Why Europe and the West Why NotChinaDavid S. Landes.docx

Why Europe and the West? Why Not
China?
David S. Landes
T he world history of technology is the story of a long,
protracted inversion.As late as the end of the first millennium
of our era, the civilizations ofAsia were well ahead of Europe in
wealth and knowledge. The Europe of
what we call the Middle Ages (say, tenth century) had regressed
from the power
and pomp of Greece and Rome, had lost much of the science it
had once possessed,
had seen its economy retreat into generalized autarky. It traded
little with other
societies, for it had little surplus to sell, and insofar as it
wanted goods from outside,
it paid for them largely with human beings. Nothing testifies
better to deep poverty
than the export of slaves or the persistent exodus of job-hungry
migrants.
Five hundred years later, the tables had turned. I like to
summarize the change
in one tell-tale event: the Portuguese penetration into the Indian
Ocean led by
Vasco da Gama in 1498. This was an extraordinary
achievement. Some scholars will
tell you that it was some kind of accident; that it could just as
easily have been
Muslim sailors, or Indian, or Chinese to make the connection
from the other

direction. Did not the Chinese send a series of large fleets
sailing west as far as the
east African coast in the early fifteenth century— bigger, better
and earlier than
anything the Portuguese had to show?
Don’t you believe it. These affirmations of Asian priority are
especially prom-
inent and urgent nowadays because a new inversion is bringing
Asia to the fore. A
“multicultural” world history finds it hard to live with a
eurocentric story of
achievement and transformation. So a new would-be (politically
correct) orthodoxy
would have us believe that a sequence of contingent events
(gains by Portugal and
then others in the Indian Ocean, followed by conquests by Spain
and then others
in the New World) gave Europe what began as a small edge and
was then worked
up into centuries of dominion and exploitation. A gloss on this
myth contends that
y David S. Landes is Emeritus Professor of Economics, Harvard
University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 20, Number 2—
Spring 2006 —Pages 3–22
a number of non-European societies were themselves on the
edge of a technolog-
ical and scientific breakthrough; that in effect, European
tyranny (to paraphrase

Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”),
“froze the genial current
of the [Asian] soul.”
A variant on this history-as-accident (or luck) is the pendulum
approach
associated with Jack Goody’s (1996) book, East in the West.
Everything starts on an
even keel thanks to the allegedly common heritage of the
Bronze Age; but then
different parts move ahead, only to be caught up and passed by
others, which then
lose ground to their predecessors. So Europe was just especially
lucky, taking the
lead at the crucial turn to the Industrial Revolution. But Asia’s
turn will now come;
indeed is already coming. As Goody (pp. 231–232) writes: “[I ]t
is a pendular
movement that continues today, with the East now beginning to
dominate the West
in matters of the economy.” As for efforts to understand this
European success—
especially explanations based on allegedly deep characteristics
that were present in
Europe but wanting in China—such efforts are irrelevant, writes
Goody (p. 238):
. . . since all these features must have been present [in China] at
the earlier
period. Those discussions can be seen for what they are, as
representing the
understandable but distorting tendency of Europeans to inflate
their overall
contribution to world society and even to ‘Western civilisation’,
a tendency
reinforced by their undoubted achievements over the past few

centuries. Such
inflation of oneself inevitably involves the deflation of others;
self-congratulation
is a zero-sum game.
But of course, Westerners were not alone in noticing some
European deep
characteristics. Thus Abu Talib, an Indian Muslim visitor to
Britain late eighteenth
century, commenting on British precocity in mechanization:
“The British,” he
wrote (cited in Khan, 1998, p. 303), “were endowed with a
natural passion for
technical innovation. They possessed inventive skills and
preferred to perform even
minor routine jobs with the aid of mechanical instruments rather
than manually.
They had such great passion for the use of technical instruments
that they would
not perform certain tasks unless the necessary instruments were
at their disposal.”
The French, he went on, were not like that.1
I shall return later to this revisionist debate. Here, suffice to
say: 1) The
Portuguese success was the result of decades of rational
exploration and extension
of navigational possibilities in an ocean (the south Atlantic)
that was hostile to
traditional techniques of navigation, which essentially involved
following the coast-
line. This technological enhancement rested in turn on a
systematic utilization of
astronomical observations and calculations, taken from the
Muslims and transmit-
ted largely by Jewish intermediaries, which allowed the

Portuguese to follow winds
and currents across the south Atlantic, and then use a
knowledge of latitude to
swing back around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean.
2) The Chinese
1 Khan (1998, p. 328, n. 122) notes further that the Arabic
lacked the vocabulary needed to speak of
factory manufacture or machinery. For the latter, Abu Talib
used “wheels and tools.”
4 Journal of Economic Perspectives
abandonment of westward exploration was partly the result of
contingent political
events; but at bottom it reflected the values and structures of
Chinese society and
civilization. 3) European exploitation of the breakthrough rested
on a disparity of
power technology (better powder and better guns) as well as on
navigational
superiority.
The extension of European power into other parts of the world
was the
expression of these and other disparities. Why other regions did
not keep up with
Europe is an important historical question, for one learns almost
as much from
failure as from success. It is not possible in brief compass, of
course, to pose this
question for every non-European society or civilization; but
three do deserve
serious reflection: Islam, China, and India. I shall focus in this

essay on China.
The First Chance: Science without Development
The one civilization that was in a position to match and even
anticipate the
European achievement was China. China had two chances: first,
to generate a
continuing, self-sustaining process of scientific and
technological advance on the
basis of its indigenous traditions and achievements; and second,
to learn from
European science and technology once the foreign “barbarians”
entered the Chi-
nese domain in the sixteenth century. China failed both times.
The first failure has elicited much scholarly inquiry and
analysis. And yet it
remains an abiding mystery. The China specialists tell us, for
example, that in a
number of areas of industrial technique, China long anticipated
Europe: in textiles,
where the Chinese had a power-driven spinning machine in the
thirteenth century,
some 500 years before the England of the Industrial Revolution
knew water frames
and mules; or in iron manufacture, where the Chinese early
learned to use coal and
probably coke (as against charcoal) in blast furnaces for
smelting iron and were
turning out perhaps as many as 125,000 tons of pig iron by the
later eleventh
century—a figure not achieved by Britain until 700 years later
(Elvin, 1973, p. 85).2
In general, one can establish a long list of instances of Chinese

priority: the
wheelbarrow, the stirrup, the rigid horse collar (to prevent
choking), the compass,
paper, printing, gunpowder, porcelain. (But not the horse-shoe,
which implies that
the Chinese did not make use of the horse for transport.)
The mystery lies in the failure of China to realize the potential
of some of the
most important of these inventions. One generally assumes that
knowledge and
know-how are cumulative and that a superior technique, once
known, will domi-
2 Elvin (1973) gives the figure as “between 35,000 to 40,000
tons and 125,000 tons,” but says he prefers
the higher estimate. He relies here on Yoshida Mitsukuni, a
Japanese specialist writing in 1967. Work by
Hartwell (1966, p. 34), also advances the higher figure. In Hall
(1985, p. 46), this becomes “at least
125,000 tons.” In this regard, Elvin (p. 285) quotes a
description by Yen Ju-yu of iron works on the
Hupei/Shensi/Szechwan borders with blast furnaces 18 feet
high, using charcoal and hand-operated
bellows (more than ten persons relaying one another) and
working continuously. The iron was
apparently used for castings, and there is no indication of
further refining as either wrought iron or
steel.
David S. Landes 5
nate older methods and remain in use. But Chinese industrial
history offers a

number of examples of technological regression and oblivion.
The machine to spin
hemp was never adapted to the manufacture of cotton; cotton
spinning was never
mechanized; and coal/coke smelting was allowed to fall into
disuse, along with the
iron industry. Why, asks Elvin (1973, pp. 297–298)?
It would seem that none of the conventional explanations tells
us in convinc-
ing fashion why technical progress was absent in the Chinese
economy during a
period that was, on the whole, one of prosperity and expansion.
Almost every
element usually regarded by historians as a major contributory
cause to the Indus-
trial Revolution in north-western Europe was also present in
China. There had even
been a revolution in the relations between social classes, at
least in the countryside;
but this had had no important effect on the techniques of
production. Only
Galilean-Newtonian science was missing; but in the short run
this was not impor-
tant. Had the Chinese possessed, or developed, the seventeenth-
century European
mania for tinkering and improving, they could easily have made
an efficient
spinning machine out of the primitive model described by Wang
Chen. A steam
engine would have been more difficult; but it should not have
posed insuperable
difficulties to a people who had been building double-acting
piston flame-throwers
in the Sung dynasty. The crucial point is that nobody tried. In
most fields, agricul-

ture being the chief exception, Chinese technology stopped
progressing well
before the point at which a lack of scientific knowledge had
become a serious
obstacle.
Why indeed? Sinologists have put forward several partial
explanations. Those
that I find most persuasive are the following.
First, China lacked a free market and institutionalized property
rights. The
Chinese state was always stepping in to interfere with private
enterprise—to take
over certain activities, to prohibit and inhibit others, to
manipulate prices, to exact
bribes. At various times the government was motivated by a
desire to reserve labor
to agriculture or to control important resources (salt and iron,
for example); by an
appetite for revenue (the story of the goose that laid the golden
eggs is a leitmotif
of Chinese history); by fear and disapproval of self-enrichment,
except by officials,
giving rise in turn to abundant corruption and rent-seeking; and
by a distaste for
maritime trade, which the Heavenly Kingdom saw as a diversion
from imperial
concerns, as a divisive force and source of income inequality in
the ecumenical
empire, and worse yet, as an invitation to exit. This state
intervention and inter-
ference encountered evasion and resistance; indeed, the very
needs of state com-
pelled a certain tolerance for disobedience. Still, the goal, the
aim, the ideal was the

