Kenneth pomeranz argues that “the great divergence” between development and involution in Europe and China did not occur until after 1800. Until then, Europe and China were comparable in population history, agriculture, handicraft industry, income, and consumption. Europe before 1800, in other words, was much less developed than the last two decades of scholarship have led us to believe, while China before 1800 was much less involuted. To make his case, Pomeranz spotlights England, the most advanced part of Europe, and the Yangzi delta area, the most advanced part of China. They diverged only after 1800, mainly because of the lucky availability of coal resources for England, and also of other raw materials from the New World.

Actors were luxury goods traded among the elite in late Ming and early Qing China. Not only individual actors but entire troupes were sold, bestowed upon friends, and bequeathed upon relatives. Their circulation served to create and maintain networks of social exchange, in much the same manner as did gifts of fine ceramic ware, calligraphic scrolls, and ancient bronzes. The cultural prestige of the actor as a luxury good, in turn, was predicated on a highly refined discourse of connoisseurship. For example, the theater aficionado Pan Zhiheng's (1556–1622) disquisitions on the art of acting were collected in a volume entitled Chongding xinshang pian (Recompiled texts on connoisseurship), published between 1600 and 1640 (Clunas 1991, 36). In this essay, I discuss the social significance of the connoisseurship of the actor, examining the exchange of actors and poems among a rarefied stratum of the mid-seventeenth-century elite.

“Only in the eyes of the law are we indians.” With these words Anu Chairman sketched the position of tens of thousands of people living beyond the reach of state and nation in dozens of enclaves in South Asia. Much of the recent wave of literature on the nation is concerned with critiquing an earlier generation of scholars who tended to assume a correspondence between nations and states. In the new literature, the connections among nation, state, territory, sovereignty, history, and identity are all problematized. Nations are seen as being socially constructed in many different ways. Thus, there are nations without states, new nations that are invented before our eyes while older ones disintegrate, and older diasporic nations that are being joined by a host of new transnational communities. Nations are now conceived as more fluid, malleable, and unpredictable than ever before.

Debate can advance scholarly discussion, and I am grateful to JAS for the chance to do so here. As much as possible, I would like to move forward by introducing additional arguments and evidence. However, some recapitulation of the book under discussion is inevitable, as is some review of debates related to Philip Huang's book on a related topic. Some return to previously plowed ground is further necessitated by the nature of his review. First, he has fundamentally misunderstood what my book claims, as well as the support for some of those claims. I will not correct all of these errors here, but I will need to go over some of the major examples. Second, a central contention of his review is that his 1990 book, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 remains the best framework for understanding the delta's economy over that entire period. Huang is; of course, entitled to that view: but in reasserting that book's thesis he ignores rather than responds to the critiques ofthat book (see Wong 1990; Myers 1991; Wong 1992). He also ignores plentiful new research on both Asia and Europe that suggests there were more paths to modernity than we once realized, most of them perfectly viable in spite of relying on more labor-intensive kinds of production than England's (especially in agriculture) during their early phases.

As recently as twenty-five years ago, there were virtually no demographers of China and there was little available data on Chinese demographic behavior. Thus in spite of intense interest in China's population dating back at least to Malthus (1766–1834), his initial understanding, or rather misunderstanding, of Chinese population dynamics remains dominant. While recent research on European population history has confirmed Malthus's observations that European, or at least English, population size was controlled largely by the preventive check, nuptiality, the absence of similar studies of Chinese population history ironically facilitated the persistence of a Malthusian hypothesis that Chinese population size was controlled largely by the positive check, mortality. It is a tribute to the elegance and power of the Malthusian orthodoxy that in spite of the lack of information on Chinese historic demographic behavior and economic performance, many of the most distinguished Western scholars of late imperial China continue to interpret social and economic processes in China during the last three hundred years in Malthusian or neo-Malthusian terms (Elvin 1973; Chao 1986; Huang 1990).

In the great divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) proposes a radical revision of our understanding of the pattern of economic evolution in the eastern and western ends of Eurasia over the course of the early modern and modern periods, roughly late Ming and Qing. A recent restatement of the standard or traditional view can be found in the macro-economic historian Angus Maddison's account of world economic development in the very long run, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (2001), which sums up his argument in Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run (1998). According to Maddison, “Western Europe overtook China … in per capita performance in the fourteenth century. Thereafter China [was] … more or less stagnant in per capita terms until the second half of the twentieth century” (2001, 44). In contrast, Pomeranz insists that if the comparative focus is placed, as only makes sense, not on Europe or China as a whole—both of which contained the most disparate regions at vastly different levels of economic development—but on the most advanced, or core, areas within each, it can be seen that, by as late as 1800, there was little to choose between them, in terms of the character of the economy, the nature of growth, or its results (2000, 7–8).