20. For comparison, see especially Qian 1985: 90–130; Goldstone 1987: 129–32; Huff 2003: 240–324; Mokyr 2003: 49–63; Goldstone 2009: 136–61; Mokyr 2017: 287–320.
21. See Mokyr 2017: 301–2 for variation in outcomes, and Goldstone 1987: 129–32 and Mokyr 2017: 294 for divergence from the seventeenth century onward. Quote: Mokyr 1990: 237. This fundamental premise obviates the need to go as far as Qian 1985: 103: “A territorially unified autocratic rule was effectively aided by and symbiotically combined with an equally unified system of ideological control. Its philosophical spirit was introspective, its academic scope was officially limited and exclusively politico-ethical, and its basic attitude discouraged innovative practices and rationalistic inquiries.”
22. Warring States: see, e.g., Bodde 1991: 178–82; Ringmar 2007: 270–71; Pines 2012: 87 (quote by Dong Zhonshu).
23. Orthodoxy: see chapters 9 and 10 in this volume. The counterfactual is spelled out by Bodde 1991: 364:
Had China permanently remained a collection of some half dozen competing principalities after 221 B.C. instead of becoming a single empire, the resulting conditions of life for the ordinary person would no doubt have been far more difficult and less secure. On the other hand, had such political disunity continued, and with it the diversity of ideas that had previously been its byproduct, I venture to suggest that the resulting intellectual environment might well have been more conducive to scientific development than that afforded by the orthodox state Confucianism of imperial China.
In terms of content, Confucianism encouraged a holistic worldview, whose dissolution in Renaissance Europe is seen as an important precondition for the Enlightenment: Bodde 1991: 186. Social focus: Needham 1969: 156–66. Other cultural features that are not directly linked to politics have also been invoked: thus Needham’s (1969) observation that Chinese lacked the notion of laws of nature: since order resulted from cosmic hierarchy, there were no laws for humans to decipher (36–37, 299–330); contrast Milton 1981 for the ascent of this concept in late medieval and early modern Europe. Bodde 1991: 19–96 views the Chinese writing system as inhibitive to scientific thinking; for its imperial monopoly, see chapter 9 in this volume.
24. Bodde 1991: 365–66; J. Lin 1995: 281–85; Huff 2003: 277–87; Mokyr 2017: 298–300, 303–7 (quotes: 306–7). For the examination system in late imperial China, see Elman 2000, 2013. Pines 2012: 89 summarizes the overall outcome: “Having monopolized the routes of individual advancement, the court could deploy its power to define what kind of expertise and knowledge was required of an aspiring official, thereby directing the educational efforts of the vast majority of the literati toward desirable ends. In addition, coercive measures could further solidify ideological orthodoxy.” Commercial elite: see chapter 10 in this volume.
25. Pines 2012: 84; Mokyr 2017: 298, 311, 317. Cf. Qian 1985: 26 for “the Chinese politico-ideological rigidity—its uniformity over a vast territory fed back strongly to intensify itself.”
26. Bodde 1991: 367.
27. Mokyr 2017: 298, 310, 340 (quote); Goldstone 2009: 147–50. Cf. Bodde 1991: 194: “We may speculate that if, in the West, a single state or church had continued indefinitely to exercise the same control over astronomy, for example, as was taken for granted in China, the Copernican-Galilean revolution probably would not soon and possibly would never have taken place.”
28. Bodde 1991: 360–61; Huff 2003: 321; Ringmar 2007: 285; Davids 2013: 229–30.
29. Sivin 1991: 63–65 (quote: 65).
30. Pomeranz 2006: 253–63. Steam engine: Deng 2004; H. F. Cohen 2009: 126–27.
31. See the epilogue in this volume. In terms of quality, scientific writing arguably peaked in the third century BCE when it was at its most detached from philosophy (Reviel Netz, personal communication). Cf. Mokyr 1990: 199.
32. Chaney 2016: 5–24 (decline in output and spread of revival), 24–27 (survey of possible causes). In a related context, Koyama 2017b: 552 notes the relevance of the lack of variety in regime types. For the earlier flourishing of Islamic scientific culture, concentrated to some extent in Central Asia (and thus away from the main imperial centers), see Starr 2013.
33. Rebellions: Goldstone 2009: 48, 143. Restrictions and interventions: Soucek 1994: 126–27, 130, 135–36; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012: 213–14. Loosening: De Bellaigue 2017.
