Although P admits that Europe/England may have a had a slight
advantage in mechanical technologies, he does not think that 18th
century England was headed for a major industrial breakthrough.
Both Europe and China had comparable standards of living and
levels of productivity. Europe was *possibly* ahead in labor
productivity and in some capital intensive technologies (i.e.mining
and metallurgy) whereas China was definitely ahead in land
productivity and land saving technologies. Both were still
organically based economies and, by 1800, both were heading
towards a Malthusian crisis. Were it not for the "ecological windfall"
which came from new world resources, and the fortunate location of
coal, 19th century-England would have not become the workshop
of the world, but would have been forced to follow a labor-intensive,
resource-saving agricultural pattern of development.
Demonstrating that Europe/England was heading in this Malthusian
direction is a fundamental objective of this book. If two-thirds of the
book is a comparative analysis of living standards, the other third
concentrates on Europe's last minute escape from this Malthusian
path. The task Pomeranz faces here is far more difficult
conceptually than the one on living standards which involved mainly
organizing, analyzing and estimating percentages, quantities and
indices (the sort of hard data that turns on so many economists).
For behind this Malthusian wall there are many trends/arguments
which P has to keep in balance without contradicting himself.
First, P has to show that both Europe *and China* were facing
similar constraints without, however, resurrecting the old
argument that 18th century China was a classic overpopulated
society experiencing diminishing agricultural returns and
deteriorating living standards. He has to be careful *not* to
contradict his earlier claim that, while modern China had higher
population densities than Europe, it had similar life expectancies
thanks to its own fertility controls and its superior levels of
agricultural productivity. Second, he has to show simultaneously
(or finds himself doing so) that Europe/England's agricultural
sector was not superior to China's and was not experiencing an
"agricultural revolution" in the 18th century, but was instead an
inefficient sector with "underutilized" resouces, which nonetheless
was facing limits to growth.
P successfully meets these difficulties but at the cost of
considerable confusion particularly re the comparative units of
analsysis: is he comparing China to Europe, China to England, the
Yangzi delta to Europe, or the Yangzi delta to England?
