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² D. Little, ‘New contributions to the philosophy of history’, Springer Science and Business Media, 5 Aug. 2010, esp. pp. 128–136, cites Wong, China transformed, esp. pp. 1–4, as an inspiration for a new trend of historical comparison stressing the importance of similarities rather than differences as a foundation for challenging received explanations. If I understand it, Little's interpretation of Wong is heuristic in intent—there is no way to determine whether the appearance of two similar developments in contrasting contexts means that either is or is not inevitable, but the comparison can surely challenge deterministic explanations of many varieties, which I think is Little's point.

³ Patrick O'Brien, in his retrospective on the ‘Great Divergence’ debates, puts it well: ‘[Braudel] observed, “a historiographical inequality between Europe and the rest of the world. Europe invented historians and made good use of them. Her own history is well lit and can be called as evidence or used as claim.”’ P. O'Brien, ‘Ten years of debate on the origins of the Great Divergence’, Reviews in History, Nov. 2010, https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1008, [accessed 7 October 2019].

⁴ As part of its logic, comparativism is hard-pressed to avoid reifying, essentializing, and being based on some agreed commensurability (including translatability of languages, concepts, and developments), regardless of the intentions of the authors. See also Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Rethinking comparativism’, New Literary History, vol. 40:3 (Summer 2009), pp. 609–626CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gagné, Renaud, Goldhill, Simon and Lloyd, Geoffrey, Regimes of comparatism: frameworks of comparison in history, religion and anthropology, Brill, Leiden, 2018Google Scholar.

⁵ Marx's understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England was distributed through his writings and, to a large degree, implied rather than explicated. The fullness of the paradigm attributed to Marx is a construction of his collaborators and interpreters—foremost among them, Engels and Kautsky. On at least one occasion Marx expressed doubt that historical paradigms had much credibility. See Katz, Claudio J., ‘Karl Marx on the transition from feudalism to capitalism’, Theory and Society, vol. 22:3 (Jun. 1993), pp. 363–389CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kent Deng has seen China-oriented comparativists working in two modes—the first in relation to the paradigm attributed to Marx for the transition from feudalism to capitalism; the second, a method of spot comparisons between ‘Europe’ and ‘China’. See Deng, K. ‘A critical survey of recent research in Chinese economic history’, Economic History Review, 53:1 (2000), pp. 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ ‘Yangtze’ is an English word and is used here in preference to its pinyin (‘Yangzi’). The name of the river in Chinese is Changjiang; Yangzi in Chinese refers only to a tiny segment of the river.

⁷ Levine, Philippa, ‘Is comparative history possible?’, History and Theory, 53:3 (Oct. 2014), pp. 331–347. See also note 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ See particularly the following essay collections: Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Explorations in connected history. From the Tagus to the Ganges, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2005Google Scholar; Subrahmanyam, S., Explorations in connected history. Mughals and Franks, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2005Google Scholar.

⁹ Wallerstein, Immanuel, The modern world-system, Vol. I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century, Academic Press, New York, 1974Google Scholar; Wallerstein, I., The modern world-system, Vol. II: Mercantilism and the consolidation of the European world-economy, 1600–1750, Academic Press, New York, 1980Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Elvin, Mark, ‘The high-level equilibrium trap: the causes of the decline of invention in the traditional Chinese textile industries’, in Willmott, W. E., Economic organization in Chinese society, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1972Google Scholar; Elvin, M., The pattern of the Chinese past, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1973Google Scholar.

¹¹ Wong, China transformed, p. 5. He continues to an explanation of his own method in the book, which was to use comparison of China and Europe to test, qualify, and refine the discursive categories received from social science.

¹² See, for instance, the invitingly titled work, Pomeranz, K., ‘Beyond the East-West binary: resituating development paths in the eighteenth-century world’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61:2 (May 2002), pp. 539–590CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It only made the ‘East-West binary’ more rigid as Pomeranz fended off the critique by Philip Huang. Peter Perdue remarked upon the ‘normal’ qualities of China, as implied by the work of Pomeranz in his review: P. Perdue, ‘Lucky Europe, normal China’, H-World, (Aug. 2000), https://networks.h-net.org/node/20292/reviews/21064/perdue-pomeranz-great-divergence-china-europe-and-making-modern-world, [accessed 7 October 2019], which, in my reading, limns the implied but not explicit reconceptualizations of the comparativists.

