it was not much more than a nuisance? Must not an explanation of China’s predicament involve its entire political economy, including the ways in which its rulers dealt with the crisis? In my view China’s financial and monetary problems, first and foremost those directly connected to government finance, became so big and unmanageable because of the structure and functioning of its financial and monetary systems. What we are discussing here is not simply a matter of wealth and poverty. It is a matter of the incapability of China’s government to mobilize available money and resources. It would lead too far in detail to discuss what solutions have been suggested to deal with China’s financial and monetary problems in the first half of the nineteenth century and what measures have actually been taken. Suffice to say here that no effective solutions were found.” [Vries 15:236-40]
• “By the 1830s the Chinese economy was in recession and the balance of trade had turned against China. The opium trade was blamed for the drainage of silver from the country and for the economic slowdown. There was no reason to believe the opium trade was the main reason for the silver famine or the recession, but a corrupt army and weakened bureaucracy, combined with the slowed economy, made opium an easy scapegoat for the dynasty’s problems.” [Miron 05:3]
• “Furthermore, opium and general trading, or smuggling, was by no means confined to Canton (modern Guangzhou) but was happening in dozens of inlets and small places along the coast. It is beyond belief that the central Chinese authorities, who to this day do not have reliable statistics on most aspects of the Chinese economy, had more than a hazy idea of what was going on, let alone accurate statistics about the opium trade and its effects on the silver supply…
We know that much and perhaps most of the silver that the merchants earned from selling opium was immediately spent again on buying tea, for which there was a ravenous demand in England… What seems certain is that if there was indeed social disruption and even turmoil, a good deal of the silver earned by locals, whether for tea or anything else, would have immediately disappeared without being reflected in official accounts.
It was entirely normal for Chinese to bury and hide valuables and money in times of trouble. Silver would certainly be hidden in this way. Once hidden, it would be risky to bring it out, even as silver prices rose, lest neighbors and others suspected that one had hidden treasure. The phenomenon of hidden valuables has recurred many times: during the collapse of the Ming dynasty, during the Taiping rebellion after 1850, again during the disturbances and the Boxer rising of the 1890s, not to mention the many tales of torture of landowners in the early days of the Chinese Communists to make them reveal their hidden valuables.
What all that suggests is that the imperial authorities may have been quite right to detect a withdrawal of silver from circulation in China, but wrong to think that all or even most of it was being exported and that foreign opium traders were therefore responsible for the larger economic consequences within China.” [Gelber 06:3-4]
• See the [Polachek 92:103,104-5] citation, below.

2. • See the [Vries 15:236-40] citation, above.

3. • See the [Gelber 06:3-4] citation, above.

4. • See the [Gelber 06:3-4] citation, above.
• “To summarise, it was not uncommon for arbitrary violations of ICPR [industrial and commercial property rights] to happen in historical China in the past millennium. The real tax rates faced by industrialists and merchants appeared to be not only high, but also unpredictable, arbitrary and progressive… As a politically disadvantaged group, merchants’ property rights did not receive proper protection. Living in an insecure environment, merchants strove to make a profit in good times, yet often chose to hide wealth and keep a low profile rather than expanding their businesses, being conscious about the risk of expropriation. Chinese sayings such as ‘‘if a tree shows its beauty in the forest, then wind is going to destroy it’’ (mu xiu yu lin, feng bi cui zhi), ‘‘wealth won’t pass three generations’’(fu bu guo san dai)… are moral lessons, but also reflections of insecure property rights.” [Chen 12:58]
• “Few Chinese homes in areas outside foreign settlements will reveal on the outside any indication of prosperity. If you go inside, you may find things intimating comfortable means, but the wall and the gate and everything outside will be in woeful disrepair, suggesting the slums. The advantage of this is that claims of having no money can be better sustained by such evidence, and also that outward evidence of wealth would invite official extortions as well as plots by brigands. Unlike most other people in days of prosperity, the Chinese conceal theirs from the world as much as possible in most instances, and make it known only to trusted friends and guests…” [Townsend 33:118]

5. • See the [Vries 15:236-40] citation, above; “As he points out, the United States for several years sent substantial amounts of silver to China when the inflow from Britain – on which so many researchers always focused – had stopped. Besides, during the period of drain China indeed massively exported silver but imported substantial amounts of silver coins.”
• See the [Polachek 92:104-5] and [Vries 15:253,258-61] citations, below, on the premium value of White-minted specie.