ineffable stillness of immobility. When in 1368 the new Chinese
emperor inaugu-
rated a native (Ming) dynasty to replace the defeated Mongol
invaders, he as-
cended the throne in Nanjing as the Hongwu (“Vast Martial”)
emperor. Let not the
name deceive the reader: Hongwu’s goal was anything but war.
He wanted rather
to immobilize the realm. People were to stay put and move only
with the permission
of the state—at home and abroad. People who went outside
China without per-
mission were liable to execution on their return. The Ming code
of core laws also
sought to block social mobility, with severe penalties for those
jumping professional
and occupational barriers. In this regard, Timothy Brook (1998,
p. vii) cites in
epigraph one of the Hongwu emperor’s favorite moral dicta:
Let the state be small and the people few;
So that the people . . . fearing death, will be reluctant to move
great
distances
And, even if they have boats and carts, will not use them.
So that the people . . . will find their food sweet and their
clothes
beautiful,
Will be content with where they live and happy in their

customs.
Though adjoining states be within sight of one another and
cocks crow-
ing and dogs barking in one be heard in the next,
Yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having
had any
dealings with those of another.
These matters reached a wretched climax under the Ming
dynasty (1368 –1644),
when the state attempted to prohibit all trade overseas.3 Such
interdictions led of
course to evasion and smuggling, with concomitant corruption
(protection
money), searches for contraband, confiscations and punishment.
All of this neces-
sarily acted to strangle initiative, to increase risk and the cost
of transactions, and
to chase talent from commerce and industry.
A second reason why China did not realize the economic
potential of its
scientific expertise involved the larger values of the society.
The great Hungarian-
German-French sinologist, Etienne Balazs (1968 [1988]; see
also Balazs, 1964), saw
China’s abortive technology as part of a larger pattern of
totalitarian control. He
recognizes the absence of freedom, along with the weight of
custom and consensus
and what passed for higher wisdom. His analysis (pp. 22–23) is
worth repeating:
. . . if one understands by totalitarianism the complete hold of

the State and
its executive organs and functionaries over all the activities of
social life,
without exception, Chinese society was highly totalitarian. . . .
No private
initiative, no expression of public life that can escape official
control. There
is to begin with a whole array of state monopolies, which
comprise the great
consumption staples: salt, iron, tea, alcohol, foreign trade.
There is a monop-
oly of education, jealously guarded. There is practically a
monopoly of letters
(I was about to say, of the press): anything written unofficially,
that escapes
the censorship, has little hope of reaching the public. But the
reach of the
3 The imperial authorities vacillated in their attitude to foreign
trade, now favoring it, now clamping
down; and these tergiversations were in themselves a deterrent
to stable enterprise and capital accu-
mulation. In addition, even when the state relented, it did so in
circumstances that pushed the traders
into illicit operations. Thus, the early Mongol (Yuan) dynasty
(1280 –1368) allowed freedom of enter-
prise, but then succumbed to the temptation of instituting a
licensing system. This enabled officials to
play the role of capitalist, financing venturers and dividing
profits 70-30: 70 for the official, 30 for the
working trader. That was greedy, compared to the typical
European 50-50 split. The traders presumably
sought to conceal gains, but in the long run, trade had to suffer.
Why Europe and the West? Why Not China? 7

Moloch-State, the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, goes much
farther. There
are clothing regulations, a regulation of public and private
construction
(dimensions of houses); the colors one wears, the music one
hears, the
festivals—all are regulated. There are rules for birth and rules
for death; the
providential State watches minutely over every step of its
subjects, from cradle
to grave. It is a regime of paper work and harassment, endless
paper work and
endless harassment.
The ingenuity and inventiveness of the Chinese, which have
given so
much to mankind—silk, tea, porcelain, paper, printing, and
more—would no
doubt have enriched China further and probably brought it to
the threshold
of modern industry, had it not been for this stifling state
control. It is the State
that kills technological progress in China. Not only in the sense
that it nips in
the bud anything that goes against or seems to go against its
interests, but also
by the customs implanted inexorably by the raison d’Etat. The
atmosphere of
routine, of traditionalism, and of immobility, which makes any
innovation
suspect, any initiative that is not commanded and sanctioned in
advance, is
unfavorable to the spirit of free inquiry.

In short, to go back to Elvin (1973), the reason the Chinese did
not develop
based on their scientific knowledge is that no one was trying.
Why try? Especially
since the Chinese were not without their own quiet resources to
thwart bureaucratic
interferences and frustrations—reliance on personal and familial
collaboration, for
example, in place of arbitrary or institutional practice in
business. In such matters,
personal trust could yield more dependable performance than
legal rules.
In all this, the contrast with Europe was marked. Where
fragmentation and
national rivalries compelled European rulers to pay heed to their
subjects, to
recognize their rights and cultivate the sources of wealth, the
rulers of China had
a free hand. Again Elvin (1973, pp. 224 –225) captures some of
this:
. . . it was the great size of the Chinese Empire which made the
adoption of
the policies of the Ming emperors possible. In a Chinese
subcontinent made
up of smaller independent states, like those of the Five
Dynasties [907-960
C.E.] or the Ten Kingdoms, no government could have afforded
to close itself
off. International economic interdependence (as that between
regions would
have become) would have removed this option; and the need for
diplomatic
and military alliances, and revenue from foreign trade, would
have made

isolationism undesirable. With smaller states, there might also
have been, as
there was in north-western Europe in early modern times, a
closer conscious
identification of the governed with their countries and rulers.
Prior to mod-
ern communications, the immensity of the empire precluded
nationalism.
Whatever the mix of factors, the result seems to have been a
curious pattern of
isolated initiatives and sisyphean discontinuities— up, up, up
and then down
again—almost as though the society were constrained by a
homeostatic braking
mechanism or held down by a silk ceiling. The result, if not the
aim, was a kind of
change-in-immobility; or maybe immobility-in-change.
Innovation was allowed to
go (was able to go) so far and no farther.4
The Europeans knew much less of these interferences. Instead,
they entered
during these centuries into an exciting world of innovation and
emulation that
challenged and tempted vested interests and kept the forces of
conservatism
scrambling. Changes were cumulative, news of novelty spread
fast and a new sense
of progress and achievement replaced an older, effete reverence
for authority. This

intoxicating sense of freedom touched (infected) all domains.
These were years of
heresies in the church, of popular initiatives that, we can see
now, anticipated the
rupture of the Reformation; of new forms of expression and
collective action that
challenged the older organization of society and posed a threat
to other polities; of
new ways of doing and making things that made newness a
virtue and a source of
delight.
Important in all this was the role of the Christian church in
Europe as
custodian of knowledge and school for technicians. One might
have expected
otherwise: that organized spirituality, with its emphasis on
prayer and contempla-
tion, would have had little interest in technology; and that with
its view of labor as
penalty for original sin, it would have had no concern to save
labor. And yet
everything seems to have worked in the opposite direction: The
desire to free
clerics from time-consuming earthly tasks led to the
introduction and diffusion of
power machinery and, beginning with the Cistercians in the
twelfth century, to the
hiring of lay brothers (conversi) to do the dirty work, which led
in turn to an
awareness of and attention to time and productivity. All of this
gave rise on
monastic estates to remarkable assemblages of powered
machinery— complex se-
quences designed to make the most of the water power available
and distribute it

through a series of industrial operations. A description of the
abbey of Clairvaux in
the mid-twelfth century (cited in White, 1978, p. 245–246)
exults in this versatility:
“coquendis, cribrandis, vertendis, terendis, rigandis, lavandis,
molendis, molliendis, suum
sine contradictione praestans obsequium.” The author, clearly
proud of these achieve-
ments, further tells his readers that he will take the liberty of
joking (the medieval
clerical equivalent of, “if you’ll pardon the expression”): the
fulling hammers, he
says, seem to have dispensed the fullers of the penalty for their
sins; and he thanks
God that such devices can mitigate the oppressive labor of men
and spare the backs
of their horses.
Why this peculiarly European joy in discovery? This pleasure in
the new and
better? This cultivation of invention— or what some have called
“the invention of
invention”? Different scholars have suggested a variety of
reasons, typically related
to religious values. One possible reason grows from the Judaeo-
Christian respect for
manual labor, summed up in a number of biblical injunctions.
One example will
suffice: when God warns Noah of the coming flood and tells
him he will be saved,
it is not God who saves him. “Build thee an ark of gopher
wood,” says the Lord, and
4 For example, Max Weber (1922 [1951], as cited in Hall, 1985,
p. 41) argued that the administrative
bureaucracy was undermanned, so that government came to

know and respond to changes only after
they had gotten under way. Hence a pattern of “intermittent and
jerky” homeostatic interventions.
David S. Landes 9
Noah builds an ark to divine specifications. A second and
related reason is the
Judaeo-Christian subordination of nature to man. This belief is
a sharp departure
from widespread animistic beliefs and practices that saw
something of the divine in
every tree and stream (hence the naiads and dryads). Ecologists
today might say
these animistic beliefs were preferable to what was put in their
place, but no one
was listening to pagan nature-worshipers in Christian Europe. A
third reason stems
from the Judaeo-Christian sense of linear time. Other societies
thought of time as
cyclical, returning to earlier stages and starting over again.
Linear time can be
thought of as progressive or regressive, as moving on to better
things or declining
from some earlier, happier state. For Europeans in our period,
the progressive view
prevailed.
In the last analysis, however, I would stress the role of the
market: the fact that
enterprise was free in Europe, that innovation worked and paid,
that rulers and
vested interests were narrowly constrained in what they could
do to prevent or

