Wojtek: >Charles, the ethical aspects of colonialism aside - if the wealth of >European capitalism originated in the third world, why did not that wealth >produce economic development on a par with capitalism outside Europe prior >to the plunder? I'm not Charles, but I'd like to take a crack at that. In reality, Europe was relatively underdeveloped in AD 1250-1350. Here's Janet Abu-Lughod's take on medieval China in "Before European Hegemony": In the past, before western scholars had sufficient information about China’s achievements in science and technology, it was commonly argued that Europe’s eventual triumph in the world was the result of her unique scientific and technological inventiveness, and, conversely, that Orientals, although perhaps "clever" had never been able to sustain a scientific revolution. The voluminous investigations of Needham (inter alia, 1954—85, 1970, have more than corrected this error. We now have much documentation on Chinese contributions to medicine and physiology, physics and mathematics, as well as their more practical applications in technology. According to Sivin (1982: 105—106), Needham did not go far enough; he stopped short of admitting that, by Sung times, China had had a true scientific "revolution," a position strongly argued by Chinese scholars (e.g., Li et al., 1982; although Chang, 1957, dissents). Whether or not the term "scientific revolution" is justified, there can be no doubt that in late medieval times the level of Chinese technical competence far exceeded the Middle East, which, in turn, had outstripped Europe for many centuries. Space permits only a few examples here: paper and printing, iron and steel, weaponry (including guns, cannons, and bombs), shipbuilding and navigational techniques, as well as two primary manufactured exports, silk and porcelain. According to Tsien (in Li et al., 1982: 459): "paper was invented in China before the Christian era, adopted for wnting at the beginning of the 1st century A.D., and manufactured with new and fresh fibres from the early 2nd century... . Woodblock printing was first employed.., around 700 A.D. and moveable type in the middle of the 11th century." Some time in the ninth century, the Arabs learned the process of paper making from the Chinese and later transmitted that precious knowledge to "westerners." Braudel (1973: 295) suggests that the first European paper mills appeared in twelfth-century Spain but that the Italians did not begin to produce paper until the fourteenth Century; Cipolla (1976: 206), basing his remarks on a 1953 article by Irigoin, however, claims that by the second half of the thirteenth Century the court in Byzantium no longer bought its paper from the Arabs but from Italy. (For more details, see T. F. Carter, 1925, revised 1955.) But in any case, China’s edge was significant. Even more impressive than paper manufacture were Chinese advances in siderurgy, which were several hundred years in advance of Europe’s. From at least the eighth century onward, coal was being mined in northern China and used in furnaces that produced high-quality iron and even steel "either by means of the Co of pig iron and wrought iron, or by direct decarbonization in a cold oxidizing blast" (Elvin, 1973: 86; see also Needham and Steel Production in Ancient and Medieval China," 19 reproduced in Needham, 1970: 107—112, and the works of Hartwell, 1962, 1966, 1967). Hartwell’s (1967) estimates of the scale of iron production are truly staggering. By his calculations, the tonnage of coal annually in the eleventh century for iron production alone in northren China was "roughly equivalent to 70 percent of the amount of coal annually used by all metal workers in Great Britain at the beginning of the eighteenth century" (Hartwell, 1967: 122) By the end of the eleventh century the Sung were minting coins and making many metal products as well. According to Hartwell (1967: 122—123): "7,000 workers were engaged in actually mining the ore and fuel operating the furnaces, forges, and refining hearths. . . [while] others were engaged in transporting the raw materials from the mines to the iron works. The scale of production at individual establishments was unprecedented.. . and probably was not equalled anywhere in the world until the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century." If we add to the workers engaged in direct ore extraction and processing those workers who fabricated tools and weaponry, can be no doubt as to the high level of China’s development. To some extent, such technological advances proved to be undoing. Elvin (1973: 18, 84—87) suggests that the invading Chin not only adopted the methods of metallurgy from northern China ( but passed them along to the Mongols who learned to tip arrows with metal; this significantly improved their military might and gave them the power to defeat not only Russia but event both the Chin and the Southern Sung. In any case, the invasion of the north by these nomadic groups precipitated a decline in the amount of iron produced in that region. Hartwell suggests that demographic and institutional changes both played a part in this retrenchment, which had begun to show up by the middle of the thirteenth century. During Chin times, the population of the northern iron-producing region had remained roughly constant and, with it, the level of production and demand. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
