If P asks us to drop our Western biases and look at Chinese
economic performance in terms of its specificities most
fundamentally at its superior agrarian sector and its land-saving
innovations, he says next to nothing about Chinese agricultural
productivity. We are definitely told indirectly it was highly
successful in the way it was able to sustain relatively high living
standards right through the 1800s. Even as China apporached the
soon-to-come Malthusian limitations of the 19th century, its
population doubled between 1750 and 1850 without any
generalized fall in per capita income (p125). Why? Because
despite the worsening person/land ratios so visible in regions like
the Lower Yangzi, the Chinese were able to attain large gains in
per-acre yields through such land-saving innovations as greater use
of fertilizers, more multicropping and extremely careful weeding
(p141). But P will hardly go further than this. He no doubt offers
substantial numbers showing how much they consumed and
produced crops like sugar, tabacco, tea and rice. But there is
really no analysis of the agrarian system as such or the land
saving technologies. There is an Appendix (B) comparing
'estimates of manure applied to North China and Europeans farms
in the late 18th century, and of resulting nitrogen fluxes'. However, I
would say that the Appendix, like the rest of the book, equivocates
on the most crucial questions determining land productivity.