discourage innovation. Success bred imitation and emulation;
also a sense of power
that would in the long run raise men almost to the level of gods.
The old legends
remained—the expulsion from the Garden, Icarus who flew too
high, Prometheus
in chains—to warn against hubris. The very notion of hubris—
cosmic insolence—is
testimony to some men’s pretensions and the efforts of others to
curb them. But the
doers were not paying attention.
The Second Chance: Learning from the Barbarians
At the time the first Europeans arrived in the Indian Ocean and
made their
way to China, the Celestial Empire as it was called was, at least
in its own eyes, the
premier political entity in the world—first in size and
population, first in age and
experience, untouchable in its cultural achievement, apparently
imperturbable in
its sense of moral and spiritual superiority.5 The Chinese lived,
as they thought, at
the center of the universe; around them, lesser breeds basked in
their glow,
reached out to them for light, gained stature by doing obeisance
and offering
tribute. Their emperor was the “Son of Heaven,” the unique,
godlike representative
of celestial power. Those few who entered his presence showed
their awe by
kowtowing— kneeling and touching their head nine times to the
ground; others
kowtowed to anything emanating from him—a letter, a single
handwritten ideo-

graph. The paper he wrote on, the clothes he wore, everything
he touched partook
of his divine essence. Western diplomats allowed the Chinese to
compel them to
these gestures, which they “considered an essential part of a
tributary system of
foreign relations” (Spence, 1998, p. 42). By doing this, “the
Westerners were
5 These Portuguese sailors of the sixteenth century were of
course not the first Europeans to make their
way to China. The best known of the earlier visitors is Marco
Polo, who came in the thirteenth century
from Venice, then the richest city in Europe, yet thought it a
small town by comparison with what he saw
in Cathay.
unwittingly shoring up the Qing court’s views of China’s
superiority” (Spence citing
Wills, 1984).
Those who represented the emperor and administered for him
were chosen
on the basis of competitive examinations in Confucian letters
and morals. These
mandarin officials were in effect the embodiment of the higher
Chinese culture,
invested with its prestige, imbued with its wholeness and
sublime superiority. Their
self-esteem and haughtiness had ample room for expression and
exercise on their
inferiors and were matched only by their “stunned

submissiveness” and self-
abasement to superiors (Welsh, 1993, p. 16, who in this case
quotes without
reference). Nothing conveyed so well their rivalry in humility
than the morning
audience, when hundreds of courtiers gathered from midnight
on and stood about
in the open air, in rain and cold and fair, to wait for the
emperor’s arrival and
perform their obeisance. They were not wasting time; their time
was the emperor’s.
They could not afford to be late, and punctuality was not
enough: unpunctual
earliness was proof of zeal (Landes, 1983; see also Huang,
1981).
Such cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward
tyranny made
China a singularly bad learner. What was there to learn? This
rejection of the
strange and foreign was the more anxious for the very force of
the arrogance that
justified it. For that is the paradox of the superiority complex: it
is an expression of
insecurity. It is intrinsically brittle; those who nourish it, need
it, and depend on it
are also those who fear nothing so much as contradiction. The
French today are so
persuaded of the superiority of their language that they dither
and tremble at the
prospect of a borrowed word, especially if it comes from
English. The same holds
for Ming China: they were so convinced of their ascendancy
that they quaked
before the challenge of Western technology, which was there for
the learning.

The irony is that those first Portuguese visitors and Catholic
missionaries used
the wonders of western technology to charm their way into
China. The mechanical
clock was the key that unlocked the gates. The mechanical clock
was a European
mega-invention of the late thirteenth century, crucial not only
for its contribution
to temporal discipline and productivity, but its susceptibility of
improvement and its
role at the frontier of instrumentation and mechanical technique.
The water clock
is a dunce by comparison. For the Chinese in the sixteenth
century, the mechanical
clock came as a wondrous machine capable not only of keeping
time but of
amusing and entertaining. Some clocks played music; others
were automata with
figurines that moved rhythmically at intervals. Clocks, then,
were the sort of thing
that the emperor would want to see, that had to be shown him if
only to earn his
favor, that a zealous courtier had to show him before someone
else did. But that was
not so easy. This magical device had to be accompanied. Where
all Chinese
instincts and practice dictated that foreigners should be kept at
a distance, confined
to some peripheral point like Macao and allowed to proceed to
the center only by
exception, the clock, in its sixteenth-century avatar, needed its
attendant clock-
maker and keepers.
The Chinese loved clocks and watches. They were less happy,

though, with
their European attendants. The problem here was the Chinese
sense of the whole-
ness of culture, the link between things, people and the divine.
The Catholic priests
who first brought them these wonderful machines were salesmen
of a special kind.
They sought to convert the Chinese to the one true God, the
trinitarian God of the
Roman church, and the clocks were not only an entry ticket but
an argument for
the superiority of the Christian religion. Were not those who
could make these
things, who possessed all kinds of special astronomical and
geographical knowledge
to the bargain, were they not superior in the largest moral
sense? Was not their faith
truer, wiser? The Jesuits were prepared to make such an
argument, stretching the
while the rules and rites of the Church to fit the premises and
win the sympathy of
an understandably skeptical Chinese elite. (The Chinese
ideographs for ancestor
worship, for example, became the signifiers for the Christian
mass.) But European
laymen made the argument as well. Here is Gottfried Wilhelm
von Leibniz (1646 –
1716), mathematician (coinventor of the calculus) and
philosopher (as quoted in
Landes, 1983, p. 45, from a letter written circa 1675):

What will these peoples say [the Persians, the Chinese], when
they see this
marvelous machine that you have made, which represents the
true state of the
heavens at any given time? I believe that they will recognize
that the mind of
man has something of the divine, and that this divinity
communicates itself
especially to Christians. The secret of the heavens, the greatness
of the earth,
and time measurement are the sort of thing I mean.
This argument, whether explicit or implicit, did carry
occasionally. The Cath-
olic missionaries had some small success, although they had
trouble persuading
their open-minded “converts” to be good exclusivists (no other
faith but the “true”
faith) in the European tradition. But most Chinese saw these
pretensions for what
they were: an attack on Chinese claims to moral superiority, an
assault on China’s
self-esteem.
The response, then, had to be a repudiation or depreciation of
Western
science and technology (Cipolla, 1967; Landes, 1983, chapter
2). Here is the K’ang
Hsi emperor, the most open-minded and curious of men in his
pursuit of Western
ways, the most zealous in teaching them (as translated by
Spence, 1974, p. 74):
“[E]ven though some of the Western methods are different from
our own, and may
even be an improvement, there is little about them that is new.
The principles of

mathematics all derive from the Book of Changes, and the
Western methods are
Chinese in origin . . .”
That was the heart-warming myth. So the Chinese, who were not
prepared to
give up clocks, who wanted clocks, who recognized their
Western origin—these
same Chinese trivialized clocks as toys (which for many they
were) or as nonfunc-
tional symbols of status, unaffordable by or inaccessible to
most. Premodern
imperial China did not think of time knowledge as a personal
right. The hour was
sounded by the authorities, and the right to own a timepiece was
a rare privilege.
As a result, although the imperial court set up workshops to
make clocks and got
their Jesuit clockmakers to train some native talent, these
Chinese makers never
arrived at the level of Western horologists—for want of the best
teachers and lack
of commercial competition and emulation. Nor did imperial
China ever develop a
clockmaking trade comparable to that found in European
countries. The same sin
of pride (or indifference) shaped the Chinese response to
European armament.
Here was something that was anything but a toy. Cannons and
muskets were
instruments of death, hence of power, and the Chinese had every

reason to interest
themselves in these artifacts, the more so as the seventeenth
century saw the
progressive dissolution of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of
China by a Tartar
people from the north. These were decades of war, and the
balance of power might
well be tilted by access to these European inventions.
Yet the Chinese never learned to make modern guns. Worse yet,
they had
known and used cannon as early as the thirteenth century but
had forgotten much
of what they had once known. Their city walls and gates had
emplacements for
cannon, but no cannon. Who needed them? The enemies of
China did not have
them. Yet China did have enemies, without and within, and no
European nation
would have been deterred from armament by enemy weakness;
when it came to
death, as in so many other things, the Europeans were
maximizers. European
technology was also monotonic-increasing: each gain was the
basis for further gain.
The Chinese record of advance followed by regression, step-
forward, step-back,
signaled an entirely different process. The Chinese, we are told,
had a proverb: He
who does not go forward will go backward (Peyrefitte, 1992, p.
157). The saying was
apparently as much observation as prescription.6
So it was that in the seventeenth century, when the Portuguese
in Macao
offered three cannon to the emperor by way of gaining favor,

they had to send
three cannoneers along with them. Similarly, the Chinese hired
on occasion
Portuguese musketeers to do some fighting for them, and they
got their Jesuit
theologian-mechanicians to make them cannon. These cannon
seem to have been
among the best the Chinese had, so good compared to the run-
of-the-foundry
product that some were still in use in the nineteenth century,
some 250 years later.
If most Chinese guns did not last that long, it was because they
were notoriously
unreliable, more dangerous to the men who fired them than to
the enemy. We even
have one report of the use of clumps of dried mud as
cannonballs. These at least
had the merit of allowing the force of the explosion to exit by
the mouth of the
tube. In general, the authorities frowned on firearms, perhaps
because they
doubted the loyalty of their subjects (Cipolla, 1966, especially
pp. 116 –119).7 In
view of the inefficacy of these pieces, one wonders what they
had to fear. Presum-
ably the improvement that comes with use.
All of this may seem irrational to a means-ends oriented person,
but it was not
quite that; the ends were different. The European may have
thought that the
6 Students of the history of Chinese technology and science,
most notably Joseph Needham and his
team, have made much of Chinese priority in discovery and
invention, pushing the origins of important

