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The Great Convergence from a West-European Perspective: Some Thoughts and Hypotheses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Jan Luiten Van Zanden
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Extract

Between 1995 and 2000 a number of synthetic studies on the economic history of Asia in the Early Modern Period were published which have changed – or should change – our ideas and perceptions of the ‘rise of the west’ and the parallel ‘decline of the east’ in a fundamental way. The potential impact of these studies is comparable to that of a previous brief spell of brilliance in our profession, the early 1970s, with the pioneering publications by, amongst others, Wallerstein, Brenner, and North and Thomas. Whereas these studies proposed fundamentally new views on the long term dynamics of the ‘rise of the west’, and concentrated heavily on the economic and socio-political history of Europe (albeit sometimes within a ‘world system perspective’), the new generation of innovative works focuses on a new analysis of the economic history of parts of Asia - on China and India in particular. Much of the detailed empirical research on which this revisionism is based, was done before the books of Goody, Frank, Wong, Pomeranz, and Lee and Wang were published, and forerunners of the revisionism can be identified. But only now the movement has created a clear set of hypotheses that challenges the accepted wisdom about die economic and institutional contrasts between both sides of the Eurasian Continent.

Type
Conference: European Miracle
Information
Itinerario , Volume 24 , Issue 3-4 , November 2000 , pp. 9 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2000

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References

Notes

1 The most important works are probably Goody, Jack, The East in the West (Cambridge 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Wong, R. Bin, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits ofEuropean Experience (Ithaca, NY/London 1997)Google Scholar;Frank, Andre Gunder, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley 1998)Google Scholar;Lee, James and Feng, Wang, One-quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities (Cambridge 1999)Google Scholar;Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton 2000)Google Scholar.

2 Comparable studies on Southeast Asia by especially Reid (Reid, A., Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce I: The Lands Below the Winds (New Haven 1988)Google Scholar) have so far had a smaller impact.

3 Much of the literature on Japan is of an earlier vintage, and was often written within the context of the explanation of the remarkabl e - that is almost ‘European’ - development of the country after the Meiji revolution; it therefore sometimes stressed its specific, ‘un-Asian’ features more than it concentrated on the many similarities between Japan and especially China; for this reason I will not discuss this literature here.

4 The best analysis is Pomeranz, , Great Divergence, 31–108Google Scholar.

5 For example, Wong, Bin, China, 16–19Google Scholar.

6 See also the pioneering study by Parthasarathi, Prasannan, ‘Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India’, Past andPresent 158 (1998) 79–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 This stress on being first is evident from the titles of some of the best books from the 1960s: Deane, Phyllis, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge 1965)Google Scholar;Mathias, P., The First Industrial Nation (London 1969)Google Scholar.

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20 See the discussion in van Zanden, J.L., ‘Early Modern Economic Growth: A Survey of the European Economy, 1500–1800’ in: Prak, M. ed., Early Modern Capitalism (London 2001) 69–87Google Scholar.

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26 Maddison, Angus, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820–1992 (Paris 1994) 23–24Google Scholar, present estimates which imply that per capita GDP in India and China was less than one-third of the level of the UK and less than half the western European level.

27 Many examples of, and theoretical reflections on, the complex and indirect relationships between output per capita and standard of living are given by Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom (New York 2000)Google Scholar.

28 See for example, North, Douglass C., Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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30 See for , China, Gates, Hill, China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism (New York 1996)Google Scholar; see also th e papers on India and the Ottoman Empire in this volume; especially the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran (see for example Matthee, Rudolph P., The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran (Cambridge 1999)Google Scholar) and Russia (see for example Veluwenkamp, J.W., Archangel. Nederlandse ondememers in Rusland 1550–1785 (Amsterdam 2000)Google Scholar) may perhaps be considered cases of an ‘incomplete’ transformation into this direction.

31 A survey of these developments is presente d in Hunt and Murray, A History; a classical expose of the role of the cities in medieval economic development is Pirenne, Henri, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Garden City 1956)Google Scholar.

32 See the literature cited in note 30.

33 Subramanyam, Sanjay, The Portugese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700 (London 1993) 18–27Google Scholar.

34 See the papers published in Hansen, Mogens Herman ed., A Comparative Study of Thirty CityState Cultures (Copenhagen 2000)Google Scholar.

35 This is the leading thought in Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge 1990)Google Scholar.

36 The classical analysis is Tilly, Coercion.

37 Wong, Bin, China, 102Google Scholar, 125.

38 Ibid., 102.

39 See also Gates, China's Motor.

40 Prak, Maarten, ‘The Dutch Republic's City-State Culture (Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries)’ in: Hansen, Mogens Herman ed., A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures (Copenhagen 2000) 343–358Google Scholar.