¹³ See both Victor Lieberman, Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context c. 800–1830, Vol. 1: Integration on the mainland, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003; Lieberman, V., Strange parallels: Southeast Asia in global context, c. 800–1830, Vol. 2: Mainland mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009Google Scholar. See also Mair, Victor H., ‘Comments on Strange parallels’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 70:4 (Nov. 2011), pp. 979–982CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Eurasia is not a straightforward concept nor narrative object. For the purposes of this article, it means the continental continuum running East-West from Ireland to Japan (including the Mediterranean world and North Africa) and the North-South continuum running from Finland to Malaysia. For further discussion on the history and varieties of definitions of ‘Eurasia’, see Crossley, P. K., Hammer and anvil: nomad rulers at the forge of the modern world, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, and London, 2019, pp. 3–23Google Scholar, where Eurasia is characterized not as a defined surface but as a set of interlocking spatial vectors.

¹⁵ For the most systemic critique of Malthus and attempts to apply his ideas to history (particularly Chinese history), see Lee, J. Z. and Wang, F., One quarter of humanity: Malthusian mythology and Chinese realities, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001Google Scholar. For further comment, see Li, L. M., Fighting famine in North China: state, market and environmental decline, 1690s–1990s, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2007, pp. 74–76Google Scholar. See also Bengsston, Tommy, Campbell, Cameron and Lee, James Z., Life under pressure: living standards in Europe and Asia 1700–1900, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004Google Scholar.

¹⁶ See Lin, Xiaoqing Diana, ‘John K. Fairbank's construction of China, 1930s–1950s: culture, history, and imperialism’, Journal of American–East Asian Relations, vol. 19:3–4 (Jan. 2012), pp. 211–234Google Scholar; Crossley, P. K., ‘In the parlor with the Cambridge history of China’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 79:2 (Jun. 2018), pp. 479–492Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Here I am following the conventional definition of South Asia (more or less coinciding with the nations of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), with the exception of Afghanistan. The overwhelming population centre of gravity is Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

¹⁸ My source here, and in the later discussion of gross domestic product (GDP), is the Angus Maddison Project (AMP) (directly or indirectly, since this source is behind many other sources). This is a magnificent compilation but is used here faute de mieux. See the critical discussion of AMP methods (relating to China's population, which seems to be frequently overestimated and without explanation) in Deng, K. and O'Brien, P., ‘Nutritional standards of living in England and the Yangtze Delta (Jiangnan) circa 1644–1840s: clarifying data for reciprocal comparisons’, Journal of World History, vol. 26: 2 (Jun. 2015), p. 237Google Scholar. See also Duan, C-Q, Gan, X-C, Jeanny, W. and Chien, P. K., Relocation of civilization centers in Ancient China: environmental factors’, Ambio, vol. 27:7 (1998), pp. 572–575Google Scholar.

¹⁹ For trenchant comments on the material and economic conditions associated with the ‘early modern’ period and their relation to China, see P. C. Perdue, ‘Eurasia in world history: reflections on time and space’, World History Connected (2008), http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/5.2/perdue.html, [accessed 7 October 2019], and P. C. Perdue, ‘China in the early modern world: shortcuts, myths and realities’, Education about Asia (Summer 1999), now archived at http://web.mit.edu/21h.504/www/china_emod.htm, [accessed 7 October 2019].

²⁰ All casualties associated with these events are guesses. Contemporary imperial records (as in the case of the Zhang Xianzhong rebellion) give total deaths in excess of the population, but sober estimates have ranged as high as one death for every three people in the areas affected by this rebellion; provinces in the middle of the fighting have an estimated 70–75 per cent drop in population by the end of the Ming period in 1644. For a detailed discussion of the difficulties of assessing death tolls, see Swope, Kenneth, On the trail of the yellow tiger: war, trauma, and social dislocation in southwest China during the Ming–Qing transition, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2018, esp. pp. 1–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rowe, W. T., ‘Social stability and social change’, in Peterson, W. J. (ed.), The Cambridge history of China, Vol. 9: The Ch'ing dynasty to 1800, Part 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 473–562CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Collective estimates by Chinese scholars comparing Ming and early Qing population evidence suggest a loss of 20 to 40 million in the initial phase of the conquest (which Angus Maddison thought was too high), and tens of millions are also thought to have expired in the Three Feudatories War, giving a total loss (over several generations) of a something between 50 million and 100 million for the seventeenth century.