6. • “The unsentimental wing of the “China-as-victim” school of historians… has long contended that China undertook her rather daring attempt to close off foreign trade in 1839 as a last-ditch effort to protect a monetary system that was being ruined by the outflow of bullion for drug purchases… However, such evidence does not exist. In fact, available evidence on the question suggests, to the contrary, that the men in charge of policy up until 1838—supported by the great majority of officials and even, in part, by the emperor—did not regard trade embargo (aimed at ending drug imports) as an effective solution to the disintegration of the Chinese currency then in progress. Some saw domestic monetary reform options as more likely to work. Others preferred legalization of the drug to reduce its price and to bring down the volume of imports. Still others, including the Tao-kuang emperor, seem to have believed that nothing but strict trade controls could work, but were not convinced that China had the military clout to enforce such controls against a feared maritime enemy. Though disagreeing among themselves, these different actors (who, together, comprised the vast majority within officialdom) nevertheless had reached agreement, by the late 1830s, that interrupting foreign trade with Britain did not hold the real answer to the domestic fiscal woes arising from China’s dwindling supply of silver specie. If their views had prevailed, there probably never would have been an opium war.'” [Polachek 92:103]
; “First was the problem [for the Chinese bureaucracy] of deciding just how much of the silver famine—as it was called—was actually attributable to the outflow of specie to pay for opium. On this, official opinion remained ever divided. But a significant number of mandarins and publicists continued, to the end, to stress the preponderant influence of domestic currency management deficiencies, and to argue that domestic currency reform therefore was the key to solving the financial crisis.
To begin with the silver famine itself, it is clear that the early 1830s did in fact witness a serious decline in the availability of silver bullion, and that this had a decidedly negative effect on the public as well as the private sectors of the economy. As of the early nineteenth century, China’s monetary and financial system was relatively primitive and inflexible. It was dependent on the maintenance of stable rates of exchange between the state-minted copper coins used in small, daily market transactions, on the one hand, and the unminted silver sycee (nearly pure bullion) used for the settlement of larger accounts. Fiat or paper instruments of credit were underdeveloped, and tended to be held in suspicion by “metalist” state ideologues; moreover, it is doubtful that the public would have trusted its largely unaccountable bureaucratic rulers sufficiently to accept state-issued notes at face value. When, therefore, the government became aware (during the mid-1820s) of a trend toward “cheap” coins and “dear” silver, it had to take this development with the utmost seriousness, inas-much as parity instability of this sort affected inter-regional and public-private economic transactions in too many sectors to allow a do-nothing response.’
But it is far less clear that the awareness of rising silver prices turned all official eyes automatically in the direction of illegal drug imports as an explanation for the phenomenon. For one matter, it was not evident that the drug traffic was the sole or even the major cause of the silver famine of the late 1820s and 1830s. Devaluation of the coinage had also been hastened by the lowering of government quality standards and by a wave of counterfeiting, and with coins thus debased it was but natural that there would be a quickening demand for silver and an attendant decrease in the availability of the latter. Then, too, Chinese awareness of uniformity of foreign-minted silver dollars and of the savings in assay fees that accrued to the businessmen who used them allowed foreign silver coinage to circulate in China at an above-face-value premium, in turn drawing purer unminted Chinese sycee out of the country. As many pointed out, both these problems could have been managed without a frontal attack on the drug traffic, and the Ch’ing government might have gone far toward restabilizing the bimetallic exchange rates if it had turned its energies to improved control of copper-coin minting and to the production of a reliable silver coinage.” [104-5]
• “[F]or Qing China there is ample evidence in the literature that the lack of a centralized and effective monetary authority – there was neither a national bank nor a national mint that coined silver – had many disadvantages in this respect… Let me point out several of those disadvantages. The enormous diversity of coins made exchange very complex and one often had to clip or cut moneys to verify their metallic content. That damaged the coins and led to further deterioration. Government knew that many of its subjects preferred to use foreign coins. Still, during the period we are discussing no official Chinese silver coins were ever minted, apart from some experiments that were not regarded a success. Foreign coins simply were better and often were accepted at a premium. When in the 1820s newly devalued coins from Spanish America came to China, there was no monetary authority to coordinate a response. Basically the only policy that government actively, but in vain, tried to implement was to prohibit the export of silver.” [Vries 15:253]
; “But even if we were able to exactly determine official, private and counterfeit copper money production, and add that to China’s silver stock, we still would have to conclude that the total amount of (semi-) precious metal available for monetary use in Qing China was small. It will definitely have been substantially lower than 200 grams of silver equivalents, with the value of copper (important as it may have been in daily use) amounting to only a fraction of that of silver. Velocity of money use will certainly have been lower here than in Great Britain…
After [paper money’s] liberal, inflationary use under the Ming, it had all but disappeared. At the end of the eighteenth century, the role of various paper moneys in general, not that of paper money issued by government, as a means of payment had (again) become substantial. Paper money issued by government only reappeared in 1853. But as compared to the situation in Britain, its importance still was fairly minor…
Horesh claims that private paper money [in China] generally was restricted to the immediate region where it was issued and confined to certain regions only. Its use was based on personal and not institutional trust. Private bank note issuance in his view cannot be described as a pillar of the late imperial Chinese monetary system: There is no solid foundation on which to assert that money shop scrip (broadly defined) was ‘well accepted’ in China in the late imperial era. This is because it constituted in all likelihood an insignificant part of China’s currency stock prior to 1900 and because the circulation of such scrip was regionally fragmented if not parochial’…
He considers it implausible ‘that the ratio of all notes as part of the entire Chinese money stock was – even as late as 1900 – much higher than ten per cent’ and adds that ‘Chinese privately issued notes were not considered reliable to the extent that they would compensate for the late imperial relinquishment of monetary reins.
Qing China lacked a highly developed monetary system. The total per capita monetary stock for China around 1900 has been estimated at 5.2 dollars or the equivalent at the time of 3.77 ounces or some 140 grams of silver. That is very little as compared to developed countries in Europe or the USA… Moreover, is not only quantities that matter. Let me again quote Wang:
‘It is thus evident that under the bimetallic system of Ch’ing China the volume of money depended heavily on the availability of two kinds of metal, silver and copper, over which the monetary authorities exerted no effective control. It was a poor system that lacked the flexibility of adjusting money supply to market demand for circulating media. In addition to the problem of inflexibility, however, other serious defects also existed in the Ch’ing system. The continuing fluctuations in the rate of exchange between the two kinds of money generated unnecessary risks and uncertainty in business transactions. Still worse was its lack of uniformity. Since silver circulated in bullion without standardization, its value was determined by its weight and fineness. It took a professional moneychanger to ascertain the fineness of the white metal. Added to this complexity, was the absence of standard weight in China. The unit of weight called liang differed from one place to another and from one trade to another. Accordingly, there appeared literally hundreds of units of account (tael) with varying degree of fineness and weight throughout the country. Nor was the cash sector less complicated. The stock of copper cash in circulation consisted of a variety of coins – government authorized, counterfeited and foreign (e.g., those from Japan, annam). Needless to say, the copper content and weight of these various types differed from one another. This was even true among the officially cast coins, depending upon when and where they were stamped. As a consequence, the monetary world was filled with a multitude of exchange rates between silver and cash, different sorts of cash, and the multiplicity of taels, all of which resulted in a chaotic fluctuation of rates. Lastly, both kinds of money, copper cash in particular, were too cumbersome to ship over long distances without modern transport facilities and too inconvenient to settle transactions, which involved a large volume of trade.’
Later on in the same text Wang points out that the problem of inflexibility, complexity, and cumbersomeness inherent in the bimetallic system remained.’ The complexity and inefficiency of this system must have pushed up transactions costs. That all was not well with China’s money, and that people at the time themselves thought so too, clearly shows in the fact that a foreign currency (i.e. dollars from Latin america) was used in various parts of the country, in particular, those that were involved in overseas trade. Dollars not only functioned as money of account but also as ‘real’ money. They began to replace un-coined sycee silver as a means of payment there from the 1730s and did so increasingly from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. As I pointed out earlier, those dollars often were exchanged with a substantial premium over their silver value whereas sycee silver was exported in order to acquire silver coins. Many Chinese used foreign coins as they found them convenient to carry and exchange and superior in craftsmanship when it came to shape and design to what the Chinese themselves were able to produce. Rulers in China were aware of this preference of their subjects for foreign coins and often tried to counter it by insisting that foreign coins should be melted and turned into sycees and by prohibiting their domestic production. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Chinese officials induced some silversmiths to manufacture dollars that in every respect were identical to the Carolus dollar. Those silversmiths, however, did not manage to obtain a similar uniformity in design and weight because numerous artisans working quite independently of each other produced the coins. Moreover, the silversmiths adulterated the money by adding alloy up to 50 per cent. This then led to the prohibition of any further manufacturing of silver dollars in China.” [258-61]
• For more on China’s sorry currency, see section II-6.A and its sources.
• On the poor shape of China’s metal mining, see section V-2.G.7 and its sources.

7. • “[E]xperts on early modern Chinese history seem to agree that silver was scarce in China already before the famous ‘drain’ of the second quarter of the nineteenth century… Strikingly enough, central government did not do much to change that. It could have stimulated trade with Westerners. That might have brought in more silver. It did nothing of the sort. As compared to most governments in Western Europe, China’s central government in this respect was passive at best, if not an active nuisance. There are many examples where it closed silver mines or opposed opening them. It tried to collect duties on silver imports. The Qing authorities claimed the right to tax commodities with customs duties. In their view foreign bullion imports were not incoming currency but incoming commodities. They therefore taxed them, insisted that the silver be kept intact after being shipped into China and, in principle, till the second half of the nineteenth century did not officially accept it as legal tender for China’s domestic markets.” [Vries 15:251-2]

————

3. Chinese government and military officials fully collaborated with opium trade and distribution, as well as domestic production.

China, including its emperors and officials, had been using opium for centuries, and official bans did not reduce its demand [1]. The Chinese not only bought and abused the opium, but did all the distribution and selling within China, with the collaboration of a host of Chinese civilian and military officials [2]. The Chinese also produced a lot of opium domestically despite the bans [3], though they preferred the taste and quality of Indian opium supplied mainly by the British. The Chinese eventually succeeded in ending the British/Indian competition by falsely committing to end their own production, thus leaving the field open for their depredations [4]. Chinese officials and militias brutally forced great numbers of Chinese to cultivate opium for plunder, sometimes using official bans and fines as tools of extortion [5]. Chinese soldiers were paid in opium plots or directly in opium [6]. The Chinese government meanwhile proclaimed to the world that it was doing everything possible to halt the trade [7].

1. • “The opium poppy was introduced into China between the 4th and 7th centuries by Arab traders, and it was cultivated widely for centuries before the East India Company began trading in Asia. An 11th century Chinese medical doctor referred to opium as medicine, and it was used to cure diarrhea, induce sleep, and reduce the pain of diseases such as dysentery and cholera.” [Miron 05:2]
• “Isabel Hilton wrote in The Guardian, “Opium had been consumed in China since the eighth century and several emperors had sung its praises. It began to be smoked with the introduction of tobacco in the late 16th century, turning its consumption from a medicinal to a social habit. By the 1830s, China was producing large quantities of opium domestically, though the imported drug was judged superior. The British traders argued, disingenuously no doubt, that they were merely supplying an existing demand, delivering the opium to a network of Chinese traders who distributed it across the empire. (Source: Isabel Hilton, The Guardian, September 11, 2011)”
• factsanddetails.com/china/cat11/sub74/item139.html
• “The earliest clear description of the use of opium as a recreational drug in China came from Xu Boling, who wrote in 1483 that opium was “mainly used to aid masculinity, strengthen sperm and regain vigor”, and that it “enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies”. He also described an expedition sent by the Ming dynasty Chenghua Emperor in 1483 to procure opium for a price “equal to that of gold” in Hainan, Fujian, Zhejiang, Sichuan and Shaanxi, where it is close to the western lands of Xiyu. A century later, Li Shizhen listed standard medical uses of opium in his renowned Compendium of Materia Medica (1578), but also wrote that “lay people use it for the art of sex,” in particular the ability to “arrest seminal emission”. This association of opium with sex continued in China until the end of the 19th century…
Smoking of opium came on the heels of tobacco smoking and may have been encouraged by a brief ban on the smoking of tobacco by the Ming emperor. The prohibition ended in 1644 with the coming of the Qing dynasty, which encouraged smokers to mix in increasing amounts of opium. In 1705, Wang Shizhen wrote, “nowadays, from nobility and gentlemen down to slaves and women, all are addicted to tobacco.” Tobacco in that time was frequently mixed with other herbs (this continues with clove cigarettes to the modern day), and opium was one component in the mixture. Tobacco mixed with opium was called madak (or madat) and became popular throughout China and its seafaring trade partners (such as Taiwan, Java, and the Philippines) in the 17th century. In 1712, Engelbert Kaempfer described addiction to madak: “No commodity throughout the Indies is retailed with greater profit by the Batavians than opium, which [its] users cannot do without, nor can they come by it except it be brought by the ships of the Batavians from Bengal and Coromandel.”
Fueled in part by the 1729 ban on madak, which at first effectively exempted pure opium as a potentially medicinal product, the smoking of pure opium became more popular in the 18th century. In 1736, the smoking of pure opium was described by Huang Shujing, involving a pipe made from bamboo rimmed with silver, stuffed with palm slices and hair, fed by a clay bowl in which a globule of molten opium was held over the flame of an oil lamp. This elaborate procedure, requiring the maintenance of pots of opium at just the right temperature for a globule to be scooped up with a needle-like skewer for smoking, formed the basis of a craft of “paste-scooping” by which servant girls could become prostitutes as the opportunity arose.”
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium
• “In China, [opium] was a normal item of use and trade for centuries before the 1840 war… We know that the 1820s and 1830s were a time of social unrest and disturbance in the Chinese empire, with various rebellious groups appearing from time to time, not least in the South. It would be normal at such times for some people to use opium to relieve stress, much as the modern world has used Valium. Such a process could help to account for the startling rate of increase in opium sales at Canton at the end of the 1820s.” [Gelber 06:2-3]

