Rod:
I've got strogn criticisms of Eric Jones's _The European Miracle_ in my
book _The Colonizer's Model of the World._ Chapter 2 is entitled "The Myth
of the European Miracle."
On this particular point, he is resurrecting an old idea that has been
shown to be total false. All modern scholarship, of all persuasions, agrees
that the intermittent imperial bans were not enforced and generally not
paid attention to, and wwere largely shakedowns of the merchants; also
broad if not unviersal agreement that the voyages to Africa around 142-1440
were not repeated because the Chinese govt needed to spend its funds on
warfare in the northwest against the "nomads," but otherwise there was no
backing away, etc., from sea travel prior to the impact of europeans
(Chinese merchant ships plied the Asian seas as happily as in prior times).
The theory that Europe's fractionated late-medieval polities somehow
explain Europe's unique development and expannsion, while the fact that
China was a single empire, is rooted in the notion that an empire somehow
cannot be as progressiveas a small state (the theory of "Oriental
Despotism") anbd while this view isd fairly widely held among Eurocentric
historians like Jones, M. Mann, John A. Hall, and others, it is
resoundingly rejected by sinologists like Ken Pomeranz, Bin Wong (see his
CHINA TRANSFORMED, 1997) Bob Marks, and others, as well as non-Sinologists
like Jack Goody, Janet Abu-Lughod, Gunder Frank, and your obdt. servant. My
view is: nobody has produced any empirical evidence that the Chinese govt
impeded economic development, and nobody has produced any convincing
evidence that the tiny warring feudal polities of earely modern Europe were
somehow more favorabvle for development than a unified state, although many
hypotheses to that effect have been thrown up.
Cheers
Jim Blaut
Subject: [PEN-L:12061] Re: China
Date: 30-Sep-99 at 16:24
From: INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED],
INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
TO: INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Eric Jones in the European Miracle has a discussion of China. He argues at
a
certain point an emperor put a halt to foreign contacts. That before this
Chinese sailors had made it as far as the Cape of Good Hope. China turned
isolationist and inward. Europe because it had not been unified was not
subject to the same central control. No king or emperor had the power to
keep Europeans at home. It was not any backwardness on China's part, but a
matter of policy.
I don't know enough Chinese history to evaluate the argument.
Rod Hay
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The History of Economic Thought Archives
http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html
Batoche Books
http://members.tripod.com/rodhay/batochebooks.html
http://www.abebooks.com/home/BATOCHEBOOKS/
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Subject: [PEN-L:12061] Re: China
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1999 14:23:21 PDT
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