²¹ This seems to correspond to Mair's and Lieberman's views of exposed Eurasian zones where states formed early and through exchange created equilibriums of technology among established civilizations. See Mair, ‘Comment on Strange parallels’.

²² For further discussion see Crossley, Hammer and anvil, pp. 3–21.

²³ For discussion of commonly invoked paradigms of urbanization, see Davis, Kingsley, ‘The urbanization of the human population’, Scientific American, vol. 213:3 (Sep. 1965), pp. 40–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bairoch, Paul, Cities and economic development: from the dawn of history to the present, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991Google Scholar; van der Woude, A. M., Hayami, Akira and Vries, Jan de, Urbanization in history: a process of dynamic interactions, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995Google Scholar.

²⁴ The original idea is in Walter Christaller's Zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland, translated by Baskin, Carlisle W. into English as Central places in southern Germany (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1966)Google Scholar, and offered as a thesis to the University of Virginia in 1933. It established basic concepts of population threshold for survival in a central place, and range as the viable distance for commonly accessed services, including markets. There are many refinements and variations, notably by August Lösch and Edward Ullmann, all built on the idea of nested patterns of markets, transport, and population, often represented hexagonally.

²⁵ William Skinner, ‘Marketing and social structure in rural China’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 24:1–3, 1964–65. See also D. Little, ‘Skinner's spatial imagination’, Understanding Society, 27 March 2010, https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2010/03/skinners-spatial-imagination.html, [accessed 7 October 2019].

²⁶ Hayashi, R., ‘Long term world population history: a reconstruction from the urban evidence’, Jinkogaku kenkyū, vol. 41, 2007Google Scholar.

²⁷ Skinner, G. W., The city in late imperial China, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1977, p. 28Google Scholar. Skinner connected this to the widely noted but so far unexplained phenomenon of medieval mega-cities being succeeded by early modern cities of smaller individual size but greater proliferation: ‘… levels of urbanization achieved in the most advanced regions were higher in the medieval era than in late imperial times’.

²⁸ Hayashi, ‘Long term world population history’.

²⁹ Hayashi though that Japan was in the 2 per cent profile for the early Tokugawa, but Skinner believed that the post-eighteenth-century ratio had to be much different from China's. See Mann, Susan, ‘Urbanization and historical change in China’, Modern China, vol. 10:1 (Jan. 1984), pp. 79–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of Skinner's and Rozman's China-Japan comparisons.

³⁰ Hayashi, ‘Long term world population history’, p. 11.

³¹ This factor has been emphasized by Rozman, Gilbert, ‘Urban networks and historical stages’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 9:1 (Summer 1978), pp. 65–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³² Smith, David A., ‘Dependent urbanization in colonial America: the case of Charleston, South Carolina’, Social Forces, vol. 66:1 (Sep. 1987), pp. 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCusker, J. J. and Menard, Russell, The economy of British America, 1607–1789, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2014, esp. pp. 250–255Google Scholar.

³³ See Rozman, Gilbert, Urban networks in Ch'ing China and Tokugawa Japan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974Google Scholar, and Mann, ‘Urbanization and historical change’, p. 81. See also Wheatley, Paul, ‘Handle sans blade: A misappropriation of central place theory’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 6:3 (Winter 1976), pp. 477–483CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Crissman, Lawrence W., ‘G. William Skinner's spatial analysis of complex societies: its importance for anthropology’, Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, vol. 8:1 (2010), pp. 27–45, esp. pp. 28–32, 41Google Scholar.

³⁵ Burke, P., ‘Patterns of urbanisation, 1400–1800’, in Bentley, Jerry H., Subrahmanyam, Sanjay and Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. (eds), The Cambridge world history, Vol. 6: The construction of a global world, 1400–1800 ce, Part 1: Foundations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015, pp. 107–132Google Scholar.

³⁶ Such a development is graphically represented in Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma and Karen C. Seto, ‘Data descriptor: spatializing 6,000 years of global urbanization from 3700 bc to ad 2000’, Scientific Data, no. 3 (Jun. 2016), Figure 5, https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201634, [accessed 7 October 2019].This recalls (but is not a restatement) of the ideas of Skinner and Rhoads Murphey on the relationships between city and hinterlands. See, in particular, R. Murphey, The treaty ports and China's modernization: what went wrong?, University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, Ann Arbor, MI, 1970.

