Abstract
In this article the autor presents a description, analysis and evaluation of the fundamentally new interpretation of the economic history of the early modern world that is defended by authors who collectively have become known as the California School, the most important among them being Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong, Andre Gunder Frank and Jack Goldstone. He in particular analyses their claim that in the period from roughly 1400 to 1800 the most advanced economies of Eurasia formed a world of ‘surprising resemblances’ and that the Great Divergence between ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ only originated with industrialisation and must be interpretated as a fairly contingent and recent phenomenon, basically due to differences in the availability of resources.The author claims that the Californians have a tendency to exaggerate the resemblances between Western Europe and East Asia and should be more specific when it comes to time, place and the differing historical trajectories of various regions. Finally, he claims they should pay far more attention to political and military developments and to the role of culture and institutions.
Introduction
The biggest challenge for global economic historians is to explain the huge gap between rich and poor countries that began to emerge with the industrialisation of parts of the Western world. In trying to explain the emergence of this gap, the so-called ‘Great Divergence’, they actually have to tackle four questions. The first one concerns the introduction of steam-power and new technologies in production and transport that during the Industrial Revolution enabled Britain and parts of Western Europe to escape from Malthusian constraints. Then, there is the question how the momentum of this revolution could turn into sustained and even self-sustaining growth. Next, there is the question how economically less developed countries could catch up with or even overtake more advanced ones. Finally, there is the question why so many countries failed to do so which perpetuated and even widened the gap between them and developed countries.
Here, I will only deal with the first question: Why did the first breakthrough of the Malthusian ceiling – the tension between population and available resources -occur in Western countries, to begin with in Britain, and not in other parts of the world? That of course is a classic problem. With the emergence of the so-called California School of economic history, however, it has been posed in a new way and framed explicitly in a context of global comparisons and connections. And it has received some new answers. This text offers a critical, constructive evaluation of the views of the Californians that indicates what we can learn from them, where they may be wrong and what promising paths for future research they neglect.
The reference to global comparisons and connections does not mean that I will discuss the entire globe. I will focus on Britain and China. The decision to do so is, to some extent, pragmatic. It keeps the topic manageable. Yet, there are also scholarly reasons. According to Jared Diamond, people of Eurasian origin, especially those living in Europe and Asia and those who migrated to America, had far better chances of becoming rich and dominant than those living someplace else because of the natural resources that were available to them. (Diamond 1997). Although not everyone would so easily write off the Americas before Columbus, his main arguments are convincing to me. In Eurasia, at the eve of the Great Divergence, Britain and China (with the tiny Dutch Republic) are normally regarded as the most developed and richest countries. In publications of the California School they hold centre stage. It therefore makes very good sense for me to also focus on them. My comparison will be synchronic and deal with ‘the very long eighteenth century’, roughly the period from the 1680s to the 1850s, in which the great diverging of Britain and China actually took place. In the literature I review, this has become by far the most popular way to proceed. This does not mean that diachronic comparisons would not make sense.
Eurocentric Approaches
The debate on the causes of the Great Divergence is as old as the social sciences. Until quite recently, two or, if one regards dependency-theory and modern world-systems analysis as distinct approaches from ‘ordinary’ Marxist analysis, three ‘schools’ have dominated it. The most popular approach is still the one that builds on the legacy of Max Weber and his claim that the West underwent a uniquely intense process of rationalisation that resulted in the emergence of capitalist market economies, bureaucratic states and a disenchanted culture that was ideally suited to produce science, technology and a methodical way of living (Schluchter 1983, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1998). Although not many scholars would actually describe themselves as Weberians, Weber is still setting many research agendas. David Landes’ bestseller on the wealth and poverty of nations, for example, has a strong Weberian flavour (Landes 1998). In this approach, that is also quite popular among mainstream economists and their institutionalist colleagues, and the economic ‘rise of the West’ is almost identified with ‘the rise of the market’. (For institutionalist economics see Thomas⁄North 1973; North 1981, 1990, 2005). Weberians focus on developments in Europe. They regard its history as structurally and fundamentally different from that of the rest of the world. To them, the Great Divergence is the culmination of a long process, not something fairly contingent that could have occurred anyplace. What happens in ‘the rest’ is of no fundamental relevance to the main direction of modern Western history.
The second approach is the classical Marxist one. Notwithstanding its idiosyncrasies, it shares a number of fundamental features with that of Weberians. The differences are well-known. More interesting in the context of this article are the similarities. Both approaches regard capitalism as the motor of modern economic development and as a Western invention. They both claim that its emergence in Europe explains the economic primacy of the West. They share the idea that Europe was different and more dynamic than the rest of the world over which it, not by accident, came to rule. Although that actually is hard to square with Marx’s overall philosophy of history, most classical Marxists, like Marx, came to the conclusion that the world outside the West lacked the internal dynamics to manage a transition to capitalism on its own (Avineri 1969; Krader 1975).