2. • “In China, [opium] was a normal item of use and trade for centuries before the 1840 war. Not until the later 1790s did the Chinese court start to worry about its growing and intensive use. In the 1820s it began seriously to prohibit opium imports, though the bans entirely failed to stop Chinese people from growing or buying it in increasing quantities. Still less did it stop Chinese citizens, merchants, gangs and hordes of officials from ignoring the prohibitions and smuggling it into the country. Even senior officials in charge of coastal protection grew very rich indeed from smuggling, or smugglers’ kickbacks.” [Gelber 06:2]
• “For good practical reasons, an embargo on foreign trade—whether conceived as a pressure tactic to elicit British voluntary renunciation of the drug trade or as a permanent measure—could not easily be divorced from a policy of tough action against the Chinese distributors who ferried the opium (and outward-bound silver) between the foreigner and the Chinese consumer. As many officials were to warn the emperor, to impose a trade cutoff without simultaneously uprooting the native traffickers would be merely to drive the smugglers and legal traders alike into illegal channels. By the mid-1830s, at least, this had begun to happen anyway, even without any actions having been taken by the Ch’ing government to restrict the authorized trade at Canton (China’s sole legal port of call for European ships), and customs revenues were beginning to be lost as a result. Obviously, more pressure at Canton would only accelerate the trend.
Why not, then, go after the native, tax-evading smugglers? But when they considered such a step, Ch’ing provincial officials could not but feel profound misgivings. As of the 1830s, the majority of senior provincial officeholders had already been through many unpleasant experiences in conjunction with attempts to control outlaw organizations who were well entrenched in the local social infrastructure or who catered to victims not willing to police themselves. From such encounters, they had learned that smugglers of almost any commodity were simply beyond the reach of efficient prosecution, owing to the government’s lack of an independent police force. Whenever the mandarins attempted to bring such criminals to justice, they had to depend on civilian informants. But the information supplied by such witnesses was more likely than not to have been contributed by parties themselves actively involved in the same line of business, and eager to have the law chase their rivals from the field. To pursue the Chinese middlemen in the opium traffic could thus pile bureaucratic evils on top of existing social ones. Few had the stomach for such action. Yet, without it, as everyone admitted, it would be self-defeating to talk of quarantining China’s foreign trade.” [Polachek 92:105-6]
; “The real reason for the prevalence of the drug habit among Li’s troops [in 1832] was that, just before the Yao wars, they had been stationed along the coast, near Canton, where they had been engaging systematically in squeezing and protecting the smuggling trade, and, of course, indulging themselves in the forbidden pleasures of the drug…
But the bulk of the illegal merchandise was still passing right up into the Pearl River, Feng claimed. How could this traffic be moving so easily past the checkpoints established in the channel? Only with the complicity of the patrol forces themselves, whom Feng accused of being on the payroll of the Chinese “thugs” who controlled the drug business onshore…
Chinese soldiers were in open complicity with underworld traffickers: taking their bribes, smoking their drugs, and revealing the impotence of the military arm of the state.” [109-10]
; “Most problematically of all, the “total” [embargo] approach, to be successful, would require a Draconian police effort onshore in order to break up the highly mobile and elusive native distributor networks. Bitter experience had taught that the imperial bureaucracy simply did not possess a sufficiently reliable police apparatus to pursue these distributors. Regulations of the sort that would have to be enforced, Wu claimed, were “but toys in the hands of corrupt government functionaries.” The tougher the regulations, the worse the blackmailing of innocents would become, while the traffic itself would not be the slightest bit interrupted. The government agents and soldiers assigned to such cases would merely report one or two arrests and seizures, and whatever else they confiscated would simply be resold!'” [122]
• “It those opium imports were so obnoxious, why weren’t they stopped? Imagine Chinese junks with Chinese crews trying to sell opium in Newcastle. Those increasing imports are not only a clear proof of British greed and un-scrupulousness… They also are proof of the weakness of China’s state and, lest we forget, of the enormous collusion with the British by many Chinese.” [Vries 13:404]
• “The East India Company obtained an opium monopoly in Bengal in 1773, and in 1830 the Company added Bombay opium to its sphere of control. From the 1770s it began heavier trade in Canton. While official Chinese policy barred the opium trade in 1799, merchants welcomed the financial rewards. Often the English traded opium for tea at Canton…
[Chinese] authorities were unable to bring smugglers to justice, as Chinese officials “steadily accepted bribes and acted as willing accomplices.” [Miron 05:3-4]
• “The rise of opium addiction in Southern China and the trade imbalance caused by the drug forced the Qing into action. In 1820, an Imperial Proclamation ordered a halt to all importation and use of opium, but the Proclamation did little to slow the flow of opium into China. Opium was funneled in with regular bribes paid out to local merchants and officials; British Lieutenant John Ouchterlony wrote “the governor of Canton… was himself well known to be extensively interested in the opium trade.”” [Cone 14]
• That the internal distribution of opium was run entirely by Chinese is evident from the facts that White traders were restricted to Canton and China had few immigrants.

3. • See the Isabel Hilton and [Gelber 06:2] citations, above.
• “Yet the great international anti-opium conferences and arrangements of 1880-1913 were entirely futile as, indeed, America’s anti-alcohol prohibitions were to be. In China itself, the issue of opium quickly changed its form. Within sixteen years of the Treaty of Nanjing, China had abolished the opium import restrictions, not least because they had become irrelevant. By 1860, and much more so by 1900, the Chinese were growing at home many times as much opium as the British, or anyone else, could import. What is more, they kept on doing it, in increasing quantities and virtually throughout all the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century.” [Gelber 06:9]
• Ralph Townsend wrote in about 1930:
“The following is a tax proclamation of which I saved a copy:
a) Poppy cultivation tax, total allotted………….. $800,000…
i) Public sale of opium (Public Sale of Opium Bureau established and each village compelled to purchase greater or less amount of opium according to its size)…
It will be observed from the tax proclamation that the poppy cultivation tax and the opium tax are merely measures enforcing the planting of opium and the compulsory purchase of such opium as the local dictator elected to assign – at his own sale price.” [Townsend 33:232-4]
; See the additional [Townsend 33] citations in this section, below.