³⁷ Mendels, F. F., ‘Proto-industrialization: the first phase of the industrialization process’, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 32:1 (1972), pp. 241–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which it is suggested that shifts to cottage industry and urban dwelling were attempts by late medieval societies in Europe to accommodate rising populations and falling wages, and that the mode persisted in societies that were unable to accumulate capital to make the transition to mechanization.

³⁸ By this I mean applying ‘proto-industrialization’ in the specific sense of that which precedes industrialization, as it happened in Europe. More than a few historians have used the word ‘proto-industrialization’ to refer to what I mean here by industrialization and applied it to Asia. See, for instance, Perlin, Frank, ‘Proto-industrialization and pre-colonial South Asia’, Past and Present, no. 98 (Feb. 1983), pp. 30–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For comparisons of its use with respect to Europe and Japan, see von Glahn, R., The economic history of China from antiquity to the nineteenth century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016, p. 399, note 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Wong, China transformed, pp. 35–52; Rosenthal and Wong, Before and beyond divergence.

⁴⁰ Frank, ReOrient, p. 31. Frank's positioning of himself in this context is worth quoting: ‘Several other authors (Ad Knotter, Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly) draw on recent works about “industrialization before industrialization” in the Netherlands, Flanders, and elsewhere in Europe. It is enough to make only these comparisons to show that “van Zanden's terms do not enable analysis of the process: the articulation of merchant capitalism and precapitalist modes of production was not at issue, and the proto-industrialism was not the most dynamic element in the transition to industrial trial capitalism” (Lis and Soly 1997: 237). All the more so would these “modes of production” cease to be the issue if, instead of limiting their purview only to parts of the marginal peninsular Europe, the examination is extended to the rest of the world—let alone analysing them as part and parcel of the whole global economy, as this book does.’

⁴¹ The chronology of Hayami's early work on ‘industrious revolution’ (kinben kakumei) has been carefully laid out by Osamu, Saito, ‘Kinben kakumei-ron no jisshō-teki saikentō’, Keio Journal of Economics (Sanda gakujutsu jānaru), vol. 97:1 (Apr. 2004), pp. 151–161Google Scholar. See translations and elaboration in Akira, Hayami, Japan's industrious revolution: economic and social transformations in the early modern period, Springer, Tokyo, 2015Google Scholar.

⁴² This idea is easily linked to Huang's ‘involution’: see Huang, Philip C. C., The peasant economy and social change in North China, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1985Google Scholar. This is related to and is as hotly contested as the material parity problem. See also Huang, P. C. C., ‘Development or involution in eighteenth-century Britain and China? A review of Kenneth Pomeranz's The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61:2 (2002), pp. 501–528CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ For an introduction, see K. Sugihara, ‘The state and the industrious revolution in Tokugawa Japan’, Working paper no. 02-02, Department of Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2004; Sugihara, K. (ed.), Japan, China, and the growth of the Asian international economy, Vol. 1: 1850–1949, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Riello, Giorgio and Parthasarathi, Prasannan, The spinning world: a global history of cotton textiles, 1200–1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011Google Scholar; P. Parthasarathi, ‘Cotton textiles in the Indian subcontinent, 1200–1800’, in ibid., pp. 17–42.

⁴⁵ Yingxing, Song, Tiangong kaiwu, 1637, reprinted by Shangwu Press, Hong Kong, 1975, pp. 198–199Google Scholar. This book has been translated into English by Zen-Sun, E-Tu and Sun, Shiou-Chuan, T'ien Kung K'ai-Wu: Chinese technology in the seventeenth century, Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, 1966Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Huang, Ellen C., ‘From the imperial court to the international art market. Jingdezhen porcelain: production as global visual culture’, Journal of World History, vol. 23:1 (Mar. 2012), pp. 115–145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ This relates to the ‘Ming Gap’ idea first proposed by Harisson and then affirmed by the evidence of Roxana Brown. For a summary discussion, see Tai, Yew Seng (Dai Rouxing), ‘Ming Gap and the revival of commercial production of blue and white porcelain in China’, Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, vol. 31 (2011), pp. 85–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Gunn, G. C., History without borders: the making of an Asian world region, 1000–1800, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2011, p. 264CrossRefGoogle Scholar. d'Entrecolles’ letters are available at http://gotheborg.com/letters/, [accessed 7 October 2019]. For greater background on the environmental, demographic, and social context of this particular industrialization, see von Glahn, The economic history of China, pp. 255–294.