techniques and devices far back, well before their appearance in
Europe. They see this quite properly
as a sign of exceptional creativity and precocity, as discussed
earlier in this paper, but they would do well
then to ask why the subsequent retreat and loss.
7 Cipolla (1966) is not a sinologist and had to rely exclusively
on European sources, including the
testimony of Christian missionaries and travelers, but his
“global vision” gives him crucial insights that
are missing in the specialist literature. Guns, Sails, and Empires
is a remarkable book.
David S. Landes 13
purpose of war was to kill the enemy and win; the Chinese,
strong in space and
numbers, thought otherwise. Here is Mu Fu-sheng (1963, pp. 76
–77, a pseudonym
cited in Cipolla, 1966, p. 120) on the imperial viewpoint:
. . . military defeat was the technical reason why Western
knowledge should be
acquired, but it was also the psychological reason why it should
not be.
Instinctively the Chinese preferred admitting military defeat,
which could be
reversed, to entering a psychological crisis; people could stand
humiliation
but not self-debasement . . . . The mandarins sensed the threat
to Chinese
civilization irrespective of the economic and political issues,
and they tried to
resist this threat without regard to the economic and political
dangers. In the

past the Chinese had never had to give up their cultural pride:
the foreign
rulers always adopted the Chinese civilization. Hence there was
nothing in
their history to guide them through their modern crisis.
Along with Chinese indifference to technology went
imperviousness to European
science. The same conditions applied. The Jesuits and other
Christian clerics
brought in not only clocks but (sometimes obsolete) knowledge
and ideas. Some of
this was of interest to the court: in particular, astronomy and
techniques of celestial
observation were extremely valuable to a ruler who claimed a
monopoly of the
calendar and used his mastery of time to impose on the society
as a whole. The
Jesuits, moreover, trained gifted Chinese students who went on
to do their own
work: mathematicians who learned to use logarithms and
trigonometry and astron-
omers who prepared new star tables.
Little of this got beyond Peking, however, and the pride some
took in the new
learning was soon countered by a nativist reaction that reached
back to long-
forgotten work of earlier periods. One leader of this return to
the sources, Wen-
Ting (1635–1721), examined the texts of mathematicians who
had worked under
the Song dynasty (10th–13th centuries) and proclaimed that the
Jesuits had not
brought much in the way of innovation. Later on, his
manuscripts were published

by his grandson under the title “Pearls Recovered from the Red
River” (as discussed
in Taton, 1963–1966, volume 2, p. 592). The title was more
eloquent than intended:
by this time much of Chinese scientific “inquiry” took the form
of raking alluvial
sediment.
Meanwhile European science marched ahead, and successive
churchmen
brought to China better knowledge than their predecessors
(though still well
behind the frontier). Here, however, the churchmen were
thwarted by the con-
straints of their mission. The Christian missionaries had laid so
much stress on the
link between scientific knowledge and religious truth that any
revision of the
former implied a repudiation of the latter. When in 1710 a
Jesuit astronomer
sought to use new planetary tables based on the Copernican
system, his superior
would not permit it, for fear of “giving the impression of a
censure on what our
predecessors had so much trouble to establish and occasioning
new accusations
against [the Christian] religion” (Taton, 1963–1966, volume 2,
p. 590).
To recall these many instances of intellectual xenophobia is not
to imply that

all Chinese were hostile to European ideas. We know that a few
far-sighted officials
and at least one emperor understood that the empire had much
to gain by learning
new ways.8 They were thwarted, however, not only by the
studied complacency of an
insecure superiority—also by a sense of completeness9— but by
the intrigue of a
palace milieu where innovations were judged by their
consequences for the balance
of power and influence. No proposals were made that did not
incite resistance; no
novelties offered that did not frighten vested interests. At all
levels, moreover, fear
of reprimand (or worse) outweighed the prospect of reward. A
good idea brought
credit to one’s superior; a mistake was invariably the fault of
subordinates.
One consequence was a prudent, almost instinctive, resistance
to change. This
is the heart of the matter: the response to difference and change.
The Jesuit
missionary Louis Le Comte (1655–1728) deplored this
conservatism (as quoted in
Cipolla, 1966, p. 120): “They are more fond of the most
defective piece of antiquity
than of the most perfect of the modern, differing much in that
from us [Europe-
ans], who are in love with nothing but what is new.” George
Staunton, secretary to
what is called the Macartney embassy from Great Britain to
China from 1792 to
1794, disheartened by Chinese indifference to suggestions for
improvement of
their canals, lamented (Macartney, 1804, volume 6, p. 6), “In

this country they
think that everything is excellent and that proposals for
improvement would be
superfluous if not blameworthy.” A half-century later a
Christian friar, Evariste Huc
(1844 –1846, volume 6, p. 81), discouraged perhaps by the
sisyphean task of
missionizing, despairingly observed: “Any man of genius is
paralyzed immediately
by the thought that his efforts will win him punishment rather
than rewards.”
Another consequence was a plague of lies and misinformation:
officials wrote
and told their superiors what they wanted to hear; or what the
subordinate thought
the superior would want to hear.10 The smothering of incentive
and the cultivation
of mendacity are characteristic weaknesses of large
bureaucracies, whether public
or private (business corporations). These are composed of
nominal colleagues,
who are supposedly pulling together but in fact are adversarial
players. What is
more, they compete within the organization, not in a free market
of ideas, but in
a closed world of guile and maneuver. Here the advantage lies
with those in place.
Reformers and subversives beware.
The rejection of foreign technology was the more serious
because China itself
had long slipped into a regime of technological and scientific
inertia, coasting
along on the strength of previous gains and slowly losing speed
as a result of the

8 The curse of foreignness remained though. In a letter of
November 1640, the Jesuit von Bell wrote:
“The word hsi [Western] is very unpopular, and the Emperor in
his edicts never uses any word than hsin
[new]; in fact the former word in used only by those who want
to belittle us” (Taton, 1963–1966,
volume 2, p. 589, n. 1).
9 For a discussion in this spirit, see Crone (1989, pp. 172–173):
“China is a star example of a successful
civilization. . . . China reached the pinnacle of economic
development possible under pre-industrial
conditions and stopped: no forces pushing it in a different
direction are in evidence. . . .”
10 This is one of the major contributions of Peyrefitte’s (1992)
book. Because he gained access to the
Chinese archives, including papers read and annotated by the
emperor, Peyrefitte is able to show the
inner workings of bureaucratic equivocation and offer a
valuable case study.
inevitable frictions of vested interest and diversion of talent and
wealth into the
comfort and gratification of gentility. It has been argued that
such retirements from
the fray should not deter ambitious newcomers; on the contrary,
the prospect of
happy exits should encourage entry, and departures should make
room for others.
But in most aristocratic societies, the availability of more
esteemed careers seems to
divert talent from commerce and industry by offering short cuts

to high status. The
withdrawal of successful merchants into land and office is seen
as a logical promo-
tion, a legitimate escape. In such circumstances, the presence of
groups precluded
by birth (thus merchants in Tokugawa Japan) or belief
(Protestant dissenters in
England) from access to office and honors—the existence, in
other words, of a
reserved pool of talent—may paradoxically be a strong
contribution to otherwise
inhibited economic development.
Why Did China “Fail”?
One of the great mysteries of Chinese history is why China did
not produce
from within the kind of scientific and industrial revolutions that
gave Europe world
dominion. A thousand years ago, the Chinese were well ahead
of anyone else and
certainly of Europe. Some would argue that this superiority held
for centuries
thereafter. Why, then, did China “fail”?
Some China scholars would mitigate the pain by euphemism, as
in Fairbank
and Reischauer (1960, p. 291, cited in Oshima, 1987, p. 34):
“Chinese society,
though stable, was far from static and unchanging . . . the pace
was slower . . . the
degree of change less . . .”11 (True, but the issue remains.)
Others would dismiss
the question as unanswerable or illegitimate. Unanswerable
because it is said to be
impossible to explain a negative. (This is certainly not true in

logic; the explanation
of large-scale failure and success is inevitably complicated, but
that is what history
is all about.) Illegitimate because where is the failure? The very
use of the word
imposes non-Chinese standards and expectations on China. (But
why not? Why
should one not expect China to be interested in economic
growth and develop-
ment? To be curious about nature and want to understand it? To
want to do more
work with less labor? The earlier successes of China in these
respects make these
questions the more pertinent and acute.)
What about the relations between science and technology? Did
the one matter
to the other? After all, science was not initially a major
contributor to the European
Industrial Revolution, which was built largely on empirical
technological advances
by practitioners. What difference, then, to Chinese practitioner
technology if
science had slowed to a crawl by the seventeenth century?
The answer, I think, is that in both China and Europe, science
and technology
were (and are) two sides of the same coin, two manifestations of
a common
11 Indeed, Fairbank and Reischauer (1960) suggest that the
reason for Chinese “stability” was “the very
perfection that Chinese culture and social organization had
achieved by the thirteenth century.” The
contrast with Europe, roiling with imperfection, could not be
sharper.