4. • “In 1906, following many international parleys, the British Indian Government made arrangements to stop all exports of opium to China on condition that the Chinese would eradicate poppy cultivation in China. The idea was that as long as the trade was legal – it had been legalized in China in 1858 – the British Indian growers were entitled to a market for their product, but that if the Chinese authorities would give evidence of a sincere desire to stop it, the British would gladly cooperate. Realization of this aim was undertaken intelligently. An abrupt cessation of opium would have brought hardship to the Indian peasants cultivating poppies, and would have introduced also a severe problem in the number of addicts in China suddenly deprived of their drug. So a ten-year reduction plan was inaugurated, by which the Chinese were to warn all smokers to begin tapering off in their consumption, and by which the Indian growers could have time to prepare for some other kind of crop. Both poppy cultivation and opium consumption were to be at an end in China in 1917, ten years from the date of the agreements going into effect.
Sure enough, the Chinese set about the reduction of smoking and the reduction of poppy acreage. The plan went through on schedule, and in 1917, so a reliable foreigner who took part in the foreign investigation informed me, and so the investigators jointly reported, not an acre of poppies could be found in all China in that year.
At this news, the British prohibited all further exports of opium to China. Here typical Chinese trickery appears: the Chinese moguls had wished above everything else to stop the competition of Indian opium, which is preferred because of its taste to that of the native crop. Thus, in 1917, having stopped their own production, they could say in substance, “Now we’ve stopped opium at home – cease your exports to us.” But after the British had passed legislation permanently prohibiting exports of opium to China, what did the Chinese do but resume opium production on a vast scale, happily free from British competition!
The Chinese might contend that disorders in the country introduced changes beyond their control, and that the Revolution of 1911, abolishing the monarchy, had brought about disorders making further control of opium impossible. But the significant fact is that for six years after that revolution, from 1911 to 1917, despite disorders, the Chinese were able to carry out the plan that would end British competition and give them the opium market to themselves. It is significant, too, that immediately the agreement period expired, opium production was resumed on such a wide scale.” [Townsend 33:264-5]

5. • Ralph Townsend wrote in about 1930: “The so-called governor of the province last year played along strategically with both Liu Ho-ting and the marines to force the planting of opium on a colossal scale, the soldiers distributing the seed to the farmers with coercion to plant them, and the profits at harvest being split all around. This year it is said that the Cantonese Army around Amoy has discouraged poppy cultivation. The governor of Fukien, after the opium money was all in, resigned last year and a new one took his place. The Chinese Navy was allowed its share of the opium money by the privilege of establishing an “inspectorate” in the river just below Foochow, where incoming junks and sampans, bringing cargoes of opium, were searched. Carriers were “fined” for every pound found aboard, then with a stamp on the opium showing that the “fine” had been paid, the opium was brought on to Foochow to be marketed.” [Townsend 33:236]
; “After reading China’s affectedly earnest commitments in various international conferences to the effect that all possible steps have been and are being taken to eradicate the opium evil, amazement is often expressed by persons in this country when they are first acquainted with the wholesale scale of Chinese opium production and consumption. The Chinese bitterly opposed an international inquiry into their opium situation two years ago and succeeded in preventing it. With the valleys of China white with opium poppies every spring, Chinese delegates abroad have blandly denied the obvious facts.
The following appeared last June in the Chinese papers all over China: “Strict and faithful enforcement of the various laws and ordinances promulgated by the government regarding the suppression of the opium evil is called for by a mandate issued by the national government June 18. The mandate threatens severe punishment to officials who are negligent in the enforcement of these laws and ordinances…. They must not regard such as dead laws, to be treated only as pro forma and ignored de facto…. Should any official be found guilty of negligence in the enforcement of such laws, thereby affecting the welfare of the people, he will be prosecuted and punished severely in strict accordance with law.”
That is rather typical. At the time of this edict the opium crop harvested in the spring was moving to market all over China. In Foochow, where I was at the time, the Chinese navy was operating an “inspectorate” station in the mouth of the harbor, searching incoming junks and sampans for contraband. But far from confiscating any opium found aboard, the navy merely “fined” the carrier for each pound of it and allowed him to proceed with his cargo.
A detail more significant, perhaps, was that the poppy planting all over the province had been ordered by the provincial governor, as he would be called in an American state, a Mr. Fang Shun-tao. Fang ordered his soldiers to distribute the seed all up and down the lowland country where the crop grows well. Farmers were informed that land not planted in opium would be severely taxed, and the methods generally employed amounted to compulsion. By this grim tyranny an enormous acreage was diverted from needed food crops. At large, public opinion among the villagers was against planting opium poppies. They knew only too well the strife and hardship that opium production invites. But of course the military under Fang triumphed and there was a bumper crop.
A favorite device of the military in China who enforce poppy cultivation is to invoke a previously disregarded law which declares that opium is illegal and extort money from the farmers on this pretext when the crop comes along as a “fine.”
This method was followed by Fang and his henchmen to whom he had farmed out the tax and fine collection privileges. Farmers who had planted under compulsion, by provincial orders, suddenly had invoked against them the dead letter orders from the Nanking central government, whereby poppy cultivation is illegal.
In one case a group of farmers came to ask the provincial government for mercy. They complained that even if they sold all of their possessions, including their wives and children, they could not meet the tax demands of Fang’s agents. The answer they received was an order to the soldiers to open fire on them – and the confiscation of their poppy crop.
Shortly after the crop was harvested Mr. Fang was able to retire from his provincial governorship and fade into prosperous obscurity, joining the scores of Chinese officials who make an exit in this fashion every year.
Resident foreigners report compulsory poppy planting over most of China. In parts of Shensi eight out of every ten acres of the irrigated land were reported planted in opium by compulsory measures there in 1931. Average opium dens in China are not the affairs of Oriental splendor arranged by imaginative motion picture directors. They are commonly nothing more than dirty and nearly bare rooms, dark and hideously dingy and smelly, without so much as a single cushion or pillow. Inside are bare wood benches, and by the benches little tables to hold the lamps and tea.” [251-3]
; “The sale of any narcotics except for medical use is forbidden in the Settlement and in the French Concession adjoining it, but vast amounts are bootlegged in to supply the local Chinese demand and for attempts to smuggle the drugs out to other countries. But as an apology for the drug-ridden plight of China as a whole, such claims are ridiculous in view of the vast acreage of opium poppies either sanctioned or made compulsory every year by Chinese officials. Drugs smuggled into China are but an infinitesimal quantity compared to the opium produced there.” [253]
; “Said the Chinese representative at Geneva in 1931:
“The facts really are that considerable improvement was achieved in the suppression of poppy cultivation and opium smoking during 1929 in many provinces of China, except in a few restricted areas or in Foreign Concessions and Leased Territories.”
The representative had the usual complacency to make this statement at a time when opium-growing was compulsory over most of the areas where it would grow, and compulsory by officials of the so-called government. Outside thousands of towns and villages foreigners could see the fields of opium poppies waving in the breeze, while abroad Chinese diplomats whined that the Chinese were doing their noble best to suppress the despicable trade, but of course could not be expected to do anything in the few acres of the country under foreign flags.
As a matter of fact, opium is obtainable in the bootleg manner in all the foreign territory in China. But it must be said that these bits of foreign territory are the only places where sincere efforts are made to combat vicious drugs. There are hundreds of places in the International Settlement in Shanghai where opium may be bought, but the officials there do as much as could be expected, among a population with a taste for opium, to keep the trade down. It is significant, too, that they are resisted by the Chinese authorities in this effort… But even with such a scandal, conditions were vastly better than in territory definitely Chinese, where opium cultivation was compulsory, and where officials assigned pro rata lots to towns and villages, with orders to purchase such lots or pay the price anyway. They were better than in Fukien, for example, where Fang Shun-tao, the governor, had the poppy seed distributed all over the lowlands by soldiers for obligatory planting.” [262-3]
; “True, the Chinese Navy, Chinese Army and Chinese police do a lot of detecting, and their record of detections looks very well on any statistics the Chinese authorities care to show. What they don’t mention is that after the opium is “detected,” it is handed back to the party possessing it with a “fine” which amounts to nothing more than a regular Chinese official squeeze. The opium then goes on to market in the usual way. Reference to the tax proclamation of Chen Kuo-hui, quoted in the previous chapter headed “Equilibrium of Chaos” will show the typical system of “fining” persons for opium possession while compelling pro rata purchases of opium by towns and villages all in the same manifesto.
Once in a while a “seizure” is made, not in the interest of opium prohibition, but because somebody failed to pay up. And such “seized” opium is sold and the proceeds pocketed by the forces of law and order.” [266]
• “The very deep and very real connections to the underworld that Chiang [Kai-shek] cultivated in Shanghai (namely in regard to the Green Gang) would remain with him throughout his entie life. Before the situation with the Japanese came to a head, Chiang had made China’s chief drug czar and criminal kingpin, Du Yuesheng, a major-general, and put his assistant in charge of the Opium Suppression Bureau. In 1931, Du Yuesheng himself became the head of the Opium Suppression Bureau. Under the guise of confiscating and eradicating the drug, the Chiang regime came to monopolize its trade. One of the key reasons the Nationalists were so intent on eliminating the Communists (who also sold opium) during the war with the Japanese was so the sale of the narcotic would not be disrupted. On Chiang’s fiftieth birthday, Du Yuesheng, whose nickname was Al Capone of the Orient, presented the leader with an airplane christened Opium Supression of Shanghai.” [Parfitt 12:134]

6. • See [Townsend 33:236,251-3,262-3] citations, above.
• “Soldiers are paid directly in opium in some armies, as mentioned previously, and where they are not paid in opium the privileges of looting it are usually good. Opium finances at least three fourths of the fighting in China.” [Townsend 33:256]

7. • Examples of the the Chinese policy of blatant lies are given repeatedly in [Townsend 33:chapter VIII: Opium]; see citations, above.