⁴⁹ Wood says d'Entrcolles’ letters were ‘devoured’ by Josiah Wedgwood: see Wood, N., Chinese glazes: their origins, chemistry, and recreation, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1999, p. 240Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Li, L. M., China's silk trade: traditional industry in the modern world, 1842–1937, Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, Cambridge, MA, 1975, pp. 19–44Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Cliver, R., ‘China’, in van Voss, L. H., Hiemstra-Kuperus, E. and van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (eds), The Ashgate companion to the history of textile workers, 1650–2000, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Farnham, 2010, pp. 103–140Google Scholar.

⁵² von Glahn, The economic history of China, p. 397. In the 1880s half of all silk output was exported and ‘terms of trade’ (import and export prices) improved in China's favour by 25 per cent between 1870 and 1913. China's share of world merchandise exports was twice that of Japan and had added 50 per cent by 1929.

⁵³ Crossley, P. K., The wobbling pivot: China since 1800, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2010, p. 88Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ For an introductory discussion, see Sarkar, S., ‘The many worlds of Indian history’, in his Writing social history, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998Google Scholar; Chaudhary, L., Gupta, B., Roy, T. and Swarmy, A. V. (eds), A new economic history of colonial India, Routledge, London, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roy, T., Economic history of India, 1857–1947, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵⁶ This point is made repeatedly by Frank in his discussions of how China became the wealthiest and most influential economy of the early modern world. See particularly Frank, ReOrient, pp. 108–117.

⁵⁷ I see this as consonant with a major theme of Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, in which he predicted that the fundaments of industrialization—not mechanization—predicted the economic and power relationships of the twenty-first century.

⁵⁸ In most instances the ‘Anthropocene’ examines the real and conceptual inversion of the relationship of the earth and humanity in natural history: the earth was once a constant and humanity the variable, and now humanity is the constant and the earth, the variable. See, among many recent sources, Steffen, Will, Grinevald, Jacques, Crutzen, Paul and McNeill, John, ‘The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, vol. 369:1938 (Mar. 2011), pp. 369, 842–867CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁵⁹ My references here are to Smith, A. and Cannon, E. (eds), An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976 (hereafter, WN)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ As Pomeranz, The great divergence, p. 24, notes, ‘… it is striking that where significant differences are discernible, they are consistently related to deviations from simple Smithian market dynamics—especially to state-licensed monopolies and privileges, and to the fruits of armed trade and colonisation’, which seems to be Smith's point.

⁶¹ Smith's work as a whole fits well with Lieberman's comment on two broad patterns of economic growth across Eurasia: growth by accretion of markets and resources, and growth (‘Smithian growth’) through long-distance trade. Lieberman, Strange parallels. Vol. 2, pp. 7–9.

⁶² One of the earliest and most searching criticisms of Pomeranz came from the leading Marxian historian of Europe, Robert Brenner. See Brenner, R. and Isett, Christopher, ‘England's divergence from China's Yangzi delta: property relations, microeconomics, and patterns of development’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61:2 (2002), pp. 609–662CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶³ Of his series of articles on the BEIC, see, particularly, K. Marx, ‘The British East India Company, its history and results’, New York Herald-Tribune, 11 July 1853 (dated 24 June 1853).

⁶⁴ See also Fogel, J. A., ‘The debates over the Asiatic mode of production in Soviet Russia, China, and Japan’, The American Historical Review, vol. 93:1 (1988), pp. 56–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Leary, B., The Asiatic mode of production: oriental despotism, historical materialism and Indian history, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989Google Scholar; Brook, T., The Asiatic mode of production in China, Armonk, M. E. Sharpe, 1989Google Scholar; Sahay, G. A., ‘Marxism and the orient: a reading of Marx’, Borderlands, vol. 6:1 (2007)Google Scholar, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no1_2007/sahay_marxorient.htm, [accessed 7 October 2019]; Tansei, C. B., ‘A deafening silence? Marxism, international historical sociology and the spectre of Eurocentrism’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 21:1 (2015)Google Scholar, http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/19/1354066113514779.refs, [accessed 7 October 2019].

⁶⁵ This is not Smith's express ratio but is extrapolated from WN by Barry R. Weingast, ‘Persistent inefficiency: Adam Smith's theory of slavery and its abolition in Western Europe’, SSRN, 8 December 2016, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2635917, [accessed 8 October 2019] or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2635917, [accessed 7 October 2019].

