Lucky China. Were it not for the silver, potato and maize Europe
brought from the Americas, the eighteenth- through nineteenth-
century might very well have been a time of extreme misery and
poverty, of intense population pressure and declining living
standards. Per capita production and consumption standards
would certainly have not been as stable. They would have declined.
Such American imports however were only one of the ways in
which China eased its land constraints. Another was through long
distance, which P does not ignore, but instead constructs the
rather ingenious argument that China could not possibly benefit as
much from its long distance trade as Europe from its trade with the
New World. The transAtlantic trade was a whole new type of trade
with benefits and opportunities simply unavailable or impossible in
any other type of international trade relation.
It is a difficult argument which he makes, if only because P first
has to show 1) that a Europe without the Americas would not have
been able to obtain key land-intensive goods elsewhere, i.e. Baltic
and eastern Europe. He has to convince us that western Europe,
really England, obtained goods from the Americas not readily
available elsewhere. Likewise, 2) he wants to show that, while
China was more efficient at obtaining its goods through lon-
distance trade, it faced certain unfortunate difficulties in obtaining
them because (let's just say what he has in mind) they were more
benign and were not as eager in peripheral exploitation.
Argument starts as follows: "I have argued above that thanks to
extremely efficient (and often labor intensive) ways of using
resources, Chinese and Japanese cores did better at finding *local*
palliatives for shortages of land-intensive resources [his italics;
which ignores completely potatoes and corn; by "palliatives" he
means land-saving innovations which were labor intensive]; but
these solutions were far from complete (especially for timber) and
they depended on importing other non-local resources (e,g.,
Manchurian beancake to relieve cotton-growing soil). In short, both
European and Asian core areas needed to obtain land-intensive
resources through long-distance trade with less densely populated
areas" (241).
Continues: "To the extent that this long-distance trade [with less
densely populated areas facing no land constraints] was
**consensual trade** [my italics] with other parts of the Old World,
cores at both ends of Eurasia faced comparable opportunities and
limits; but, a good case can be made that Chinese cores used this
kind of trade more successfully than their western European
counterparts did" (241).
The argument why western Europe could not quite get what it
needed from eastern Europe, and why China could not quite benefit
from its long distance trade as Europe did in the Americas, is a
highly contorted 20 pages long defence with Occam's razor
flashing all over it but he has to make it.