approach to problems and experience. The response to new
knowledge of either
kind is of a piece, and the society that closes its eyes to novelty
from one source has
already been closing them to novelty from the other.
In addition, China lacked the institutions that made for a
cumulative process
of finding and learning: the schools, the academies, the learned
societies, the
challenges and competitions. The sense of give-and-take, of
standing on the shoul-
ders of giants, of collective as well as individual achievement,
of an inherited but
ever imperfect treasure, of progress—all of these were weak or
absent in China.
And this is another paradox. On the one hand, the Chinese
formally worshiped
their intellectual ancestors; in 1734 an Imperial decree required
court physicians to
make ritual sacrifices to their departed predecessors (Taton,
1963–1966, volume 2,
p. 590). On the other, the Chinese showed a deplorable tendency
to let the findings
of each new generation slip into oblivion, to be recovered
perhaps at a later date
by antiquarian and archaeological research.12
The history of Chinese advances, then, is one of points of light,
separated in
space and time, unlinked by replication and testing, obfuscated

by metaphor and
pseudo-profundity, limited in diffusion (with no technology for
diffusion compa-
rable to European printing)—in effect, a succession of
ephemera. Much of the
technical vocabulary was invented for the occasion and fell as
swiftly into disuse; so
that later scholars spent much of their effort trying to decipher
these otherwise
familiar ideograms. Much thought remained mired in
metaphysical skepticism and
speculation. Here Confucianism, with its easy disdain for
scientific research, which
it disparaged as “interventionist” and superficial, contributed its
discouraging word.
A poem written in the early nineteenth century by the son of the
then–prime
minister, himself a high state dignitary, warned (as quoted in
Taton, 1963–1966,
volume 2, p. 593): “With the microscope you see the surface of
things. . . . But do
not suppose you are seeing the things in themselves.”13
The effect was discredit or indifference to science and
technology, the greater
for the want of mutual verification and support. This want of
continuing intellec-
tual exchange and reinforcement, this subjectivity, is what more
than anything
explains the uncertainty of scientific gains and the easy loss of
impetus. Chinese
savants had no way of knowing when they were right. It is
subsequent research,
mostly Western, that has discovered and awarded palms of
achievement to the more
inspired.

Small wonder that China reacted so unfavorably to European
imports. Euro-
pean knowledge was not only strange and implicitly belittling.
In its ebullience and
excitement, its urgency and competitiveness, its brutal
commitment to truth and
efficacy (Jesuits excepted), it went against the Chinese mindset.
12 This ongoing slippage happened in spite of considerable
effort to collect knowledge and present it in
encyclopedias. One such project, really a kind of anthology,
may well have been the biggest project of
its kind ever attempted: 800,000 pages (Spence, 1990, p. 86).
But a plethora of encyclopedias is a bad
sign: like still photographs, they are an effort to fix knowledge
at a point of time. They are useful as
reference works, especially for historians, but they can impede
free inquiry.
13 Of course, when the time came, one could find support in
Confucianism for other positions. That is
the nature of sacred writ: one can quote it to one’s purpose.
David S. Landes 17
So the years passed, and the decades, and the centuries. China
saw Europe
leave it far behind. At first China was unbelieving and
contemptuous. Later it
became increasingly anxious and frustrated. From asking and
begging, the West-
erners became insistent and impatient. The British sent two
embassies to China
seeking improved trade relations: one headed by George

Macartney in 1792 and a
second headed by William Pitt Amherst in 1816. An underlying
difficulty was that
the Chinese were happy to sell to the British, but it was very
difficult for the British
to sell to the Chinese, except for silver and opium. After a
series of diplomatic and
trade confrontations, the First Opium War started in 1839. The
British victory in
that war resulted in the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which
opened up Chinese ports
to British ships, reduced Chinese tariffs on British goods, and
ceded Hong Kong to
the British.
“There is Nothing We Lack”
Now England is paying homage.
My Ancestors’ merit and virtue must have reached their distant
shores.
Though their tribute is commonplace, my heart approves
sincerely.
Curios and the boasted ingenuity of their devices I prize not.
Though what they bring is meager, yet,
In my kindness to men from afar I make generous return,
Wanting to preserve my good health and power.
Poem by the Qienlong Emperor on the occasion of the
Macartney
embassy (1793)
The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war,
which a
fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived
to keep
afloat these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe

their
neighbours by her bulk and appearance, but whenever an
insufficient
man happens to have the command upon deck, adieu to the
discipline
and safety of the ship. She may perhaps not sink outright; she
may drift
some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the
shore; but
she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom.
George, Lord Macartney to his journal (cited in Welsh, 1993, p.
33)
The Chinese policy of superior indifference to Western things
has been
traditionally summed up in the dismissive letter of the Qienlong
emperor (reigned
1736 –1795) to George III, rejecting the British request of 1793
for trading rights
and a permanent legation in Peking: “We have never set much
store on strange and
ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s
manufactures.” So
much for scientific instruments and technological devices. That
is what I would call
potent prose. It was by no means the only such contemptuous
dismissal or trivial-
ization of foreign art and artifacts during these centuries of
active contact (1550 –
1900). Thus, the Qienlong Emperor’s successor, receiving and

dismissing Macart-
ney’s successor Lord Amherst in 1816, told him in effect to get
lost: “My dynasty
attaches no value to products from abroad; your nation’s
cunningly wrought and
strange wares do not appeal to me in the least” (as quoted in
Sahlins, 1988,
pp. 10 –11). These explicit expressions of contempt, coming as
they did from the
emperor himself, leave little room for extenuation. The
historian, even the apol-
ogist, must deal with them—as the British had to. (They came
back in 1839 with
gunboats.)
Yet the argument has now been put forward that these back-of-
the-hand
dismissals were not a rejection of Western knowledge, but
rather messages for
internal consumption. The Manchu dynasty then ruling China
was foreign, its
legitimacy open to question. It could not afford to nourish its
enemies by admitting
to a lack of autonomy, an inferiority to other outsiders. (This
very fear of yielding—
the definition of learning as weakness!—is testimony in my
opinion to cultural
defensiveness and introversion.) In fact, this thesis continues,
the Chinese were very
much interested in Western techniques and artifacts, especially
in the military
realm. What they did not want to import was European
ideologies; and these two,
technology and ideology, were closely linked. It was the
Christian missionaries who
had done that, using, as we have seen, European knowledge and

devices to suggest
the superiority of European religion (Waley-Cohen, 1993). But
this argument is not
sustained by the facts nor is it persuasive in logic.
As to the facts: the Chinese long preceded the Europeans in the
use of
explosive powder, whether for display (fireworks) or use in
weapons. Yet a study of
their armament reveals a singular inability to enhance, by
implication an indiffer-
ence to, the destructive capacity of their bombards and cannon,
to the point where
they wreaked more fright than damage. Their very names bore
witness to their
inefficacy: thus we have the “nine-arrows, heart-penetrating,
magically poisonous
fire-thunderer,” a tube designed to blow a cluster of arrows in
the direction of the
enemy. Joseph Needham (1979) recognizes that these could not
have gone very far,
“since the gunpowder was not exerting its full propellant force.”
But he conjectures
that they might have some effect in close combat against lightly
armored or
unshielded personnel. Or the “eight-sided magical, awe-
inspiring wind-and-fire
cannon,” a vase-shaped bombard used to blow rubble and
rubbish. Too bad those
opposing these devices could not be told of their potent,
magical, awe-inspiring
names; they might have surrendered on the spot.14
Nor can one demonstrate a sustained and effective interest in
European
military technology by pointing to occasional instances of

recourse to advice and
14 The Chinese use of hyperbole in describing weaponry seems
to be a convention, and historians would
be well advised to contain their credulity. We have an account
of firearms and explosives in the later
Ming period that speaks of cannon that “when they strike a city
wall can reduce it instantly to rubble”;
and of bombards whose sighting devices are so accurate that one
“might pick off a general or remove
a prince,” as quoted in Elvin (1973, p. 94). For critical
comments on the value of this weaponry, see Sivin
(1978, p. 468). Elvin in fact is reasonably skeptical, if only
because he wants to know why the Chinese
started so fast and then slowed down.
technique from Jesuit missionaries. These good clerics were
ready, in the cause of
propagation of the faith (O Lord, what great things are done in
thy name!), to
teach the Chinese how to make and aim cannon. Adam Schall
did this for the
failing Ming dynasty, producing over 500 pieces of light
artillery; and his successor
Ferdinand Verbiest made another 500 over a period of 15 years
(so two or three a
month) for the Manchus. This small output—all the smaller
because these guns
had a deplorable tendency to blow up—found use on and off,
remaining “an
important part of the imperial arsenal until the end of the [Qing]
dynasty” in the

twentieth century. Similarly, we are told, a work on gunnery
written by Schall in
collaboration with a Chinese colleague and published in 1643
was revived and
reprinted in 1841 at the time of the Opium War (Waley-Cohen,
1993, pp. 1521–
1532).
Yet such longevity bespeaks a scarcely changing technology.
What we have, in
other words, is an accomplishment here, an event there, the
import of a piece of
knowledge and its sterilization. The contrast with the
systematic, tireless pursuit of
improved gun manufacture and gunnery in Europe, which
enlisted the efforts of
military and scientists, underlines not simply the backwardness
of Chinese technol-
ogy but, more important, the fundamental difference in attitude
and approach.15
What is more, the Chinese interest in European weaponry says
little about a wider
intellectual curiosity. It is a commonplace of the history of
technological diffusion
that the one thing that excites every ruler is the art of war. The
Ottoman Turks
learned little from the West other than the making of heavy
cannon, and even there
they continued to depend on European technicians. The Chinese,
in seeking to
make and use lighter artillery pieces, did better, but only
because they borrowed
later, when Europe had moved on from that technology.
Imitation of Western
clocks showed a similar pattern: China copied objects at or near

the prevailing
frontier, but did not adapt or improve.
As to logic: to see this kind of partial, episodic, intermittent
appropriation,
generally of knowledge and technique already obsolete in
Europe, as evidence of
an effective and continuing Chinese interest in science and
technology is to be
guilty of the fallacy of misplaced discreteness—to take points
for a line. It may be
important for reasons of self-awareness to chide European
observers of the period
for the complacency and sense of superiority they derived from
their scientific and
technological dominance. But it does not change the fact of
dominance nor the
high cost of Chinese self-sufficiency. If one is to feel superior,
better to be superior;
or better yet, to recognize the concurrent superiority of others.
The result of this line of thought is historiography handicapped
by an ideo-
logical agenda. It tells the story that in the late eighteenth
century, well before the
Western incursion brought a new immediacy to the need for
military reform, the
Chinese were interested in technological advances and in what
the West had to
15 This improvement touched both the production of cannon
(boring machine of Jean de Maritz) and
the techniques of targeting and aiming. Leonhard Euler, a
marvel of mathematical versatility, also
played a key role in the measurement of longitude by lunar
distances. On the advances in artillery, see