34. Goldstone 2009: 49, 143; Parthasarathi 2011: 185–222, esp. 187, 195–201, 212–13, 265. For weapons technology, see also Hoffman 2015: 87, 99. Cf. Foa 2016: 80–106 for institutional change.
35. Pollock 2005: 79 (quote), with Roy 2008: 386; Parthasartahi 2011: 193–94; Yazdani 2017: 100–105, 279–85, 515–22.
36. Mokyr 1990: 236 (quotes).
37. Goldstone 2009: 49–50.
38. In my reading of counterfactuals (see Part III in this volume), European polycentrism was considerably more robust than was envisioned by Mokyr 2017: 341, who claims that “fairly minor rewrites of history could have secured Europe for an obscurantist Catholic regime in which the Republic of Letters would have turned into a benighted theocracy dominated by Jesuits.” Only in Europe: Mokyr 2006: 290–311. Contra Goldstone 2002: 376–77, it was not necessary for competing “nation-states” to exist for engine science to arise and succeed: what mattered most was simply the absence of the opposite, irrespective of the characteristics of these states. For a basic model of how competition between countries favors innovation, see Chaudhry and Garner 2006.
39. See Mokyr 2002: 35; 2009: 40 for the term, and more generally 2002: 28–77. Premises: Mokyr 2002: 36–41.
40. Mokyr 2009: 40.
41. Inkster 1991: 35–36 (quote: 36); Huff 2011: 314–15.
42. Inkster 1991: 36, 42–43; Moe 2007: 75; Huff 2011: 314–15. Human capital: Allen 2009b: 260–64 (who emphasizes economic development that raised real wages as a driving force). Conversely, Kelly, Mokyr, and Ó Gráda 2014 emphasize the superior human capital and physical condition of British workers as a driver of high real wages. Literacy was not a sufficient condition: Vries 2013: 225–26 notes that literacy requirements for most jobs remained low well into the nineteenth century, and that the Netherlands, which enjoyed a very high literacy rate, was not at the forefront of innovation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
43. Mokyr 2009: 107–13, 121–22. Inventions: Mokyr 1990: 291–92 for these terms.
44. Modest contribution: Mokyr 2002: 46–50, 81; Mokyr 2009: 61–62. Steam engine: Allen 2009b: 252. Goldstone 2002: 367–69 and 2009: 132–34 likewise invokes the case of the steam engine but is generally more sanguine about the relationship between scientific advances and the Industrial Revolution. Vries 2013: 306–12 follows the Goldstone–Mokyr line concerning an “enlightened economy” and sustained innovation rooted in science and technology (and on 313n949 disagrees with McCloskey’s rejection of science as a driver of industrialization). See Landes 1998: 201–6.
45. Inkster 1991: 60–88, esp. 73, 78–80, 87; Mokyr 2009: 93.
46. Patents: Mokyr 2009: 92–93. Exit option: Mokyr 2002: 263–68. On the enlightened political economy, see Mokyr 2009: 63–78. Mokyr 2002: 297 (quote). Cf. also chapter 10 in this volume, for the findings of Hoppit 2017.
47. Jacob 1997: 113–15; Jacob 2014: 7–8 (quote: 8), 221; Inkster 1991: 37–45; Goldstone 2002: 365; Goldstone 2009: 157, 159–60, 169–70; Mokyr 2009: 85–87.
48. Mann 2006: 376; Mokyr 2009: 51, 54 (quote), 57; Slack 2015: 234 (quote), 242–56.
49. Inkster 1991: 44–45; Moe 2007: 76–78.
50. Moe 2007: 77; Jacob 2014: 136–84 (quotes: 163–64).
51. Mokyr 2009: 25–27, 100–105; Vries 2013: 428.
52. McCloskey 2010: 6–25 for a summary (quotes: 10, 7, 24). For an earlier statement, see Baechler 1975: 113.
53. McCloskey 2010: 409, fig.4 for a chart of the causal connections underlying this process, and 406–19 for a more formal presentation of her model.
54. “4 Rs:” McCloskey 2016: xxxiv–xxxvi. By contrast, the aristocratic values of
the earlier Renaissance (another potential “R”) “were not democratic betterments and did not improve the lives of ordinary people, at any rate not for a long time” (xxxv). McCloskey 2016: 367–76 (church), 388–96 (literacy), 396–400 (fragmentation), 401–23 (ideas; quote: 417), 149–291 (rhetoric).
