Agricultural Systems Development in the 18th Century - Article Example

This paper is a critique of the articles by Huang and Pomeranz that deal with the issue of development in Europe and China in the 18th century. The article by Huang is a review of the book: The Great Divergence: Europe, China and the making of the modern economy by Pomeranz. The articles deal with the comparison of the agricultural systems in each of these regions and the way in which they influenced the development of trade and commerce. One of the main criticisms made by Huang is about the way in which Pomeranz has interpreted the economic development in the two regions without any understanding of the economies of the Yangzi delta that was the primary factor of analysis by the latter. Huang argues that Pomeranz and other scholars who write about the Chinese and European economies do from the point of view of their own countries and not from the point of view of the region in question. This is known as a lack of ethnocentricity in political science. What this means is that the political scientists resort to bias in favor of their own regions and also lack what is known as perceiving the world through the eyes of the inhabitants who are specific to the region in question. This apparent blindness towards the subject area is the lack of ethnocentric bias and this means that the scholars do not judge the subject material from the point of view of the subjects themselves. Huang is even handed when he points out studies by Chinese scholars fare no better when it comes to discourse on the European region and hence it is by no means settled that there is anything specific about claims made by both European and Chinese scholars. Hence, the criticism that Huang levels at Pomeranz is borne out by the lack of objectivity in Pomeranz’s analysis about the Chinese economy in the 18th century. Huang and Pomeranz contrast the differing ways in which the Chinese and European peasants went about their occupations by listing the differences that range from simple dietary practices to differences in clothing and other facets of agrarian life. Pomeranz quotes extensively from the data on the food habits of the peasants that include their calorie intake and other parameters that proved the premise that the Chinese were no worse when it came to food intake than their European counterparts. He further compares the non-grain intake with the consumption of meat and comes to the premise that the Chinese fared badly on this count due to the fact that they were pastoral in nature as compared to the meat eating Europeans. Whereas Huang arrives at the point that the Chinese were more into labor intensive crops and methods that required more people. This brings us to the point that the population of the Yangzi delta was much more in proportion to the population of a comparable region in Europe and hence Huang’s contention about more people employed for the same unit of area holds true. The premise that the Chinese were employing more people than their European counterparts brings us to the point that one of the reasons the Industrial revolution succeeded in Europe and not in the Asian region is because of the fact that the Europeans were more inventive due to the compulsions of having lesser people to work and hence needed to innovate. The other point that Huang makes and is widely accepted among scholars is that the Chinese society was highly stratified and this led to a stifling of creativity and consequently less scope for innovation and experimentation with newer forms of methods and implements to carry out their activities. This resulted in the Europeans stealing a march over the Chinese because of the arrival of what is known as the Industrial revolution. The fact that both Chinese and European economies had a comparable stature prior to the Industrial revolution is not lost on Huang. He asserts that a process that he calls “involution” happened that drew away the yields that accrued because of the labor intensification of the land. He compares this process to the lack of technological progress that made China lose out on the Industrial revolution. The fact that Asia in general lost out on the industrial revolution when it had a comparable standing in the world with that of the European counterparts is something that the scholars on both sides have debated. One of the points that they mention has to do with the conquest of the New World by the Europeans that supplied them with cheap materials like cotton and jute. This is certainly the case with Britain which in its quest for cheap raw materials scoured the Indian sub continent for the same and ended up by colonizing the country and hence a ready made supplier of raw materials to be used as feed for its burgeoning cotton mills and jute factories. As Huang states in his review, involution can explain the great paradox of the grandeur of the ancient Chinese civilization as compared to the weakness of the modern one. This goes a long way in explaining the differential in the ways in which China progressed or rather regressed as compared to the unitary progression that Europe went through. Pomeranz uses this extensively in his analysis when he states that Europe diverged from that of the Chinese economy and the making of the modern world was made possible because of progress that depended on technological innovation and a substitution of man made labor with the machine intensive processes. However, Pomeranz’s contention about China losing out due to the factors that he mentions is not taken by Huang. As explained above, Huang resorts to a better explanation of the lack of progress by China and hence lays claim to the fact that factors other than those mentioned by Pomeranz were at work here. Huang makes the point that Pomeranz has misconstrued him when he refers to labor productivity as opposed to land productivity. The latter sets a lot of store by the fact that producing cotton products involved high paid activity for most of the week whereas Huang makes the claim that it was the lower paid activities that formed the bulk of the work leading to lower productivity and hence lower output per unit of land. Huang further makes the point that China missed the Industrial revolution because of the resistance of the family driven units of agriculture to the labor saving capitalization and resistance to economies of scale in farming. The former happened in the proto industry whereas the latter happened in Agriculture. In the concluding part of this paper, I would like to point to my preference for Huang’s analysis as compared to Pomeranz. His explanations regarding why China did not progress further than its European counterparts are solid and based on factual rather than hypothetical surmises. Huang’s arguments are in line with the studies done by several social scientists and his assertions conform to the points made by them. The points made by Huang about lower skilled workers making up the majority of the workforce and hence lower productivity in general make the point supported by data and more plausible than the points made by Pomeranz. Further, Huang asserts that Pomeranz arrives at his data by empirical methods rather than statistical measures and hence consequently, the data is open to debate. As outlined in this paper till this point, Huang’s examples bear closer resemblance to the actual situation existing in the Yangzi delta during the 18th century. And the fact that China missed the Industrial revolution due to the factors mentioned above lend credence to the theory that Europe had much more than its own ingenuity to account for the difference in the ways in which these regions developed. Another point that is made by Huang is that the modern economy as it exists today is largely an industrial based one and even agriculture when mechanized has yielded the kind of results that normal pastoral methods have not borne. Hence, it makes Huang’s point that much palatable particularly when one compares the data and the supporting evidence that he presents. They are grounded in data that is more reliable and statistically coherent. In conclusion, it is my opinion that Huang has made a far more substantial contribution to the reasons why the modern economy diverged from that of the Chinese method or the Asian method and the reasons for the same have been adequately addressed by Huang. It is my contention that more scholars need to follow Huang’s path when it relates to the study of the causes of this divergence and the way we can move beyond traditional agrarian methods of economic development. Hence, Huang’s study is more apt to be recommended by scholars studying Asian history rather than Pomeranz’s model of divergence. It is indeed a study that can appeal to the countries in Asia as they modernize their economies and follow the Anglo-Saxon model of growth. Read More