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4. Given the Chinese high demand and extensive collaboration, stopping the opium trade to China was impossible.

Given the extensive collaboration of Chinese officials, denying the Chinese demand for opium was impossible; it was just a question of who would do the selling [1]. Opium was in fact legal in much of the world, much used and traded at the time [2]. In order to avoid the problems of underground trade, legalization was increasingly advocated by Chinese bureaucrats, international observers, and Christian missionaries [3]. In the Malay country and the Dutch East Indies, sale of opium was legalized *only for Chinese residents*, because it was understood that trying to prevent them from obtaining it was not worth the trouble [4]. When legalization was agreed to after the Second Anglo-Chinese War (1860), Chinese consumption of opium did not increase, according to a study of export rates and prices [5]. A big reduction in Chinese opium abuse was achieved in the mid-20th century via the draconian tactics of the Communists, but today China is once again experiencing an opioid epidemic [6].

1. • See the [Polachek 92:105-6,122] citations in the previous section (3).
• “[I]t is pushing things too far to suppose that China would have remained free of opium if foreign governments had restrained their own traders. With commerce of any sort being carried on, and Chinese beginning to travel in and out of the country, the opium habit would sooner or later have been imported during the nineteenth century, and with it an early spread of poppy cultivation in China. Chinese take to opium like a kitten to catnip, and with the mandarins able to do much as they pleased in areas distant from the capital, we cannot conceive of their resistance to opium production when its profits loomed so large. Opium was bound to come in China, British or no British…
People were a long jump, in those days, from twentieth century international commissions on slavery, narcotics, seal fisheries, bird protection and such. The opium trade was but one of the many condoned evils of the times, accepted according to the standards of thought then current. China, without internal organization sufficient to enforce progressive measures, and possessing a population given over by temperament to welcome any sort of vice, especially one as slothful as opium-smoking, was the outstanding sufferer. Opium was eagerly welcomed there and gained a grip on the people that it had evidently never held on any other population, even where it had been known for centuries…
To say that the Chinese, their tastes being what they are, would be free of opium but for the transportation of opium to China in foreign ships a hundred years ago is equivalent to the proposition that prohibition in the United States would have succeeded but for Canadian and Mexican smugglers.” [Townsend 33:258-60]

2. • “Growing and selling opium was entirely legal. In 1840, and for decades afterwards, growing, selling and using opium was entirely legal in places like Turkey, Persia and (British) India. In India it was not only legal but in the 1830s and 1840s opium from the British East India Company’s Bengal opium monopoly was quite normally auctioned in Calcutta and shipped to many places, for instance to the Dutch in the East Indies. Opium was legal in Britain itself, which imported some 200,000 pounds of it from India in that same year. It continued in normal use, especially in the form of laudanum, and was used by many distinguished British and European people, including Prime Minister Gladstone in Britain and Prince Bismarck in Germany, was openly sold to the families of wounded soldiers during World War I and traces of laudanum could be found in British over-the-counter cold medicines as late as the 1950s. Indeed, neither in Britain nor in America, were there laws against opium or any other drug until many decades after the 1840-1842 war.” [Gelber 06:4]

3. • “In 1836 the Emperor held a series of “Opium Debates” between those favoring legalization and those favoring further suppression of opium. Legalizers claimed the real issues with opium were organized crime and the silver drain that was ruining the economy. They argued that legalizing opium and taxing it would generate huge revenues, and they believed that enforcing opium prohibition would be expensive and strengthen the already feared lower bureaucracy in China. The moralists claimed that disregard for the law was no reason to repeal it and that legalization would result in everyone smoking. They believed opium was evil and felt it was the emperor’s duty to save the people from this evil. The legalizers appeared close to victory until a rival political faction thwarted the initiative.” [Miron 05:3-4]
• “Our study of how literati opinion deflected Ch’ing policy back in the direction of rigid trade controls begins with their resistance to an attempted liberalization of policy in 1836. One might anticipate that mounting bureaucratic disillusion with other alternatives would eventually incline Ch’ing leaders to consider the idea of legalizing the drug traffic. In addition to lowering import prices and encouraging domestic replacement of foreign sources of supply, such a move would also have the clear advantage of removing the Ch’ing military from its prestige-eroding role in the sheltering of a contraband product, and might thus even help reduce consumption among the troops.
In fact, Lu K’un had already been pressing hard for such a policy change at the time of his inopportune death in office, late in 1835. His idea, moreover, was to be picked up and renewed by Lu’s bureaucratic and examination-system mentor, Juan Yuan, early in 1836, and it was to be strongly supported, by Lu’s successor in office, Teng Ting-chen.
Yet the outcome of these efforts from within the bureaucracy was not as expected. In mid-1836, just as the advocates of legalization seemed on the verge of success, a vigorous resistance suddenly blossomed forth from the censorate, spearheaded by the Spring Purification circle, and backed by considerable informational resources that this network of literati politicians possessed. Taking skilled advantage of these resources, as well as of the political fluidity and renewed indecisiveness of the emperor following the death of Grand Councillor Ts’ao Chen-yung, in early 1835, the opposition was able to thwart legalization. It was, in time, even able to build upon this initial victory to win imperial backing for a new attempt at solving the opium problem through trade controls—this time to be supplemented by a prior crackdown against onshore consumers.” [Polachek 92:113-4]
• “The American Treaty of Tianjin [1858] that Reed had negotiated in consultation with his missionary advisors was similar in most respects to that negotiated for the British by their plenipotentiary, Lord Elgin…
On the question of opium, however, the American treaty, like that of Great Britain, was notably silent. This did not mean that Reed was unconcerned about the issue; on the contrary, he had been strongly opposed to the trade prior to his arrival in China and had been instructed to reaffirm his government’s anti-opium stand in the terms of the new treaty. But following his visit to Shanghai, Reed found that the overwhelming majority of foreign residents, missionaries included, were of the opinion that legalization was preferable to the system of semi-legalized smuggling presently in place…
Lord Elgin was also under great pressure to have the drug legalized. British merchants and missionaries shared the American view that legalizing the drug would be preferable to the lawlessness and immorality currently associated with the trade. Indeed, according to J. W. Wong, subsequent to the First Opium War, the British had persisted in their effort to persuade the Chinese authorities to legalize opium. And British missionaries were, of course, subjected to the same humiliating charges of hypocrisy leveled by the Chinese against all the foreign missionaries operating in China. But neither Elgin nor Reed was willing to force attention upon the topic of legalization during their negotiations with the Chinese at Tianjin. To coerce the Chinese to legalize the drug under the threat of arms ran contrary to the professed moral and political values of both men. They therefore agreed to leave the question out of the formal negotiations at Tianjin and instead pursue an alternative resolution of the issue when a more detailed supplemental commercial agreement was worked out with the imperial commissioners at Shanghai.
In fact, Reed had received a letter from an American merchant in Shanghai suggesting that including opium on the list of taxable imports maintained by the Chinese authorities might amount to its de facto legalization. Reed later informed Elgin of this idea and assured him of his full support should the British attempt this strategy during their consultations with the Chinese. Therefore, not surprisingly, when the major powers finally settled the details of their commercial agreement in October 1858, opium was listed among the various goods subject to tariff, in effect legalizing the drug. According to Wong, the Chinese negotiators were willing to accede to this request conveyed by Elgin largely because the governor-general of Liangjiang, He Guiqing, had already been deliberately contravening instructions from Beijing by surreptitiously levying a duty on the drug to get revenue to fight the Taiping insurrection. So, when the idea was brought up to add opium to the list of taxable goods, there was no objection from the nervous Chinese. Elgin and Reed were therefore able to win their desired goal of having the drug legalized without having to do so under circumstances that might have been interpreted as blatantly immoral or contradictory to international standards of justice. In other words, the British and the Americans won by stealth that which they would have been embarrassed to secure under military coercion at the treaty negotiations in Tianjin.
Williams’s later assessment of the significance of the new agreement on opium reflected the conflicting sentiments of the missionary community, while disingenuously placing primary responsibility for legalization on the shoulders of the British:
‘The Chinese government has yielded in its long resistance to permitting this drug to be entered through the custom-house; so the opium war of 1840 has at length ended in an opium triumph, and the honorable English merchants and government can now exonerate themselves from the opprobrium of smuggling this article. Bad as the triumph is, I am convinced that it was the best disposition that could be made of the perplexing question; legalization is preferable to the evils attending the farce now played, and we shall be the better when the drug is openly landed, and opium hulks and bribed inspectors are no more.'” [Lazich 06:220-2]

