By specifying P's analysis on the nature of the constraints China
was facing on a region by region basis, in the context of a brief
overview of China's historical geography, I think we can now move
on to assess, critically, the logic of P' s claim that Europe was
able to benefit much more from its "coercive" trade with the New
World than China trading with Southeast Asia or within its own
imperial borders.
Let me start from a point I began last week. It is a
difficult/sophisticated argument which Pomeranz makes, if only
because he has to show that 1) a Europe/England without the
Americas would not have been able to obtain as cheaply key land-
intensive goods elsewhere, i.e. Baltic and eastern
Europe, as well as answer 2) why those regions in China facing
acute ecological pressures encountered major
unfortunate difficulties importing scarce goods from other regions
within or outside.
Re 2, the argument is highly fabricated though the essential point
does come through and it is quite intelligent: as given regions
began to experience diminishing returns in the expoirt of raw
materials and thus increasing costs - "as, for instance, exporting
more lumber began to involve hauling logs further and further to the
river bank" - they began to export less and "began a process of
import substitution" in which they "manufactured goods they had
previously imported" from the more advanced regions (243).
Except when "special raw materials" were needed [?] the state
could not reverse this process because China was a land of free
labor "where people were free to swithch into new kinds of
production and to decide which goods to produce for themselves
and which to purchase with the cash earned from their labor" (243).
The result was that most (peripheral) provinces in China - as they
faced higher export costs - began adopting, freely and naturally,
import substitution practices, which "limited the ability of more
advanced regions to keep growing and to specialize further in
manufacturing " (245).
If P's argument is difficult to read - and I have stuck only to the one
obvious point - it is because he embroils you into his own effort to
avoid slipping the idea that perhaps China was indeed encountering
worst ecological limitations than Europe (or, for that matter, had
less efficient markets, less regional specialization), so he goes on
into all sorts of equivocations/additions including how gender norms
may have "encouraged import substitution in the interior" (249) - an
argument which does not square well with his earlier rejection of
Goldstone's gender theory.
In the case of Europe's trade with eastern Europe, the tables are
turned; now we are dealing with a periphery "with varying degrees
of forced labor" with the consequent scenario that "import
substitution was slower than in the Chinese interior" (254),
because landlords, for one, relied on cheaper compulsory labor and
therefore experienced "much slower" diminishing returns to export
production" -- BUT; and at this point, as I was reading the book, I
skipped a few pages and went right to the conclusion 'cause I had
had enough of the doubletalk) western Europe could not really get
eastern Europe to export much of their land-saving goods because
that area had an "underconsumption problem" due to inadequate
demand and maldistribution of income.
Oh no, he has created 'reasonable doubt' among economic
historians. Myself I don't intend to read those pages.
