Joseph Green asks whether Pomeranz has intentionally ignored
findings which run against his thesis. Anyone can be accused of
this charge; and on the surface P appears to be following recent
trends in his claim that "English agricultural production seems not
to have changed much between 1750 and1850". Clark himself
concludes there was no agricultural revolution in the period between
1770 and 1850, though in his 1991 article he says there was an
agricultural revolution from 1600 to 1770. But I get the impression
(from stuff I have seen recently in the net) that Clark has joined
other quantitative economic historians in underplaying altogether
the agrarian changes that took place after 1600. As we saw here
some time ago, George Grantham thinks that early medieval
Europe already had the agrarian tool kit that it went on to use fully
only in the 19th century as a result of market incentives. Indeed,
Clark is working right now (and perhaps has already finished) a
paper arguing there was no Industrial Revolution but that instead
the IR, as the abstract says, "was most likely the last of a series
of localized growth spurts stretching back to the Middle
Ages...Accidents of demand, demography, trade and geography
made this spurt seem different than what had come before - but it
was really more of the same". Yes, accidents: S. J. Gould has
penetrated deep into the social sciences and has added spark to
otherwise dull econometric papers.
On the other hand, we saw that Pomeranz misreads Clark's 1991
article in a rather serious way, for Clark's estimation was that there
was little change in labor productivity after 1770, whereas P's
general message (using Ambrosoli's work as well) was that
English agriculture was experiencing diminishing crop returns after
1750, due to declining soil fertility *despite* using methods "which
raised labor productivity" (216)!?
I believe - by taking seriously not just one or two but many of the
findings out there - that there is substantial evidence showing that
English agriculture was experiencing substantial increases in land
productivity (and in labor productivity) after the 1600s through the
1800s into the 1830s/50s when truly scientific/mechanized
agriculture took off. In an article that will come out soon, where I
evaluate closely Frank's Reorient and Wong's China Transformed, I
go into this a bit. As I look back into that paper, however, I must
say that I was too preoccupied with those stats which
demonstrated increases in *labor* productivity and paid less
attention to those relating to land productivity. I was too
westernized in my appoach and took it for granted that productivity
should be defined in terms of labor-saving technologies. But
Pomeranz has reinforced on me the idea that advances in land-
saving technologies (even if they are labor intensive) are measures
of efficiency as well.