⁶⁶ WN, p. 264.

⁶⁷ Hopfl, H. M., ‘From savage to Scotsman: conjectural history in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 17:2 (Spring, 1978), pp. 19–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rendell, Jane, ‘Scottish orientalism: from Robertson to James Mill’, The Historical Journal, vol. 25:1 (Mar. 1982), pp. 43–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacKenzie, John M., Orientalism: history, theory and the arts, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995, p. 29Google Scholar. The contemporary impact of Scottish stadialism on perceptions of China—and a sceptical view of whether such ideas entailed a conclusion of British superiority—have been explored in Choi, J. Y., ‘A “most interesting subject for the investigation of the philosopher”: conjectural history in John Barrow's Travels in China’, Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies, vol. 42:3 (Sep. 2019), pp. 303–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is a small part of the role of China speculation and ideation in eighteenth-century European culture. See Kitson, P. J., Forging romantic China, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, pp. 8–10Google Scholar, for a discussion of this field; on Adam Smith's faintly romanticized discussion of China's economy and trade, see ibid., pp. 18–19.

⁶⁸ WN, p. 53.

⁶⁹ WN, pp. 39–40. For further comment on the implications of Smith's single remark and Malthus's large and sweeping theories of population growth, see Rosenthal and Wong, Before and beyond divergence, pp. 529–531. See also Li, Fighting famine, pp. 74–76.

⁷⁰ Wong, China transformed, p. 22.

⁷¹ WN, Book 1, Chapter 5: ‘On the real and nominal Price of Commodities, of their Price in Labour, and their Price in Money’.

⁷² This, according to Deng and O'Brien, ‘Nutritional standards’, pp. 233–267, is what happened.

⁷³ Allen, R. C., Bassino, J. P., Ma, D., Moll-Murata, C. and van Luiten Zanden, J., ‘Wages, prices, and living standards in China, 1738–1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan, and India’, The Economic History Review, vol. 64:1 (2011), pp. 8–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Deng and O'Brien, ‘Nutritional standards’. Twenty years ago historians such as Pomeranz and Wong reached the same general conclusion as Smith—that real living standards in China and in England were comparable—but for their own reasons. They disputed Smith's claim that England's real wages were higher than China's. For their part, Allen et al. correct Smith also, but their grounds are that while he was correct on wages, an average Chinese labourer, in fact, had a lower standard of living than an Englishman because of the tension between comparatively low wages compared to England but a cost of living that was roughly similar—differences that were already established in the seventeenth century, well after the old ‘1500’ mark proposed by Huntington as the ‘great divergence’, but well before the ‘1800’ mark proposed by Pomeranz for roughly the same phenomenon.

⁷⁴ WN, p. 106.

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 114.

⁷⁶ Ibid., pp. 40–41. Kitson explored somewhat the origins of the idea that Smith had described China as limited and declining, and found it emerging in the aftermath of the Macartney mission of 1793. Smith and Macartney were both members of Samuel Johnson's Literary Club in London, but neither one was the source of British readings of Smith as providing evidence of China's poverty or political weakness. Kitson, Forging romantic China, pp. 128–129.

⁷⁷ WN, p. 106.

⁷⁸ Ibid., pp. 39, 45.

⁷⁹ Ibid., pp. 369–370.

⁸⁰ Smith's dissertation on credit is worth an article in itself, especially since it touches on a true difference between the mechanizing and militarizing economies of the early modern period, on the one hand, and those discouraging private debt and avoiding public debt, on the other. Ibid., pp. 253–254, 408. See also Mathee, R., ‘The Safavid economy as part of the world economy’, in Floor, W. and Herzig, E. (eds), Iran and the world in the Safavid age, I. B. Tauris, London, 2012Google Scholar, especially pp. 40–42; Kilinçoğlu, D. T., Economics and capitalism in the Ottoman empire, Routledge, London, 2015, esp. pp. 65–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸¹ WN, pp. 369–370.

⁸² Ibid., pp. 105–106.

⁸³ G. Daudin, K. H. O'Rourke and L. Prados de la Escosura, ‘Trade and empire, 1700–1870’, Centre de recherche en économie de Sciences PO (Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris), Document de travail (no. 2008-24) (July 2008) is largely identical to O'Rourke, K. H., Prados de la Escosura, L. and Daudin, G., ‘Trade and empire’, in Broadberry, S. and O'Rourke, K. (eds), The Cambridge economic history of modern Europe, Vol 1: 1700–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 96–121, see p. 17Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ Daudin et al., ‘Trade and empire, 1700–1870’, p. 25.