55. McCloskey 2016: 459 (quote).
56. Liberty and hegemony: McCloskey 2016: 359, 362. For China, see chapter 10 in this volume.
57. McCloskey 2016: 511, 439 (quote).
58. Vries 2013: 398–400 and 435–36 stresses the difficulties of relating cultural features empirically to economic outcomes, as the former often include such a high level of generalization that it becomes “impossible to use them as operational variables in concrete … explanations” (quote: 435). Even so, he considers the Weberian maxim that the rationalization of economic life (in capitalism), public life (in the state), and mastery of nature and society (through science and technology) had been pushed farther in the West than elsewhere to be respectable and worthy of closer engagement (436; cf. Chirot 1985: 186–91).
59. Allen 2009b: 16–22 summarizes his argument. See also Allen 2011 for another short version. For criticism, see above all Kelly, Mokyr, and Ó Gráda 2014, esp. 364–67; and also Vries 2013: 199–207.
60. Allen 2009b: 19, 109–10, followed by Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 124. For the conversion of arable- to pastureland after the Black Death and the increase in the number of sheep, see Oldland 2014. For the imposition of growing export tolls on wool and measures to pass those extra costs on to foreign buyers rather than to domestic sellers between the 1270s and 1390s, and their unintended consequence of making (less heavily taxed) broadcloth exports more competitive, see Munro 2005: 451–53. For the bans, see Hoppit 2017: 216–48.
61. Allen 2009b: 110 (quote), and also 130; Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 124–25 (quote).
62. Allen 2009b: 109.
63. Ibid., 110–11, 130 (quote).
64. Ibid., 111–31 (model), esp. 123–28 for the key findings. By contrast, representative government and enclosure hardly mattered. Urban/rural shifts: ibid., 17, table 1.1. London’s population grew tenfold between 1500 and 1700: 19. For similar statistics, see Wrigley 2016: 45–50, 67–74, who emphasizes that English urban growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hugely exceeded the continental rates: the urban population in England grew by more than 700 percent compared to 80 percent in continental Western Europe, and the urban share quadrupled in England while rising by one-third in Western Europe overall, with much of the latter growth due to the former’s: see chapter 10 in this volume. Cf. Palma 2016 for the observation that international trade boosted real wages in some other Atlantic economies of Europe as well. Agricultural revolution: Overton 1996; Wrigley 2016: 51–60, 65, 67–74.
65. Allen 2009b: 129 (quote); Hoffman 2015: 211–12. See also chapter 10 in this volume.
66. Allen 2009b: 111, 162–63. Also see, e.g., Pomeranz 2000: 61; Cuenca Esteban 2004: 55.
67. Goldstone 2002: 363–64; G. Clark 2007: 242; Wrigley 2016: 34, table 3.2. Coal and China: Pomeranz 2000: 59–68; Pomeranz 2006: 252–56; also Marks 2002: 110–11; Tvedt 2010: 34, 36. Against Pomeranz’s emphasis on the contingency of access to coal, see, from different angles, Bryant 2006: 438; Parthasarathi 2011: 162–64; Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 167; Vries 2013: 291–96; Vries 2015: 404. Coal as ghost acreages: E. Jones 2003: 84.
68. Disruption: contra Goldstone 2002: 360–61, who avers that if the coalfields had been located in Brittany instead of Britain, coal could simply have been imported—which would hardly have been possible during the French Wars. Activation: Allen 2009b: 84–90 (quotes: 90). Mokyr 2009: 102 notes that coal use was ultimately driven by changes in knowledge that created demand and enabled exploitation. Allen 2009b: 90–96 likewise recognizes collective invention as a driver of demand for coal.
69. See chapter 10 in this volume.
70. Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 125 (quote).
71. Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 7 correctly note that Allen’s model does not work without recourse to politics to explain how the necessary economic conditions arose.
72. E. Jones 2003: 3–149, 225–38 (quote: 119); Rosenthal and Wong 2011, esp. 228–40 for their conclusions.
73. Mitterauer 2003: 274–98; van Zanden 2009a: esp. 291–300 (quotes: 294–95), and also 295: “The big wave of institutional design of the 10th–13th centuries occurred in a political vacuum resulting from the disintegration of the Carolingian empire, and more generally, the weakness of earlier Greco-Roman traditions.”