41 North, Douglass C. and Weingast, Barry W., ‘The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth Century England’, Journal of Economic History 49 (1989) 803–832CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a criticism of this interpretation see Clark, Gregory, ‘The Political Foundations of Modern Economic Growth: England 1540–1800’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26 (1996) 563–588CrossRefGoogle Scholar; new support comes from Wells, John and Wills, Douglas, ‘Revolution, Restoration, and Debt Repudiation: The Jacobite Threa t to England's Institutions and Economic Growth’, Journal of Economic History 60 (2000) 418–441CrossRefGoogle Scholar; during the rewriting of the paper I started reading Epstein, S.R., Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300–1750 (London 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who has a rather different view on the relationship between the structure of the state and its efficiency; it is beyond the scope of this paper to respond to this view, but I can refer to Hoffman, Philip T. and Norberg, Kathryn, ‘Conclusion’ in: Hoffman, , Norberg, eds, Fiscal Crises, Libert, and Representative Government 1450–1789 (Stanford 1994) 299–310Google Scholar, for a statement of the opposite view to which I also adhere in this paper.

42 See the previous note for the discussion about this issue.

43 This section is to a large extent based on the papers in Engelen, Theo, Wolf, Arthur P. eds, Marriage and the Family in Eurasia: Perspectives on the Hajnal Hypothesis (Stanford 2001)Google Scholar, which the authors allowed me to read already and which contain a systematic comparison of the functioning of marriage systems in the west and the east (and also deals with some of the critical points raised by Goody, , rThe East, 167–192Google Scholar, concerning this hypothesis).

44 See Theo Engelen and Arthur P. Wolf, ‘Introduction’ in: Engelen and Wolf eds, Marriage.

45 Lee and Wang, One-quarter, Monica Das Gupta, ‘Strategies for Managing Household Resources in Rural North India’ in: Engelen and Wolf eds, Marriage.

46 Wolf, ‘Europe and China. Two kinds of Patriarchy’ in: Engelen and Wolf eds, Marriage.

47 , Frances and Gies, Joseph, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (New York 1987) 136–140Google Scholar; Sheenan, M., ‘Choice of Marriage Partner in the Middle Ages’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History (1978) 3–33Google Scholar;MacFarlane, Alan, Marriage and Love in England 1300–1840 (Oxford 1986)Google Scholar;Goody, , The East, 172Google Scholar.

48 See the literature cited in the previous note for England; on similar developments in the Low Countries: Nicholas, David, The Domestic Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children, and the Family in Fourteenth-Century Ghent (Lincoln 1985)Google Scholar; the ideas concerning the rise of the European marriage pattern developed in this section have been dealt with in some more detail in van Zanden, Jan Luiten, ‘The European Marriage Pattern, an Attempt at Interpretation’ (paper Corn Conference on th e Rise of the European Marriage Pattern, Cambridge 1997)Google Scholar, where some new evidence related to these changes in Holland is presented.

49 Laslett, Peter, ‘Family and Household as Work Group and Kin Group: Areas of Traditional Europe Compared’ in: Wall, Richard et al. eds, Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge 1983)Google Scholar.

50 See also MacFarlane, , Marriage, 53–55Google Scholar; the importance of female infanticide in large parts of Asia is still evident from recent calculations; see Sen, Amartya, Development, 104–106Google Scholar.

51 A related point is that in my view the jury is still out on the issue if the labour market in for example China was as well developed as in western Europe; see the discussion in Pomeranz, , Great Divergence, 80–106Google Scholar.

52 Kriedte, Peter, Medick, Hans and Schlumbohm, jurgen, Industrialization before Industrialization (Cambridge 1981)Google Scholar;Tilly, Charles, ‘The Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat’ in: Levine, D. ed., Proletarianization and Family History (Orlando 1984) 1–86Google Scholar.

53 De Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution’.

54 van Zanden, Jan L., ‘Wages and the Standard of Living in Europe, 1500–1800’, European Review ofEconomic History 3 (1999) 175–198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 See Van Zanden, ‘Early Modern Economic Growth’.

56 Mokyr, Joel, The Lever of Riches: Technological Change and Economic Progress (Oxford 1990) 48–60Google Scholar; see also Epstein, , Freedom, 66–67Google Scholar, for the wave of new technologies in the 1350–1500 period.

57 The literature on these developments is enormous: see Boserup, Ester, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (London 1965)Google Scholar and idem, Population and Technology (Oxford 1981), for the theoretical interpretation.

58 See van Zanden, Jan Luiten, ‘An Experiment in Measurement of the Wealth of Nations’ in: van Ark, Bart, Buyst, Erik, van Zanden, Ja n Luiten eds, Historical Benchmark Comparisons of Output and Productivity (Seville 1998) 50–61Google Scholar.

59 Pomeranz, , Great Divergence, 98–107, 206–207Google Scholar.

60 de Zeeuw, J.W., ‘Peat and the Dutch Golden Age: The Historical Meaning of Energy Attainability’, AAG Bijdragm 21 (1978) 3–31Google Scholar.

61 A classical analysis is still Wilkinson, R.G., Poverty and Progress (London 1973)Google Scholar; but see the critical remarks about this interpretation in Mokyr, , Lever, 160–161Google Scholar; the small role of the goal to save labour in eighteenth-century innovations is demonstrated by Macleod, Christine, Inventing the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge 1988) 158–181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Mokyr, , Lever, 75–103Google Scholar.