4. • “In the Malay country and in the Dutch East Indies various systems of governmental regulation prevail. These areas have a considerable immigrant population of Chinese, and it is thought better to legalize the sale of opium than to risk the American prohibition system and introduce the bootlegging evils which could be expected among a population determined to have opium at any cost. In the Dutch East Indies I was told that opium could be purchased only by Chinese, with sale to any others forbidden under heavy penalties. Such a notion would horrify most Americans, with cherished theories of non-discrimination between races, but it has a practicality about it that is worth more than a ton of mushy sentiment. It simply takes into account that all people are not in their inherited physical constitution and moral outlook the same.” [Townsend 33:267]

5. • “The effect of drug prohibition on drug consumption is a critical issue in debates over drug policy. One episode that provides information on the consumption-reducing effect of drug prohibition is the Chinese legalization of opium in 1858. In this paper we examine the impact of China’s opium legalization on the quantity and price of British opium exports from India to China during the 19th century. We find little evidence that legalization increased exports or decreased price. Thus, the evidence suggests China’s opium prohibition had a minimal impact on opium consumption. ” [Miron 05:Abstract]

6. • Articles:
China’s new opium wars: Battling addiction in Beijing (2016).
• www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/05/china-opium-wars-battling-addiction-beijing-160516141819379.html
The other China boom: Drugs (2013).
• www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2013/12/other-china-boom-201312308497562811.html
China’s synthetic drugs problem expanding – government (2017).
• www.rappler.com/world/regions/asia-pacific/165351-china-drugs-problem-expanding-government
China-US Cooperation and the New Opium War (2017).
• thediplomat.com/2017/08/china-us-cooperation-and-the-new-opium-war/
Despite a Crackdown, Use of Illegal Drugs in China Continues Unabated (2015).
• www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/world/despite-a-crackdown-use-of-illegal-drugs-in-china-continues-unabated.html

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5. The Anglo-Chinese Wars were launched against China’s unfair trade and negotiation policies, not its opium embargo.

The aims of the British and other European governments in their wars against China were not opium profits, but trading rights in general, respectful treatment for diplomats, and legal safeguards for European citizens in China [1]. The British government and people didn’t care much for the drug smugglers and tended to sympathize with China in this regard [2]. Just as they do today, the Chinese played hardball with foreign traders, wanting to sell but not to buy. Europe’s diplomats and trade representatives were confined to a certain area and treated according to China’s ancient tribute system, required to give tribute gifts and to kowtow before the emperor [3]. European citizens in China were occasionally abused or killed by China’s arbitrary and cruel legal system [4]. Europe’s demands imposed in the treatises pertained to these issues and not to opium; though China was pressured to legalize it after the second war, largely in the interests of law and order [5]. However, legalization evidently did not increase China’s opium consumption [6].

1. • “The 1840-42 Anglo-Chinese war (the so-called “Opium War”) is almost universally believed to have been triggered by British imperial rapacity and determination to sell more and more opium into China. That belief is mistaken. The British went to war because of Chinese military threats to defenseless British civilians, including women and children; because China refused to negotiate on terms of diplomatic equality and because China refused to open more ports than Canton to trade, not just with Britain but with everybody. The belief about British “guilt” came later, as part of China’s long catalogue of alleged Western “exploitation and aggression.”” [Gelber 06:1]
; “[A]t no point did the British government, or its official representatives in and outside China, countenance the opium smuggling on the China coast or give it aid or comfort. Part of the trouble, indeed, was that while the Chinese expected foreign “headmen” (including British government officials) to keep their compatriots in order, Parliament in London was entirely unwilling to have them enforce Chinese laws against British citizens on Chinese soil. China’s coastal protection was obviously a matter for China itself. No British Minister or official questioned China’s right to control its own shores and borders, or to decide what should be imported and what excluded.
Even the enforced confiscation by the Chinese of opium stocks managed by the Canton merchants brought no hostile reaction from London. When news of Commissioner Lin’s March 18, 1839, confiscation order to those merchants reached London, there was no reaction. Only in September did London became alarmed, with the arrival of a Canton dispatch of May 29 relating China’s military threats against defenseless British civilians. Only then did the great British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, begin to talk about military action. Those public feelings turned to anger and outrage at the end of 1839 when there were further reports of traders and their families having to seek refuge on board British merchant ships at sea, deprived – at least officially – of food and water supplies from shore. When somewhat embellished reports reached London of English women and children being threatened by Chinese soldiers, there was real fury. For British politics the issue ceased to be opium – about which many people sympathized with China – and became the fate of not just opium traders but innocent men, women and children threatened by armed Chinese soldiers…
The real issues for the British therefore became not opium but jurisdiction, ultimately sovereignty, expansion of trade and by no means least the safety of British men, women and children threatened, chased away or imprisoned without charge or trial…
On February 20, 1840, Lord Palmerston wrote to the emperor and, simultaneously, to the commanders of the British force sent to Canton. While the Chinese were fully entitled to enforce their anti-opium edicts, Palmerston wrote, it was something else entirely to punish the innocent (i.e., those merchants who did not trade opium) together with the guilty and to threaten lives without as much as a trial. The force should seek reparations for the insults to Queen Victoria’s officer at Canton, and to British people; to secure the opening of other ports to trade; to get agreement that the British and everyone else could trade in China; and to allow British diplomats to come to Beijing and the ports.” [5-6]
; “When the British, having advanced up the Yangzi, were on the brink of storming China’s ancient capital, both sides signed the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. In it, China agreed to open four more ports; to having foreign consuls stationed at each; and to treating British and Chinese officials as equals. The Chinese would also pay a sizeable indemnity; and the British would get the (then) barren rock of Hong Kong, where they would be able to maintain merchants under the control of their own magistrates. The treaty did not mention opium.
As early as 1841, while the conflict was in progress, John Quincy Adams, the former sixth President of the U.S., remarked that opium “is a mere incident to the dispute, but no more the cause of the war than the throwing overboard of tea in Boston harbor was the cause of the North American revolution … the cause of the war is the kowtow – the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of the relations between lord and vassal.”” [7-8]
• “In a lecture before the Massachusetts Historical Society in December of 1841, John Quincy Adams declared that opium was “a mere incident in the dispute, but no more the cause of the war than the throwing overboard of the tea in Boston harbor was the cause of the North American Revolution. The cause of the war is the ‘kowtow.'” Harsh words those are, but in that reference to the kowtow, particularly, a great deal of astute insight into all problems with the Chinese is revealed. The kowtow, and all that it implies, is as important today as it was ninety-two years ago in our relations with China. By way of information, the kowtow is the obeisance a Chinese demands of those he considers below him – and secretly the Chinese maintain a superiority theory by which they are arrogantly above all foreigners… [details China’s contempt for foreigners].” [Townsend 33:260-2]
• “Given the perspective time grants to the historian, it is readily apparent that conflict between China and the West was inevitable. It is equally apparent that opium provided the occasion rather than the cause of that conflict. So long as the Chinese remained too arrogant to study these barbarians carefully, too arrogant to realize that England in particular had become powerful enough to make good the demand for diplomatic equality—for that long the point of Sino-Western contact could be but a powder keg awaiting a spark. Industrialization and the growth of nationalism had made the West more powerful and more assertive at a time when the Chinese had passed the peak of their power. The phenomenon of dynastic decline, so much a part of China’s historical record, had not bypassed the Manchus.
The locus of power had shifted, but China’s mandarins had not perceived this. The “foreign devils ,” the “big noses”—those who the Chinese thought of as savages and treated hardly better—were no longer willing to respond to the arbitrary exercise of authority obediently or submissively. Had the Chinese been able to conceive of diplomatic equality among nations, they might have been spared the Opium War and the century of humiliation that followed.” [Cohen 10:6]
• “[T]he Ch’ing government, and not the British, took the really active role in forcing a diplomatic and military showdown over the drug question in 1840; it did so under the influence primarily of internal political pressures, and not foreign economic or military threat. This internal pressure, we shall further argue, arose out of the desire of the Spring Purification party (in alliance with Lin Tse-hsu) to establish more firmly the legitimacy of its rather unorthodox power base within the Ch’ing system.” [Polachek 92:102]

2. • See the [Gelber 06:5-6] citation, above.

