Few days ago I came across a paper published in the last issue of
EHR (LIII, 2000) "A critical survey of recent research in Chinese
economic history" by Kent G. Deng. Paper evaluates one of the most
heated questions of world history: why premodern China did not
industrialize despite enjoying, at least until 1500, Euroasian
superiority in metallurgy, military power, navigational equipment,
manufacture of silk and of porcelain, paper making, block printing,
mechanical clocks, number and organization of professional merchants,
long-distance communication systems (roads and canals) throughout
the country, "a remarkable degree of social mobility", standardized
weights and measures, a non-agricultural population of about 20% of
China's total, a multi-layerd network of 45, 000 market towns
supported by a large number of "free, small-scale farmers, working
under a system of private land-ownership" - all this together with a
single national government ("active in maintaining food supply,
famine relief, and price control), a standardized written language, a
dominant Confucian code of ethics".
Although Deng questions the Hegelian/Marxist unilinear conception
which underlies "the use of the European experience as a gauge to
measure China", he recognizes that this has been a major
preoccupation of historians, particularly of western scholars, among
whom he detects nine schools of thought: those who emphasise,
respectively, ideological factors, the way the market functioned,
environmental/geographical differences, the balance of class forces,
population, technology, rent-seeking government, role of the state,
and the world-system. Having separated western scholarship into
these nine schools, Deng has an easy time pointing to the
(obvious) weaknesses of each. Landes's Wealth and Poverty, for example,
is brushed aside in just one short sentence: "When this bulky, narrative
book is stripped to the kernel, the subject is 'culture' and cultural
determinisn." More ink is spent on other works, but the discursive
strategy which Deng employs is still extremely misleading, for it
creates the illusion that every work on this question is pushing a
particular brand of determinisn, when the truth is that most scholars
today accept an overdetermined explanation, meaning not the mutual
causation of everything by everything (only Resnick and Wolf would
make this erroneous inference) but the overdetermination of one - or
of a tight constellation of primary factors - by many
secondary/conjuctural/accidental factors.
I agree that in the case of somelike like Jared Diamond we are
dealing - explicitly though not implicitly - with a strong
environmental determinism, but even in his case
one does not refute him by showing (obviously) that the environment
is not everything, or by pointing - as Deng does, to a quick
similarity between Europe's and China's geography. We have enough of
that in Blaut (or in the Monthly Review). Here's Deng: "what is often
overlooked is that there is an 'Asian Mediterranean' in the China
seas. In the past, different peoples met, migrated, and traded there.
Moonsoon winds favored shipping in the Asian Mediterranean and there
is no reason to view Asia as geographically inferior to the
Mediterranean on the other side of Euroasia. Therefore, geographic
difference no longer provides a safe haven for enviromental
determinisn in studying China."
Deng cites a paper by Diamond in *Nature*, not the book, but it is
important to understand that in the book Diamond says that
"geographic connectedness and only modest internal barriers gave
China an initial advantage." But he then adds that "China's connectedness
eventually became a disadvantage, because a decision by one despot
could and repeatedly did halt innovation. In contrast, E's
geographic balkanization resulted in dozens or hundreds of
independent, competing stateless and centers of innovation. If one
state did not pursue some particular innovation, another did, forcing
neighboring states to do likewise or else be conquered or left
economically behind."
This is a view long argued by neo-Weberians, but in their writings
the *political/military* dimension of this apparent
geographic determinism becomes transparent: in Europe we had an
international political organization known as the *interstate*
system. Every effort at creating a world empire had failed. Deng
could have recognized this political aspect right here in his
analysis of "geography, but he prefers to divide
and rule, so he approaches this political issue separetely, and
responds, this time against Mokyr, that "China always faced
competition from the Steppes and increasingly so after AD 1000: from
the Tartars, Mongols, and Manchus, to name just a few."
But this point still misses the net: European inter-state competition
was between relatively equal state powers, and it was more intense
and sustained than elsewhere. Also, we need to understand the
role of *culture* in this context as well (which is implicit in Diamond's
use of the word "innovation"). As Chirot writes: "There existed
a European-wide culture in which learned men, traders, pilgrims,
mercenaries, sailors, and statesmen moved with ease across political
boundaries...Intolerant dogmatism pushed good minds, capital, and
skilled men to other states and prevented stagnation. Thus it was
that German printing techniques, Italian banking methods, Dutch
cartography, Portuguese maritime experience, and the explosion of
learning, art, and science spread throughout Europe to help those who
knew how to use them".
I would insist that the Mediterranean is unique geographically in the way
that it connects to the rest of the world, and in the way that it
acted as the busiest cultural/ethnic intersection in world history.
Leave that and the other schools which Deng criticises for later.