Steele (1994).
offer. The evidence was readily available to Europeans who
chose to grasp it. Yet in
public the Chinese denied such an interest, primarily for reasons
of domestic
politics. Europeans, similarly influenced by developments at
home, took that denial
as evidence of an entire mental attitude: ingrained xenophobia
and a concomitant
resistance to progress. In the Age of Progress, such an attitude
led automatically to
the assumption that the Chinese were inferior beings (Waley-
Cohen, 1993,
pp. 1543–1544).
We know better today than to entertain such an assumption.
Even so, the fact
that Western Europe caught up with and passed China, leaving
it far behind, has
distressed numbers of Asia specialists. These have sought to
exonerate China of the
sin of failure either by blaming Europe (the crimes of
imperialism) or by denying
(delaying) the alleged Chinese shortfall, while stressing the
many technological
and scientific contributions of Asia to European civilization.
Among the most vocal
and influential of this sinophilic school: Janet Abu-Lughod
(1989), André Gunder
Frank (1998), Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) and John Hobson
(2004). Against these,

I would recommend a reading of the more realistic work of Joel
Mokyr and Ricardo
Duchesne (2006).
It is all well and good to point to the sin of Western pride, but
not by inventing or
avoiding reality. On the one hand, the Europeans could and did
on occasion succumb
to the temptations of arrogance; and then to their cost. In
matters of science, for
example, the French were particularly sensitive in their self-
esteem and still are.16 On
balance, however, European opinion tended to rest on
performance and achievement.
European scientists rarely refused to learn or copy, and they
were only too ready to
revise their judgment when presented with the facts. (Scientists
could also be fero-
ciously dismissive, however, in disputes over priority.) The
same for European travelers
confronted with foreign achievement. To be sure, European
judgments were based too
much perhaps on their infatuation with material knowledge and
achievement; hence
the tendency to measure men by their ability to use and make
machines. But of course,
that is the kind of measure economists still use when we rank
countries by product and
income per head. China could have used some of this.
What all of this points to is the overwhelming importance of
self-respect, the
power of self-image to distort and mislead. Confronted with a
near terminal case of
cultural superiority in China, the historian is tempted to play
the role of comforter

and to stroke the object of his affections as the master a pet.
That’s all right for pets,
which don’t have to grow up, but not for countries, which do.
Imperial China open-minded, curious? No way.
16 See Guerlac (1979) on the protracted French reluctance to
accept Newtonian physics.
David S. Landes 21
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/17511340910964153Why Europe and
the West? Why Not China?The First Chance: Science without
DevelopmentThe Second Chance: Learning from the
BarbariansWhy Did China “Fail”?“There is Nothing We
Lack”References
84· In Tang times, wo men rode hors es a nd played polo. The
empresses in
both the Tangut and the Liao states played important political
and military roles.
85· See Alisen, Mongol Imp erialism, fOf Mongol fiscal and
political policies.
86. James T . C. Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-
Political Changes in
the Early Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Council on East Asian
Studies, Harvard
University, 1988).
CHAPTER 9
~
Without Coal? Colonies? Calculus?
COUNTERFACTUALS & INDUSTRIALIZATION
IN EUROPE & CHINA
Kennech Pomeranz
Background-Europe in a Chinese Mirror
The question of whether China could have had an industrial

revolution is
largely, but not entirely, independent of one less often asked.
Could
Europe have had a "Chinese" experience, becoming a society
with highly
productive agriculture, extensive handicraft industry, and highly
sophis-
ticated markets but no breakthrough to a world of vastly
expanded
energy use and sustained growth in per capita income-so that it
eventu-
ally faced resource pressures that sharply limited extensive
growth as
well? Or to put it slightly differently, could the regions of
Europe that
industrialized in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century
(chiefly,
though not exclusively, in Britain) have instead remained
"stuck" in a
Dutch or Danish configuration, which would have made them
much
more like China's Yangzi and Pearl River deltas? Although we
will need
to distinguish these questions carefully, there is enough
material that is
useful to both-and enough ways in which each sheds light on the
other-that it seems to me worth asking them together. I adopted
this
strategy in The Great Divergence, which focused primarily on
"could
Europe have become China?" a question that, from the point of
view of
24 1

this book, is esse ntially a "could Europe have 'fa iled'?"
counterfactual.
Here I return to the more familiar "could China ha ve
industrialized?"
question but with my study of the other question very much on
my mind.
It is both the source of empirical statements about the relative
state of X,
Y, or Z in Europe and China that I will reuse here and also the
source of
many of the beliefs that I have been testing by examining the
"could
China have been a contender?" counterfactual in this essay.'
To put things crudely, I argued in the book that China and
Europe,
and more specifically the Yangzi Delta and England, their most
advanced
regions, were much more similar as late as 1750 than we have
commonly
realized. Standards of living appear to have been quite similar.
Life
expectancy was comparable! Consumption of at least some of
the nOI1-
grain foods that typically increase in early stages of sustained
per capita
growth (such as sugar) was also at least comparable, as were
levels of
production and consumption of textiles, also a common
indicator of
early growth according to Engel's Law. 3 And while certain
aggregate
indicators of welfare in China would decline over the 150 years
after
1750, I would argue that this did not indicate the

"overpopulation" that
many scholars claim doomed nineteenth-century China. Indeed,
stan-
dards of living seem to have continued to inch upward in many
Chinese
regions, at least until 1850. Any overall decline in per capita
consumption
before the great catastrophes of the mid-nineteenth century
probably
reflected in large part greater population growth in the poorer
regions of
the country, so that the weight of advanced regions in
empirewide aver-
ages declined rather than a deterioration of economic
circumstances
within most regions .4 Institutionally, the eighteenth-century
Chinese
economy may well have more closely resembled an idealized
market
economy than did Europe's at the same time (though neither was
all that
close): certainly it is hard to find in mid-Qing China crucial
blockages to
the kinds of exchange, development of markets, or accumulation
and
deployment of resources needed for industrialization. To be
sure, the
economies of eighteenth-century China and Europe (or the core
areas of
each) were not identical; but by no means did all the
economically rele-
vant differences favor Europe.
To frame the problem slightly differently, one can distinguish a
kind
of growth that involves successfully exploiting all the

opportunities avail-
able with given resources and technology, mainly through
developing
increasingly efficient markets and the division of labor, from
growth that
shifts the production possibility frontier outward through
technological
change and/or resource windfalls. During the nineteenth
century, the
CI)
UJ
Z
% ~
.
'" c W :~
coco
~
~~
'" <<I' 'S-o
~
z
~
%
. ",
c:::7

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<L
'OJ~~ U (l) ..c
~ '"
-:>0
~
(;
-,,"' ...:........ ,, <S'>
~
!
,,-
UJ
I
I
o
iii
co
=>
I
~
~
~

~
'0..
E
OIl "'"
,S
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<( .5~(i a....J
'" , . ~0
,0-
~ G -0'"
t::
z g.
>0"'. '"-- 0
~: 0..
~ '" ~
;.;::
~
Cl
o
;.;::
::s
a
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~

244 U NMA KING T H E WE ST
North Atlantic countries began a staggering burst of this latter
kind of
growth, which continues to this day; clearly that burst must
have had
Some preconditions, which we can see as European advantages.
This does
not, however, tell us whether Europe was doing better than
China (or
perhaps other places) at the first, "Smithian" kind of growth,
which had
predominated during the previous few centuries. Nor, of course,
does
success at Smithian growth guarantee Success at the other kind
of
growth. As Joel Mokyr (chapter ro of this volume) emphasizes,
techno-
logical change has its own prerequisites, and whatever they may
be, they
do not simply follow from getting economic institutions "right."
I would
also argue (here differing from Mokyr) that both technological
change
and reSOurce windfalls were important to dlSt;;guishing the
modern
Ituropean fr~inese path.
Perhaps most surprisingly, despite very high population
denSities,
China's core regions do not seem to have been doing any worse
ecologi-
cally than Europe's in the eighteenth century. I have
reconstructed nitro-
gen fluxes from dry-farming areas of North China and England,
circa