⁸⁵ Smith considered the volume of non-British European sea imports to Europe as negligible in comparison to the volume handled by the BEIC. WN, pp. 113–114. This appears to have been a bit of an overstatement, but certainly in Britain volume was growing steeply in his own time while in the Netherlands and France it receded, and the United States, was miniscule.

⁸⁶ Solar, P. M., ‘Opening to the East: shipping between Europe and Asia, 1770–1830’, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 73:3 (2013), pp. 625–661, p. 653CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁷ Smith seems to have struggled to explain why a country taking in so much silver would nevertheless value it so highly—his explanations ranged from a liking for silver decoration on clothes, furnishings, and people, to unusual losses of silver cargoes in river transport, to ‘the almost universal custom of concealing treasures in the bowels of the earth, of which the knowledge frequently dies with the person who makes the concealment, must occasion the loss of a still greater quantity’. WN, pp. 114–115.

⁸⁸ WN, p. 22.

⁸⁹ Following on in time from comparativism has come an increase in closely interlocking studies of maritime history. The importance of the sea was probably foreseen earliest and most clearly by Wills, John E. Jr, ‘Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: the interactive emergence of European domination’, The American Historical Review, vol. 98:1 (Feb. 1993), pp. 83–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Commenting on a wave of new studies of the maritime joint-stock companies, Wills remarkably pinpointed the clear conceptual links among shipping, long-distance trade, and the normality of large Asian economies, almost replicating Smith's logic: ‘In the works here discussed is an even more interesting paradigm shift, in which Asian patterns of production, trade, and governance are seen to have fundamentally shaped the long process of emergence of the Asian maritime facets of the modern world-system’, ibid., p. 84.

⁹⁰ WN, p. 53. Smith was wrong in assuming that there was no interest in China in shipping. Von Glahn relates a case study of a Chinese ship-owning family. Such family firms gradually dissolved through division among heirs and reliance on equity rather than credit (bringing in more partners, further dissolving the firms; resolving debts through liquidation). See von Glahn, The economic history of China, pp. 341–342.

⁹¹ Solar, ‘Opening to the East’.

⁹² Smith seems to have assumed that interest rates in China were higher than they were; he thought the legal limit was actually the real rate in use: WN, p. 53. But he was right that they were distinctly higher than in Europe; see von Glahn, The economic history of China, p. 462.

⁹³ Frank, ReOrient, p. 101.

⁹⁴ ‘The wealth of ancient Egypt, that of China and Indostan, sufficiently demonstrate that a nation may attain a very high degree of opulence, though the greater part of its exportation trade be carried on by foreigners. The progress of our North American and West Indian colonies, would have been much less rapid, had no capital but what belonged to themselves been employed in exporting their surplus produce’: WN, p. 207.

⁹⁵ ‘More than three decades ago, Marshal Hodgson … opined that “all attempts to invoke pre-modern seminal traits in the occident to account for the divergence in living standards can be shown to fail under close historical analysis”.’ Two generations of post-war research on India, China, and Southeast Asia (synthesized in the recent writings by Fernand Braudel, Kirti Chaudhuri, Gunder Frank, Jack Goldstone, Jack Goody, John Hobson, Ken Pomeranz, John Reid, Kaoru Sugihara, David Washbrook, Bin Wong, and Harriet Zürndorfer et al.) concur. Braudel inferred that ‘the populated regions of the world faced with demands of numbers seem to us to be quite close to each other’. O'Brien's passage occurs very nearly the same in O'Brien, P., ‘Metanarratives in global history of material progress’, The International History Review, vol. 23:2 (2001), pp. 345–367CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁶ As Pomeranz, The great divergence, p. 207, concludes, ‘rather than looking at other advanced economies in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as cases of “Europe (Britain) manqué”, it probably makes more sense to look at Western Europe (Britain) in this period as a none-too-unusual economy’. See also note 67 of this article.

⁹⁷ Arrighi took paradigmatic ideas of capital and labour more seriously than I am suggesting here, but he also considered Marx and Smith as more compatible that I do, seeing Smith as conceptualizing a European ‘high-level equilibrium trap’ from which Europe escaped by industrialization. See Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, particularly pp. 13–39.