Dependency theory and world systems-analysis are often regarded as neo-Marxist. They do indeed build on elements of classical Marxism, such as its focus on exploitation and ‘unequal exchange’ and on the history of capitalism as central to any understanding of the modern world. There clearly also exist major differences. I will not deal with them here. For adherents of these ‘schools’ too, capitalism functions as the lever of global development. When they refer to capitalism, however, what they have in mind is not a Smithian market economy with fair and free competition. In their view, capitalism is actually characterised by monopoly, collusion and coercion, which implies that in it political power holders and capitalists co-operate intensively. Braudel, who had a major influence on Wallerstein’s historical analysis, even defined ‘real’ capitalism as an ‘antimarket’ that only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state, or rather when it is the state (Braudel 1979–1984; Braudel 1977: 64–65). Both ‘schools’ present capitalism as a dynamic force that from its very beginning was trans-national and, spreading from the West, created the modern world-system by incorporating a fairly passive and nondeveloping ‘Rest’. In that sense, they too are clearly Eurocentric.
Up until now, the word no reference whatsoever has been made to China. That is not by mistake. In Weberian and (neo) Marxist stories alike, Qing China hardly figured. If it was mentioned at all, it was described as the almost archetypical immobile ‘nondeveloper’ characterised by ‘oriental despotism’ and an ‘Asiatic mode of production’. Until late into the 20th century, with some rare exceptions, scholars considered the country as so backward or at least immobile that it did not even occur to them to study why the first industrial revolution did not take place there (Blue 1999; Hung 2003).
The California School
Things have changed tremendously. Recently, various scholars have almost completely re-written the economic history of China in the early modern era. They have found a willing audience. The best-known amongst these scholars are Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone, James Lee, Feng Wang, Dennis Flynn and Arturo Gira´ldez, Robert Marks, and the late Andre Gunder Frank. They are called ‘the California School’ because most of them worked at universities in California. Scholars like Jack Goody and John Hobson, working in Britain share most of their ideas and are here also regarded as members of the School. The label has been introduced by Jack Goldstone who has just published a small book excellently synthesising the Californian view on ‘the rise of the West’. For a succinct description, I can do no better than quote him:
Instead of seeing the rise of the West as a long process of gradual advances in Europe while the rest of the world stood still, they have turned this story around. They argue that societies in Asia and the Middle East were the world leaders in economics; in science and technology; and in shipping, trade and exploration until about AD 1500. At the time Europe emerged from the Middle Ages and entered its Renaissance, these scholars contend, Europe was far behind many of the advanced societies elsewhere in the world and did not catch up with and surpass the leading Asian societies until about AD 1800. The rise of the West was thus relatively recent and sudden and rested to a large degree on the achievements of other civilisations and not merely on what happened in Europe. Indeed some of these scholars suggest that the rise of the West may have been a relatively short and perhaps temporary phenomenon. (Goldstone 2008b: VIII)
The rise of School, the members of which of course do not always agree amongst each other in every respect, is part and parcel of a widespread dissatisfaction with Eurocentrism. Some of them emphasise Europe’s backwardness. An exponent of this current is John Hobson, who in his The Eastern origins of Western civilisation systematically tries to ‘provincialise’ and ‘primitivise’ Europe. (Hobson 2004) Focusing on the economy, but definitely no less anti-Eurocentric, is Andre Gunder Frank. His ReOrient. Global economy in the Asian age, i.e. the period 1400–1800, hammers home one clear message: Economic historians studying the early modern era must focus on the East, in particular on China, the world’s most developed economy. To focus on ‘rising’ Europe is a Eurocentric mistake: ‘… Europe remained a marginal player in the world economy until the second half of the eighteenth century with a perpetual deficit [i.e. in its trade with Asia, Peer Vries] despite its relatively easy and cheap access to American money, without which Europe would have been almost entirely excluded from any participation in the world economy’ (Frank 1998a: 75). According to Frank ‘… the Europeans did not do anything – let alone ‘modernize’ – by themselves’. (Frank 1998a: 259) When they in the end rose, they did so by ‘climbing on Asian shoulders’ with money they had somehow found, stolen, extorted or earned. (Frank 1998a: 277). Although Frank continues to refer to Europe’s exploitation of the Americas, he now fiercely rejects dependency theory and the idea that it was the Europeans who created a global economy for which they themselves were the centre. His pleas have not fallen upon deaf ears, even though most of his claims are patent exaggerations. Robert Marks, for example, writes in a popular textbook that Europe was ‘… a peripheral, marginal player trying desperately to gain access to the sources of wealth generated in the East’. (Marks 2002: 43) Less vociferous Californians, like Pomeranz and Wong, confine themselves to emphasising that ‘the Rest’ was not backward, and ‘the West’ not that different, and they defend a ‘Eurasian similarity-thesis’. I will discuss that extensively later on in this article.
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