3. • See the sources above on the causes of the wars.
• “The conditions imposed by the Chinese on the Western merchants were less than pleasant. Probably the most ethnocentric people in the world, the Chinese considered their realm the center of the universe, the Middle Kingdom, and regarded all cultural differences as signs of inferiority. All who were not Chinese were, obviously, barbarians. Europeans and Americans were distinguished from Inner Asian tribesmen only by, the fact that they approached from the east and by sea rather than from the northern steppes. The fact that barbarians should come to China in a quest of the benefits of civilization did not surprise the Chinese, who were prepared to be generous—provided that the outsiders behaved with appropriate submissiveness.
Since ancient times, relations with the barbarians had been regulated under the tribute system. Theoretically, all peoples in contact with China were tributaries. The procedures for this form of contact had become highly ritualized: entertainment of the tribute mission, audience with the emperor, performance of the kowtow by the visiting envoys, and the bestowal of gifts by the emperor. Most of all, the kowtow bothered Westerners. As performed in court, it involved a series of kneelings and prostrations, “head-bangings,” performed at commands, leaving little doubt as to who was paying homage to whom.
By the time the Americans arrived on the scene, the tribute system had long been a vehicle for trade and the Manchus had worked out a variation for dealing with the barbarians who came by sea. Satisfied with the Western merchants’ acceptance of the inferior role necessitated by tributary status, the Chinese government did not require the tribute mission to the capital. Whereas the court had traditionally sought the prestige derived from the ritual, by the eighteenth century both Peking and the local officials found sufficient advantage in the revenue derived from the trade. Nonetheless, the barbarians could certainly not be allowed free rein within the empire. They were contemptible not only as foreigners but also as businessmen—a class of low standing in the Confucian hierarchy, however well its members actually lived.
If the barbarian traders persisted in coming to peddle their wares, to purchase some of the products of the superior Chinese civilization, they had to be restricted to one small area in Canton. Here the possibility of contamination was limited, the disease quarantined, the Chinese people protected. Here Chinese officials would not be bothered by the barbarians but could leave the management of the foreign merchant in the hands of the Chinese merchant.
Hemmed in by restrictions, left without recourse to settle disputes, unprotected by his government, the American businessman, like his European colleagues, remained in China. Obviously, the profits were worth the bother. And at times the bother was considerable, as in the notorious Terranova case of 1821, in which a seaman on an American ship was seized and executed by Chinese authorities in retaliation for a death for which he may have had no responsibility whatever. When Chinese officials demanded that Terranova be turned over to them in connection with the death of a woman allegedly struck by debris discarded from the American vessel, the merchants at first refused. Advised that refusal would mean exclusion of Americans from trade with China, the American business community decided to allow Terranova to be seized after a show of protest. Terranova was tried secretly, with no American present, and sentenced to death by strangulation. After the sentence was carried out, the American government did not protest and the Americans in Canton were commended by the local viceroy for their properly submissive behavior. Such was the state of Sino-American relations under the tribute system, during the years when the Chinese dictated the terms of contact.
The Canton variation of the tribute system had been established at the peak of the Manchu (or Ch’ing) dynasty’s strength and prior to the modernization of Europe… In other words, the Canton system had developed at a time when Chinese power relative to the maritime nations of the West was great enough for the Chinese to control the nature of Sino-Western relations. So long as the Chinese retained this position of relative strength, they treated Westerners arbitrarily and with contempt. That the West responded in kind when the power balance shifted was regrettable, but not difficult to understand.” [Cohen 10:3-4]
• “In 1757 the Qing Court officially restricted trade to Canton. While at Canton, the activities of merchants were significantly constrained. Foreigners were confined to the Factories, a small warehouse district near the banks of the Pearl River. They were forbidden to associate directly with Chinese people and they were not allowed to learn the Chinese language. Foreign women were not permitted to visit the Factories. Foreign merchants were not permitted to setup permanent residence at Canton. They were only allowed to stay at the Factories during the shipping season and moved to Macao during the offseason.
A central feature of the Canton System was the Cohong, a monopolistic guild of hong merchants. The hong merchants had organized to control pricing and strengthen their position both in dealings with the Chinese government and with foreign merchants. As the Canton trade evolved, the Cohong took on an increasing role as an agent of the government. In 1754 the security merchant system was established in which each foreign vessel was required to have a single hong merchant assume responsibility for it…
In 1793 King George III dispatched Lord George Macartney to seek an audience with the Qianlong Emperor. Macartney was able to access the Emperor and their meeting was cordial despite Macartney’s famous refusal to perform the koutou, a bowing ritual customarily required for those paying tribute at the Chinese court. Despite the outward cordiality, Macartney was unable to secure formal diplomatic relations or any additional trading privileges. The Qianlong Emperor issued two edicts that he sent home with Macartney. The edicts are often quoted as a summation of China’s view of its place in the world order, and its opinion on the prospects of European trade:
“Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.””
The Canton System of Trade, by Ralph Heymsfeld.
• www.thepeacefulsea.com/canton-system.html
• “The Amherst embassy [of 1816] has a long-standing reputation as a diplomatic failure in Britain’s early relations with China. This analysis concentrates on a greatly overlooked aspect of the Amherst mission—the controversy within the embassy’s leadership about whether to perform kowtow before the Jiaqing emperor. George Thomas Staunton, basing his arguments on some “local inside knowledge,” successfully prevailed on Amherst to refuse to kowtow. This decision directly resulted in the rejection of the embassy from Beijing.”
The “Inner Kowtow Controversy” During the Amherst Embassy to China, 1816–1817.
• www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09592296.2016.1238691
• “The Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars were the direct result of China’s isolationalist and exclusionary trade policy with the West. Confucian China’s attempts to exclude pernicious foreign ideas resulted in highly restricted trade. Prior to the 1830s, there was but one port open to Western merchants, Guangzhou (Canton) and but one commodity that the Chinese would accept in trade, silver. British and American merchants, anxious to address what they perceived as a trade imbalance, determined to import the one product that the Chinese did not themselves have but which an ever-increasing number of them wanted: opium.”
England and China: The Opium Wars, 1839-60, by Philip V. Allingham.
• www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/opiumwars/opiumwars1.html
• “[T]he local mandarins at the ports of South China… then as now [1930], were out for their heavy graft. Their policy was one of secret encouragement [of opium trade], with intermittent displays of suppression evidently calculated to assuage the anxieties of the central government. The result was that British traders could not count on anything. Every promise was sure to be violated. Trade in other merchandise was subjected to the hazards of this vacillating policy, with anti-foreign outbreaks recurrent.” [Townsend 33:258]
• “In 1844, in the wake of China’s defeat by Great Britain in the “Opium War,” the United States obtained a treaty of “peace, amity and commerce” from China. By the very act of negotiating, China conceded to the United States a degree of stature that would have been inconceivable to the Manchu court five years earlier. For the first time in sixty years of contact between Chinese and Americans, a representative of the government of China allowed a representative of the government of the United States to treat with him as an equal—without, of course, surrendering his conviction of absolute Chinese superiority over the American barbarians.” [Cohen 10]

4. • See the [Gelber 06:5-6] and [Cohen 10:3-4] citations, above.
• “While in Guangzhou [Western traders] were confined to a small riverbank area outside the city wall where their 13 warehouses, or “factories,” were located. They were also subject to Chinese law, in which a prisoner was presumed guilty until proved innocent and was often subject to torture and arbitrary imprisonment. Furthermore, ships coming into the harbour were liable to a host of petty exactions and fees levied by the Chinese authorities.”
• www.britannica.com/event/Canton-system
• “Emperor Daoguang was humiliated and enraged by the stipulations of the treaty [ending the first Anglo-Chinese War], and his people felt the Emperor’s dissatisfaction. A growing resentment towards Western powers in China led Qing officials to delay British merchants from obtaining the “full rights” of the agreement. The British were prevented from using docks and harbors which were conceded in the treaty, and it wasn’t uncommon for angry Manchus to harm or seize the property of British merchants.” [Cone 14]