I800, and they do not show more severe soil depletion in China,
and if we
added China's paddy rice regions to the comparison,5 it would
get rather
lop-sided in China's favor. 6 Even for wood supply and
deforestation,
there is no clear Western Europe advantage circa I75 0 , despite
its much
sparser population. The Chinese used land and fuel more
efficiently-
thanks to everything from more labor-intensive fuel gathering to
more
efficient Stoves to greater use of crop residues-and they were
actually
better off in many ways than Europeans.? Cores at both ends of
Eurasia,
I would argue, faced a crucial race in the eighteenth century
between
mounting ecological pressures and the resources available to
counteract
these pressures (about which more shortly). These pressures
were evident
in everything from rising real prices for timber and other land-
intensive
products to increased erosion (in both China and Europe) to
increased
flooding and a falling water table (mostly in China) to more
frequent
sandstorms, erosion, and stagnant per acre agricultural yields
(also noted

in Europe).B All things considered, it is not clear that the
problems in
China's core were the more serious ones. 9
Broadly speaking, "development" in Core regions meant an
accumu-.
lation of both more labor and more capital and increased per
capita con-
sumption by the growing numbers of people present. But as long
as one
remained within a world in which Malthus's famous four
necessities-
food, fiber, fuel and building materials-came from plant growth,
having
a more Or less fixed quantity of land was a potentially serious
constraint
Wi tho ut Coal? Colonies? Calculus? 245
on such development. Roughly speaking, three kinds of
solutions existed.
One co!.!1d ..trade manuf~tured products for vegetable products
from
elSewhere, in effect using plentiful labor and capital to
purchase the prod-
ucts of somebody else's land; this, of course, required finding
enough
trading partners with the right factor endowments and an
institutional
structure that facilitated this trade (or imposing such a structure
through
conquest). O!!.~.9 adopt various strategies to maximize the
ecologi-

cally sustainable yield of one's existing land-though in an age
before
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, most such strategies were
extremely
labor intensive. Qr_one could reduce one's dependence on
annual vegeta-
tive growth, turning to subt~ranean stores of building materials
and
especially energy, which allowed mines with a relatively small
surface
area to substitute for enormous areas of woodland.
Chinese cores pursued the first option very successfully-so
success-
fully that they were running into rapidly diminishing returns by
the late
eighteenth century. The same institutions that facilitated vast
amounts of
long-distance trade, with mostly freehold peasants in the
interior trading
rice, timber, and so on for cloth, salt, metal tools, and so on,
eventually
facilitated both enormous population growth and the
development of
more local handicraft industries on the periphery: both had the
effect of
reducing die surplus of land-intensive products that those
regions had for
shipment to core regions. And the political structure that
facilitated inter- .
nal trade did not, for reasons to be discussed shortly, encourage
a
sufficiently rapid expansion of this trade to overseas areas (such
as South-
east Asia), where institutional arrangements favorable to a more
rapid t. ",.(vI(' '"

I ~~, .
expansion of trade would probably have required Chinese
conquests.
Nor, of course, did China have the geographic and
epidemiological luck
that helped Europe cteate a vastly larger hinterland in the New
World at
relatively low cost to itself.
Chinese cores were also quite successful at exploiting the
second pal-
liative for resource constraints: kinds of land management and
resource
conservation (most of them very labor intensive) that allowed
very high
yields while slowing (though not completely stopping)
environmental
degradation. It is important to note that parts of Europe were
doing this .
too: practices such as marling, for instance, raised yields and
sustained
the soil, but at the cost of significant declines in output per unit
of labor. 1 0
Had other palliatives not succeeded on a huge scale in the late
eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, these areas might have continued
still fur-
ther in a labor-intensive, land-saving direction-in which case
Northwest
Europe would indeed have looked much more like the Yangzi
Delta, the
http:labor.10

Li ngnan core, or Japanese core areas in the Kanto and Kinai .
In Den-
mark, which may be the part of E urope that went farthest down
this
road, ecological stabilization was achieved, but industry (even
handi-
crafts) grew very little before 1800, the share of the population
living in
cities did not increase before 1850, and both vv~ges and per day
returns to
labor for self-employed farmers declined-all despite well-
developed
" markets and involvement in Western European science . II
Moreover, while such strategies were quite useful for sustaining
an
existing standard of living, this kind of development did not
move the
society much closer to industrialization and sustainable per
capita
growth: indeed, if pursued for very lorig periods of time, they
may lead to
a balance of factor endowments that potentially inhibit the
switch to cap-
ital- intensi ve and energy- intensi ve technologies. 12 lnd
ustrializa tion
required instead a fundamental break with the constraint of
production
p~iliJi~s QYJ~e local , sllPp}y of 1~~9~which China did not
make but
nineteenth-century Europe did, with the help of both fossil fuels
and a
staggering increase in land-intensive imports. It is probably

true, as vari-
ous scholars have pointed out in response to arguments that
profits from
the New World were important to European growth, that without
the
New World the labor and capital that crossed the Atlantic (or at
least
most of it) could have been profitably deployed nearer
home(r~ut if the
New World's crucial contribution was not increased financial
profits but
land~nsive real r-~sources (including much of industrializing
England's
cOtto; and later much of its food and timber ), it is much less
clear that
adequate substitutes were available elsewhere.]4
Based on this sketch, I would argue that the big differences
favoring
Europe were: (1) advantages in certain, though not all, areas of
science
and technology; (2.) a lucky geographic accident, the location
of vast
amounts of coal relatively close to the surface in England,
where they
were close to (a) wealthy areas with very high fuel demands
(partly due
to especially serious deforestation), (b) good water transport,
and (c) a
large concentration of artisans who were available to make the
crucial
improvements on the steam en~s that made deeper mining po~e
and also made it possible to use coal to solve any number of
other prob-
lems, including the transportation over land of the coal itself;
(3)

significant unexploited agricultural resources on various parts
of the
Continent, which could be brought into play to feed growing
urban pop-
ulations and were, ironically, still available in the early
nineteenth cen-
tury in large part because of pre-Napoleonic institutions
(especially in
Central and Eastern Europe) that had interfered with markets
and
Without Coa l? Col onies? Calcu lus? 247
retarded develop ment (and population grow th) far more
seriollsly than
any market imperfections in China; and (4) access to the New
World,
which eventually made ava ilable a huge flood of land-intensive
products I
and an outlet for tens of millions of emigrants (who in turn
helped bring
still more export-producing lands into production).
Probably few people would dispute that at least three of these
differ-
ences (numbers r, 2., and 4) mattered, though many would add
others;
much of Th e Great Divergence is devoted to undermining the
case for
some of the most commonly cited additions to the list (e.g.,
differences in
property systems) by pointing to China's relative success at
exploiting
what was possible with its resources and slowly improving
technologies

and also noting some surprising European shortcomings in
getting the
most from its existing capital, labor, and especially land. And
within this
list of four, I put more emphasis than most scholars on the last
three
points, arguing that, at least for the stages of industrialization
down to,
say, r860 (which were the ones that gave Europe its global
predomi-
nance), science and markets alone could not have provided
solutions to
some of the resource constraints that faced core regions around
the eigh-
teenth-century world without the added benefits of resource
bonanzas.
Instead, Northwest Europe might well have found itself in a
situation nOt
unlike that of the Yangzi Delta or the Kanto a nd Kinai in
Japan, with fur-
~, from trade, s~alization, institutional adjust~e~ts, and tech-
nical advances just barely stayiifg ahead of popu1afion growth
and ' even
then only with the help of very labor-intensive efforts to
maximize agri-
cultural yields while maintaining soil quality, avoiding waste of
scarce

fuel, and so on.
In such a scenario, any emergent industrial sector would have
had to
be far smaller, both because of raw material and fuel constraints
and
because the share of the population that could leave the land
would have
, been smaller: one can imagine fuel -hungry (and strategic)
sectors such as
iron and steel being particularly affected @ Given different
factor endow- "
ments, technological change might have also taken different
directions,
saving more land and energy but less labor (and perhaps
creating fewer
entirely new goods). In all probability, the costs of projecting
European
power into other parts of the Old World would have been larger
and the
surplus available to bear those costs much smaller.
This economic scenario would still not rule, out the possibility
of
significant European empires abroad in the nineteenth century.
After all,
the European forces involved in conquering and holding these
empires
were relatively small and often not even equipped with the
latest
http:technologies.12

24 8 UNMAKI N G THE W EST
weaponry. However, it might well have reduced those empires
in scale
and duration. Furthermore, Europe's impact on the colonized
societies
would have been very different had these conquerors-like so
many oth-
ers in the past-brought with them some significant technological
advan-
tages concentrated in a few militarily significant sectors (such
as iron and
steel) rather than a generally transformed economy supporting a
much
higher standard of living and radically different patterns of
work and
resting on very large differences in per capita supplies of
energy and other
primary products.
Could China "Have Been a Contender"7
If European industry-and so its capacity to project military
power-had
grown much more slowly, East Asia would seem the most likely
area to
have escaped its gunboats. It was geographically remote, had
large and
relatively cohesive polities, and had a concept of war more like
the West's
than that of much of Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia
(e.g., East
Asians, like Europeans and South Asians, generally fought to
gain land,

not captives, and built large fortifications). Geoffrey Parker has
argued
quite powerfully that a "military revolution" that did not depend
on
industrialization nonetheless gave the West decisive advantages
over
.. many of its foes (a point I will leave to others to debate),'6
but he agrees
that successful assaults on China and Japan required
"steamships, steel
artillery and sepoys .... They did not fall before the military
revolu-
tion. "17 In such a context, would China have industrialized on
its own? (I
will omit Japan here for reasons of space, though it may
actually have
been better situated than China.) Parts of m y answer can
probably be
inferred from the discussion of Europe above; others are laid
out below.
It seems to me unlikely, though not impossible, that China circa
175
0
was poised to have an industrial revolution anytime soon. This
was not,
I would argue, because of any of the deficiencies in economic
institutions
that some scholars have alleged (i.e., an overbearing state,
inadequate
prop erty rights, a cultural ~ against c~mmerce, or a family
system that
incouragedp~pulatiollgLQWt::ilJlt the expense of capitai-;-
c~umula.!ion);

