What did stimulate growth, however, was knowledge, the well-known transfer of actual techniques. The arrival of silk or paper technologies in the West did create new industries, if the arrival of Western cotton in medieval China did not. But it would be naïve to reconstruct a too direct causative link. Quite often the knowledge arrived, but no consequences followed. For instance we now have archival proof that paper was known in pre-Islamic Iran, but that it took several centuries for a take- off of its use. Another point is that quite often these transfers were not directly linked with trade itself except for the knowledge of the road: refugees, migrations, religious networks were as much or even more important. Some refugees transmitted the secrets of glass-making to China, some monks transmitted silk technology to Byzantium, some pilgrims expanded the qarez irrigation techniques all along the Hajj networks.
In fact what have mattered more is something broader, the sheer knowledge of the existence of others, a basic geography of the world that diplomacy and trade created, especially among the Middle Eastern countries situated in between all the contacts. As early as late antiquity, an image of the world was created, with the idea of the four (or more) kings of the world (Chinese, Indian or Iranian, Nomad, Greek), probably originating from India, and pervading the whole Asian continent up to the tenth century: this is known from Umayyad palaces to Chinese Buddhist texts or Sogdian paintings (La Vaissière 2006). Among this division of the world it is remarkable that the Chinese were par excellence the gifted craftsmen, while the nomads provided professional warriors. Whatever quantities might have traveled on an irregular basis, an international division of labor was contemplated, even if not actually realized. The Muslim geographers inherited from this basic geography and developed their much broader vision of the world. They had an actual, if patchy, knowledge of the whole Eurasian and African landmass, from Japan to Madagascar and Senegal. Their central position allowed them to control the flow of data between the various great blocks
during most of the middle ages. The Mongol invasion broke this monopoly on knowledge.
After the failure of the twelfth-century attempts of the Sicilian kings to integrate Muslim geographical knowledge into the Christian world, the novelty of the thirteenth century in Europe was the discovery of the possibility of trade, which proved to be more important in the long run than the actual trade. This is what led the Portuguese around Africa to the Indian Ocean, in search of spices and Christians. Two centuries after the failed attempt of the Genoese Vivaldi brothers, but in direct intellectual continuity, Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco De Gama managed to pass into the Indian Ocean. Similarly the Spanish went to America with a Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus, this stranded medieval traveler, who had learned his purely medieval geography of the world from the fourteenth-century Ymago mundi of Pierre d’Ailly. In a striking symmetrical attempt to break Muslim centrality, the early Ming supported the maritime expeditions of Zheng He (1405–1433), which made use of the Muslim knowledge of the maritime roads for the benefit of the Chinese empire.
In a way, and as the Ming eventually put an end to these attempts, it might be argued that the mirabilia of Marco Polo in the long run mattered more than the redirections of trade forcefully implemented by the Mongol nobility: not actually the goods that these marginal Genoese and Venetian traders brought back, but the knowledge of a world beyond the Muslim world, the depth of Asia totally forgotten since Theophylact Simocatta’s depiction of the Turks and China during the second stage of the Silk Road. It seems to be a mistake to try to link with a single economic reasoning the actual inland trade of the Mongol period seen from an economic perspective and the economic expansion of sixteenth-century Europe. By the thirteenth century the important trade was already the maritime one, and its importance was only to grow, as the caravan trade had reached its technological limits half a millennium before Gengis Khan. But to understand the actual link between the inland Silk Road and the growth of Europe, we have to step outside economic history, and take into account the mobilizing power of the newly created Ymago mundi.
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6 China before capitalism
R. B. WongIntroduction
Did capitalism cause industrialization? Was it either necessary or sufficient? Many of our responses to such questions depend upon how we account for technological change between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. If we think that capitalism as an economic system made possible the technological changes leading to industrialization, then Europe had capitalism and no other world region did. If capitalism as practiced in Europe did not produce the crucial technological changes, we can possibly use the term “capitalism” to describe economic practices in other world regions; at a minimum we can disentangle the issues of explaining industrialization from those of explaining capitalism. The advantages of separating capitalism from industrialization are even clearer when we move to the twentieth century and consider the Soviet and Chinese industrialization experiences. If we accept the premise that capitalism was neither necessary nor sufficient to create industrialization, we can frame our understanding of how they are connected to each other in nineteenth-century western Europe and North America by looking to earlier periods, both within and beyond Western settings.
Industrialization requires the mobilization and concentration of capital. Large private firms and well-developed financial markets of the second half of the nineteenth century confirm a good fit between the demands of industrialization and the institutions of capitalism. The repeated episodes of major technological change that enabled the creation of new industries, markets, and products depended on financing of multiple kinds best achieved with well-developed capital markets. Modern economic growth is impossible to imagine without sophisticated financial markets and large firms, some of which dominate their markets. This intimate connection between capitalism and modern economic growth has been read backward into earlier eras of history, leading economic historians of many world regions to search for institutions and practices similar to those found in Europe. Some of these scholarly practices implicitly move through respecifications of an empirical proposition: (1) early modern European capitalist practices created economic growth and dynamism to (2) only early modern European capitalist practices could create economic growth to (3) the absence of early modern European capitalist practices means the absence of economic growth.
Through an assessment of Chinese economic history before the late nineteenth-century development of capitalist firms and markets transforming China’s economy, this chapter seeks to query this sequence of propositions. To do so I make a distinction between economic growth as a general category and industrialization as a more specific species of economic growth. I put forward that the Chinese economy had three of the four features that editor Larry Neal has suggested we find in capitalism. Their presence in an economy that is not capitalist, at least by the criterion of having large firms able to amass large amounts of capital and control major portions of their markets, means that one can find private property rights, enforceable contracts, and price-setting markets outside capitalist systems. Neal’s fourth feature of “supportive governments” is more complicated to assess. It makes little sense, at least to me, to consider as “support” any government policies and activities that are not implemented with the purpose of affecting economic conditions and possibilities. By this
criterion, the role of war-making by early modern European states, whatever its positive economic consequences, in large measure probably does not qualify as government support for a healthy economy able to grow – unless we look only at winners and discount the losses suffered by competing actors motivated to achieve the gains that went to others.
For evaluating the possibilities of economic growth before industrialization, the efficacy of the institutions of private property, contract enforcement, and price-setting markets all matter. The Chinese economy did in fact exhibit all these features without, however, also creating large concentrations of capital by firms able to dominate particular markets. How China mobilized and managed natural and financial resources in the absence of the kinds of capital markets and firms controlling large amounts of capital that we see in early modern Europe shows a government support for economic growth that we do not find in Europe. While these Chinese fiscal mechanisms are not in any simple sense substitutes, they help us to understand how the early modern Chinese economy was able to grow without the institutions of European commercial capitalism. In addition, the presence of commercial capitalism in Europe did not mean that those economies especially advanced in commercial capitalism also necessarily took the lead in creating industrial capitalism, as the Dutch case reminds us. Finally, the ideas and institutions animating Chinese political economy before the late nineteenth century continue to be key conceptual resources and material practices in China’s twentieth-century economic transformation, even if less obviously so than the case of European movements from commercial to industrial capitalism. Without recognition of the relevance of late imperial Chinese political economy to subsequent economic change, it remains too easy to assume that early modern Chinese practices present problems and that modern foreign institutions introduce possibilities. Half-truths get us only half way.