74. Ringmar 2007: 61–92, 131–48; Duchesne 2011: 165–229; Marks 2002: 156.
75. Acemoglu and Robinson 2012: 197–212; Bayly 2004: 59–82.
76. Goldstone 2009: 108–76. In light of this, his objections to (a crude, even strawman version of) the state system argument (100–102) seems curiously misguided: see chapter 10 in this volume. See also 172: “The unusual characteristics of Britain’s social, political, religious, and intellectual life—many of them emerging over many centuries from Magna Charta to the Toleration Act of 1689—created an alternative to the dominant tendencies on the continent and created the first society in which innovation and scientific engineering became widespread and firmly integrated into everyday production routines.”
77. Vries 2013: 416, 427–28; Vries 2015: 431–36. See also, e.g., O’Brien 2011; Parthasarathi 2011: 264–67.
78. Mokyr 2002: 263–75; Mokyr 2009: 7, 25–27, 63–78. Fragmentation and enlightenment: Mokyr 2005: 342; Mokyr 2007: 23–26; Mokyr 2017: 165–78.
79. Karayalcin 2016: 495 explains the Great Divergence in terms of variation in land regimes in post–Black Death Europe, a diversity that was itself associated with the presence of a multistate system. Wrigley 2016: 201–3 focuses on positive feedback mechanisms within the modernizing English economy without seeking to explain what mobilized and mediated these mechanisms.
80. G. Clark 2007. Reviews are gathered at http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/a_farewell_to_alms.html.
81. See van Zanden 2009a: 101–43 for this line of reasoning; and see also Hartmann 2004 for the notion that this pattern undergirded the first Industrial Revolution (231–42), although the actual mechanisms remain unclear. See Dennison and Ogilvie 2014 and 2016 for a sustained critique of the proposed linkage between the Northwestern European marriage pattern and economic growth, contra De Moor and van Zanden 2010 and Carmichael et al. 2016, among others.
82. Belich 2016: 99–104. For the notion of labor-saving devices and capital use, see Herlihy 1997: 49–51, doubted by his editor Samuel K. Cohn Jr. (10–12) on chronological grounds.
83. Voigtländer and Voth 2009: 248–51; Voigtländer and Voth 2013a, 2013b. In a shift away from an earlier model (Voigtländer and Voth 2006), war is the most important proximate factor for them: Voigtländer and Voth 2013a: 182; Voigtländer and Voth 2013b: 799. Cf. Edwards and Ogilvie 2018 for criticism of other elements of their argument.
84. See Tvedt 2010 for an illuminating comparative study.
85. Rosenthal and Wong 2011: 200 are right to maintain that “political competition and conflict are not enough to guarantee technological change and economic growth.” But these are necessary preconditions for making it happen. Quote: Allen 2009b: 275. See Mokyr 2006 for the view that if the Industrial Revolution had not happened in Europe, it probably would not have happened at all; and more generally Crone 2003: 171–75 (who notes that indigenous modernizing development was unlikely to have occurred in Japan instead, which was not generally part of a competitive state system: 174–75). The contributors to Prados de la Escosura 2004 all agree on the exceptional nature of the British Industrial Revolution.
86. I say “most likely” because we cannot strictly speaking establish whether traditional empire was in principle and invariably inimical to modernizing development or merely usually and in practice. Based on Part V of this book, I do, however, incline toward the former.
EPILOGUE
1. It has not tak
en much effort to flesh out David Landes’s intuition that “Europe’s good fortune lay in the fall of Rome and the weakness and division that ensued. (So much for the lamentations of generations of classicists and Latin teachers.)” (Landes 1998: 37). By now, outright praise of the Roman empire has (largely) followed modern colonial empires to the trash heap of history. I touch on the historical merits of Latin near the end. of this chapter.
2. Quoted from http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Life_of_Brian/10.htm.
3. The general picture holds true even as the precise scale of these various developments continues to be debated. For urbanization, see Scheidel 2007a: 78–80; Wilson 2011: 179–93; J. Hanson 2016. Population size is a particularly controversial issue but even conservative estimates point to relatively high densities: see Frier 2000: 814, table 6, updated by Scheidel 2007a: 48. For maritime market integration and lowered transaction costs, see Scheidel 2011a; Scheidel and Meeks 2014. For bulk goods, see, e.g., Erdkamp 2005. For a high estimate of monetary value, see Duncan-Jones 1994: 168–70; but cf. Scheidel 2009c: 201–2. For isotopic evidence of silver ore smelting preserved in ice cores, see the references in Scheidel 2009b: 47–48n7, and most recently McConnell et al. 2018. Credit: Harris 2006; Rathbone and Temin 2008.
Escape From Rome Page 69