i;;r[~-;-~ays, as I suggested ~r!Jer, China~~ welJ-position~d as
Europe. But China did face two important handicaps:
leu~yorable
resource endowments and less vigorous growth in science and
technol-
, OgY.{Ar- Teast Tn tecIi.Dology;Jcshouldbe~redth~-ttilisslow
(
-growth was off an impressive base of accul11ulated techniques:
this is less
clear in at least som e branches of science.)
Wi thout Coal? Colonies? Calculus? 249
Resource Constraints
Patterns of Growth and the Absence of a "New World"
By the late eighteenth century, the effects of both population
growth and
a slowly but steadily rising standard of living (which belies any
straight-
forward "Malthusian crisis") were putting serious pressures on
the ecol-
ogy of various parts of China. These pressures were not that
different
from those faced by many advanced areas in Europe, but in the
absence
of the favorable "resource shocks" discussed earlier (and in the
context
of a different political economy), they worked themselve s out
very differ-
ently. !:~terl~lQl:ls=which had supplied areas such as the
Yangzi
Delta with rice, timber, and raw cotton in exchange for

manufactures-
boomed, both in population and in their own handicraft
manufactur-
ingY This reduced primary products exports to core regions:
their
growth essentially stopped, while labor and capital were
redeployed out
of manufacturing to manage land and fuel more intensively.
~teL
roughly IU.0~ po pulatio n growth in the most advanced region
of China
(the Yangzi.Pel!ill virtually ceased, not to permanenclysur p as
sthe 1770
level until after I25..2~ other core regions· c~n~inued tog row
but much
more slowly than China as a whole (which roughly doubled in
popula-
tion from 1750 to 1850).
The resulting economic pattern was in many ways "successful"
if one
does not judge it by the anachronistic standard of the ind ustrial
world:
living standards probably held up fairly well in advanced
regions, and
improved in many hinterlands, until the catastrophes of the mid-
nine-
teenth century (which had more to do with a ~~UH:~§_b:lown,
exac-
erbated by imperialism, than economic failure).' 9 Moreover,
this pattern
of development, in which best practices were changing fairly
slowly but
were diffused effectively across a huge landscape, generally fit
the Ming-
Qing notion of what an economy should do: allow as many

people as
possible across the huge range of environments in China a
reasonably
stable existence as independ ent producers able to support a
family. w
However, it did not move China any closer to industrialization;
indeec!.;c1
its reliance on increasi ngly labor- intensive kinds of land
management to Y
sustain more people at a comparable standard of living probably
biased
innovation in directions that did not make that more likely. By
contrast,
it is worth remembering here that the vaunted achievements of
the "agri-
cultural revolution" prior to the nineteenth century did not
generally
raise the best per acre yields significantly; th ey enabled
roughly constant
yields to be achieved with less labor (and allowed yields on
lagging farm s
I
UN M iKING THE WEST2.5°
to catch up to more productive ones). That kind of innovation
alone
could not sustain growth in a situation like that in which China
found
itself; it only helps if the labor thus liberated can feed itself by
trading for
primary products from elsewhere.

This resource squeeze did not rule out industrialization, but it
biased
the direction of innovation in ways that made a rapid wholesale
trans·
formation of the Chinese economy-or even the economy of a
particular
region-much less likely. (It should be remembered here that
China is
more comparable in size to Europe as a whole than to any
European
country, and a region such as the Yangzi Delta, with 37 million
people in
1770, was larger than any European country other than Russia.
Thus,
even a breakthrough limited to "only" one such region would
have been
quite comparable to what happened in the first half of the
nineteenth cen·
tury in Europe, and the industrialization of "Europe" as a whole
cannot
be said to have happened until after 1945.)
Could China have found a bonanza of "ghost acreage"
comparable to
what Europeans found in the New World? This seems to me
very
unlikely without radically altering the world map (so that
Fujianese
going to trade in Java might have been blown to Acapulco)
andlor imago
-ining changes in Chinese politics and society so basic that we
would nollonger be dealing with "China." Certainly some quite
sparsely populated
and potentially very fertile land in Southeast Asia lay within
easy reach of

Chinese ships, and no new technology would have been needed
to turn
them into "rice bowls" exporting primary products back to the
mother
country (as happened after I850 once colonial regimes both
enforced
~ghts in thes~~~ and allowed larg~-~~ffiT)ers of i~migrants
to come a11~ims to them). But the political conditions for such
an initiative were not present in some areas and emerging only
slowly in
others; and, as the reasons for that were long standing,
attempting to
remove them would probably not pass the "minimum rewrite"
rule.
The costs of conquest, government, and infrastructure
development
for major Chinese rural settlements in Southeast Asia would
have been
very large, and there was no clear reason why Chinese
merchants should
have undertaken those costs without government backing. After
all, even
in the New 'J::10rld (where the costs of conquest were greatly
reduced by
the natives' lack of immunity to Old World microbes, while for
Chinese
going to Southeast Asia the disease gradient ran the other way)
these
costs were sufficiently large that people -vould only finance
New World
colonization if they could find something in the colony to
export back
home into a market in which high markups were guaranteed .
European

Vithout Coal? Colonies? Calculus? 2.51
sovereigns, hungry for tax revenues to support incessant and
increasingly
expensive warfare, were willing to grant and enforce the
necessary
monopolies and, as the colonies themselves came to be seen as
valuable
prizes of war, began to underwrite much of their defense and
government
directly. And for some of the most lucrative New World
exports, geogra-
phy and climate dictated that an import monopoly was a sales
monopoly;
sugarcane, for instance, simply would not grow in Europe. 2I
By contrast, although a Chinese merchant/pirate outfit such as
the
Zheng family empire of the seventeenth century certainly had
the capac-
ity to conquer various parts of Southeast Asia (driving the
Dutch off Tai-
wan, capturing and holding various ports all the way to Java for
many
years, and controlling many of the shipping lanes)," it never had
access
to the sorLof protected market back home that would have made
it
worthwhi.le to undertake systematic, large-scale settlement. On
the con-
trary, the Zheng flourished only in a dynastic interregnum and
never had
as firm a grip on any Chinese port as they had on various spots
overseas.
Even had a less effective Qing military given the short-lived

Southern
Ming more time to solidify itself, it is far from clear that it
would have
done so, or that it would have maintained strong ties to the
Zheng and
their overseas empire.
In more normal times, both the Ming and Qing sometimes
supported
merchants who traveled abroad (defined as staying away less
than three
years), but neither dynasty would protect Chinese who settled
abroad. 2 ;
The Qing were certainly interested in frontier expansion
(acquiring an
area roughly half the size of the United States between 1683 and
1759),
but this land was in mostly arid andlor mountainous Central
Asia and
was conquered to create a security zone, not to gain control
of.economi-
cally attracti~ _.re-sources.~·-- . _
For the most part, the Qing did not face the sort of military
competi-
tion among relative equals that led to innovative fiscal measures
and sup-
port for mercantilist colonization in the Atlantic world; indeed,
since :
they considered ~~~~J)IlJ_enLthe l!.!ain thre~heir rule, the idea
of encouraging new, heavily taxed popular "needs" for such
things as
sugar or tobacco would have made no sense to them. 24 Last,
but by no
means least, even if the Qing had had .a very different attitude

toward
overseas expansion, almost anything imported from Southeast
Asia
would have faced substantial domestic competition (Guangdong
Province was quite possibly the world's largest sugar producer
circa I750,
for instance), which would have limited per unit profit margins
on
imports. 25 Given all these conditions, the possibility of the Q
ing provid-
http:imports.25
http:worthwhi.le
http:Europe.2I
2.52 U N M A KING THE WE ST
ing either the direct or indirect backing that Chinese merchants
would
have needed to make it worth laying out the huge overhead
costs of
major agricultural colonies in Southeast Asia seems close to
zero.
In the absence of state backing for a Chinese venture, most of
these
lands remained unexploited until much later. Neither the
indigenous
kingdoms nor the early European colonial regimes in the islands
were
willing to grant secure property rights in land to Chinese
immigrants;
indeed, in some of the more promising areas (near Batavia and
Manila),
even the lives of members of the large Chinese merchant

communities
were at substantial risk from recurrent massacres. 26 This
situation cer-
tainly encouraged these merchants to stay liquid and buy land
back home
(as many did), if they wanted land, rather than sinking huge
amounts of
capital into bringing over their countrymen to drain swamps or
clear jun-
gles. Meanwhile, none of the rulers of these areas had the
capacity to
develop these lands as export-oriented rice bowls themselves;
they were
unwilling (probably because they felt too insecure) to accept a
huge flood
of Chinese or Indian migrants and (in the case of the colonial
regimes)
unable to bring in nearly enough Europeans to do this job. 2 ?
On the mainland, things were somewhat different and perhaps
more
promising in the long run. Victor Lieberman has suggested more
of a
trend toward agricultural intensification in mainland Southeast
Asia
prior to colonialism than we had previously recognized and
toward states
willing and able to enforce property rights to reclaimed land if
this
resulted in increased tax revenues. But Lieberman sees this as a
cyclical
process in which the gradual consolidation of stronger
territorial states
was punctuated by periodic breakdowns, and in the late
eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries all of these states were suffering

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