5. • See the [Lazich 06:220-2] citation in the previous section (4), and the [Gelber 06:7-8] citation, above.
• “The [Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 ending the first Anglo-Chinese War] gave Hong Kong to the British and opened new ports to British trade. It forbade the Chinese from trying British sailors under Chinese law (extraterritoriality) and gave Britain “most-favored-nation status” in trade. Opium was not a major focus of the treaty, and the British negotiators were simply instructed to “impress upon the Chinese “how much it would be for the interest of that Government to legalize the trade.” [Miron 05:5]
; “The second Opium War broke out in 1856, when Canton officials boarded the Arrow, a vessel accused of piracy, and ripped down a British flag. British ships attacked the city in response.
The British again won the war easily. The Treaty of Tientsin, signed in June of 1858, contained no reference to the opium trade but further opened legal trade in favor of the British. Lord Elgin, the British negotiator, saw opium as a deplorable evil rather than a term of negotiation. He nevertheless believed it “had” to be legalized, yet he “could not bring himself to tell the Chinese that the time had come to legalize this lucrative, but demoralizing traffic”. After the peace, the British again supported legalization as the only way to control the trade. China finally succumbed, stating, “China still retains her objection to the use of the drug on moral grounds, but the present generation of smokers, at all events, must and will have opium” (Rowntree 1905, p.88). The Chinese legalized opium in 1858, with a tariff of about 8%.” [5-6]
• “Opium remained a bootlegged commodity smuggled into China from abroad until 1858, when pressure from Western countries occasioned legalization of it in the interests of law and order – terms which have a familiar ring upon American ears at the present time. The American envoy Reed urged legalization with the plea that the powers of the West could not consider “our work done without some attempt to induce or compel an adjustment of this pernicious difficulty.” This speech followed the argument that since the Chinese authorities were unable to suppress the traffic in opium, the next step was regulation by legalization. But in actuality the Chinese Government was about as incompetent to regulate opium as to suppress it. Opium smoking is a vice peculiarly appealing to the Chinese temperament, which likes indulgences of an effortless kind.” [Townsend 33:257]
• “[I]n the beginning, the British sought to be treated as equals and to place relations between China and Great Britain on a rational, ordered basis—such as was understood in the Western world. In the Treaty of Nanking, the Victor’s exactions were onerous, but none too severe. Chinese policy had forced the case to be tried on the battlefield and China, having lost the case, paid the costs. Having won, the British indulged themselves in a few desiderata, extending trade to five other ports, as well as regularizing procedures at Canton. The necessity of using force, buttressed by imperial experience in India, led the British to demand the cession of Hong Kong-a base for military as well as entrepreneurial activities in East Asia. For the future, British power would be present to remind the mandarins that Great Britain lacked neither the will nor the ability to insist on equal treatment.
In 1843, the British and Chinese negotiated a supplementary treaty that altered the Canton system and assured the British of most-favored-nation treatment in the future. Whereas duties had heretofore been imposed on Western exports in an arbitrary and capricious fashion, the Chinese tariff was now embodied in a treaty, to be modified only by the mutual consent of the contracting parties. Also with an eye to justice for foreigners, the concept of extraterritoriality was introduced, allowing Westerners accused of crimes to be tried by their own consular officials, according to the legal concepts of the Judaeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman heritage. None of this troubled the Chinese—other than the obvious indignity of having – to deal with presumptuous barbarians on a level of equality.” [Cohen 10:8-9]

6. • See the [Miron 05:Abstract] citation in the previous section (4).

————

6. The Anglo-Chinese Wars shocked the insular Chinese into engaging with the modern world.

Survival of the fittest and struggle for territory are laws of nature that men disobey at their peril. This remains true even when in times of affluence utopians dream of international brotherhood. A wealthy, arrogant people who get over-civilized and drop their guard will get their comeuppance. China got theirs. There is no way to fully justify the spankings Europe gave them. They weren’t nice. The strong took advantage of the weak. However, China herself and all other great nations have taken advantage of weak neighbors and aggressed them as far as their capabilities permitted. From China’s standpoint, at least the European incursions shocked them into realizing that they weren’t so superior as they thought, and catalyzed them to engage with and learn from the modern, White-created world.

END Sources of sections V-3-4
—————————————————-

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Ni 05: High Corruption Income in Ming and Qing China (2005), by Shawn Ni and Pham Hoang Van.

Nilsson 21: The Race Problem of the Roman Empire (1921), by Martin Nilsson.

Nisbett 03: The Geography Of Thought; How Asians and Westerners Think Differently (2003), by Richard Nisbett.

O’riordan 04: Superior Visual Search in Adults with Autism (2004), by Michelle O’riordan.

Osborn 17: World War III Deathmatch: China vs. America’s Military (2017), by Kris Osborn.

Ostmoe 95: A Germanic-Tai Linguistic Puzzle (1995), by Arne Østmoe.

Pacey 90: Technology in World Civilization; A Thousand-Year History (1990), by Arnold Pacey.

Parfitt 12: Why China Will Never Rule the World; Travels in the Two Chinas (2012), by Troy Parfitt.

Park 97: Corruption in Eighteenth-Century China (1997), by Nancy Park.

Peng 95: New Research on the Origin of Cowries Used in Ancient China (1995), by Ke Peng and Yanshi Zhu.

Penyeh 98: Tradition and Change in the Performance of Chinese Music; Vol 2 (1998), by Tsao Penyeh.

Peterson 74: The Greek Face (Journal of Indo-European Studies; Vol 2, #4; 1974), by R. Peterson.

Polachek 92: The Inner Opium War (1992), by James M. Polachek.

Qian 85: The Great Inertia; Scientific Stagnation in Traditional China (1985), by Wen-yuan Qian.

Rempel 98: Why Rome Fell (1998), by Prof. Gerhard Rempel.
• web.archive.org/web/20051218144105/ • mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc1/lectures/14romefell.html

Rozin 16: Right: Left:: East: West. Evidence that individuals from East Asian and South Asian cultures emphasize right hemisphere functions in comparison to Euro-American cultures (2016), by Paul Rozin et al.

Shaffer 10: Profiting in Economic Storms: A Historic Guide To Surviving Depression… (2010), by Daniel Shaffer.

Shaughnessy 89: Western Cultural Innovations in China (1989), by Edward Shaughnessy.

Smith 94: Chinese characteristics (1894), by Arthur Smith.

Sng 14: Size and Dynastic Decline: The Principal-Agent Problem in Late Imperial China 1700-1850 (2014), by Tuan-Hwee Sng.

Snow 02: The Spider’s Web; Goddesses of Light and Loom: Evidence for the Indo-European Origin of Two Ancient Chinese Deities (2002), By Justine Snow.

Stover 76: China: An Anthropological Perspective (1976), by Leon Stover and Takeko Stover.

Taub 93: Acupuncture: Nonsense with Needles (1993), by Arthur Taub.

Townsend 33: Ways that are Dark; The Truth About China (1933), by Ralph Townsend.

Treffert 89: Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome (1989), by Darrold Treffert.

Treffert 09: Savant Syndrome: An Extraordinary Condition; A Synopsis: Past, Present, Future (2009), by Darold Treffert.

U.S.-China 14: U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2014 Report to Congress; Section 2: China’s Military Modernization (2014).

Tsung-i 91: Questions on the Origins of Writing Raised by the Silk Road (1991), by Jao Tsung-i.

Vernon 82: The Abilities and Achievements of Orientals in North America (1982), by PA Vernon.

Vries 01: Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence (2001), by Peer Vries.

Vries 03: Via Peking back to Manchester. Britain, the Industrial Revolution and China (2003), by Peer Vries.

Vries 06: Orientalism Inverted; or Good Reasons not to ReOrient the Economic History of the Early Modern World (2006), by Peer Vries.

Vries 10: California School and Beyond; How to Study Great Divergence (2010), by Peer Vries.

Vries 12: Challenges, (Non-)Responses, and Politics: A Review of Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Why Europe Grew Rich…” (2012), by Peer Vries.

Vries 13: Escaping Poverty; The origins of Modern Economic Growth (2013), by Peer Vries.

Vries 15: State, Economy and the Great Divergence (2015), by Peer Vries.

Vries 16a: What we do and do not know about the Great Divergence at the beginning of 2016 (2016), by Peer Vries.

Vries 17: A review of Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age (2017), by Peer Vries.

Wan 11: Early Development of Bronze Metallurgy in Eastern Eurasia (2011), by Xiang Wan.

Wei 05a: Dao and De; An Inquiry into the Linguistic Origins of Some Terms in Chinese Philosophy and Morality (2005), by Julie Lee Wei.

Wei 05b: Counting and Knotting; Correspondences between Old Chinese and Indo-European (2005), by Julie Lee Wei.

Wenke 80: Patterns in Prehistory (1980), by Robert Wenke.

White 62: Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), by Lynn White.

Xing 11: China’s High-tech Exports: Myth and Reality (2011), by Yuqing Xing.

Yang 84: The Ugly Chinaman (1984), speech by Bo Yang.
• isites.harvard.edu/fs/html/icb.topic702814/Bo_Yang.html

Zanden 08: The road to the Industrial Revolution: Hypotheses and conjectures about the medieval origins of the ‘European Miracle (2008), by Jan Luiten van Zanden.

Zanden 09a: The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution; The European Economy in a Global Perspective (2009), by Jan Luiten van Zanden.

Zanden 11: Before the Great Divergence: The modernity of China at the onset of the industrial revolution (2011), by Jan Luiten van Zanden.

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Source: Frank Jamger