ListServ Discourse
I could not agree more with Leo. I know it is difficult to control oneself in times of heated exchanges from responding on the spot to everything you disagree with or take as being unfair. But in the last month or so we have seen too many repetitive statements, smart one-liners, personal accusations of disloyalty to the left. My way of dealing with this has been to open a few postings then delete en masse everything else. But lately I don't even care to open anything, may read a few sentences here and there, but who can follow this debates in this list when some are sending 22 postings a day?! This is out of order. Louis has no reason to do this. He should simply rest satisfied with his effort, which people here respect, repond to some criticisms, but stop trying to take over the list with his Lenin-style method of communication full of accusations. The idea that he is a victim of pen-l is nonsense. Again, I repeat, he should rest confindent that, even if people disagree with him, he has made a serious substantive effort advancing his ideas. There is no need for him to feel that he has to convince everyone, something which I am sure would not please him anyways, for he would no longer have anyone to argue with.
Minimum Posting Length (Re: ListServ Discourse
This raises an interesting point. Usually the solution to overposting is to ask for fewer posts. But that's unsatisfying because sometimes people are engaged enough in real exchange to make quicker posts worthwhile. But one solution would be not to limit the posts but actually to mandate a minimum length. If to post, people had to produce a certain length of discourse, it would force them to think about a range of issues. It would also discourage purely personal flaming and sniping, except in the longer, usually more intensive and entertaining form which at least has some substance. Yes, there is no clear, either-or solution. Short, enterteining sniping with little substance are worth reading. Limiting post to a particular number is also unrealistic when an intensive exchange is on. But I do think there's a point when you are overposting; it is not definite but perhaps over 10 a day, or certainly over 15 is just too much.
Re: Wittfogel
I had no desire to present myself as an advocate of Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism, but I think too many specialists today have the bad habit of rejecting in outright too many classic interpretations just because they were enunciated in extreme and dogmatic forms. We should be glad that not all scholars have reacted this way towards Wittfogel. Who would deny that in the field of anthropology Wittfogel's work served as a major stimulus to research re the role of irrigation in the development of early civilizations (see Harris, 1980; Mitchell, 1973)? Or that, by carrying for the first time a thorough historical investigation on the 'Asiatic Mode of Production', he contributed decisely to the rejection of the unilinealism of Stalin's five-stage theory (Mandel, 1971)? But before we look further at his legacy, it might be convenient to clarify what Wittfogel was trying to say. However much Wittfogel may have stimulated research into the origins of the state, I think it would be wrong to interpret the idea of 'Oriental Despotism' as if it were a general theory of the *origins* of the state along great rivers. It is, rather, a theory which seeks to explain the consolidation of a *type of despotic state* as a function of the necessities of *large-scale* irrigation agriculture. This is particularly clear in his 1935 article, The Stages of Development in Chinese Economic and Social History. There his claim is *not* that the Shang dynasty (1766 -1045 BC), or even any of the dynasties Confucius (551-479 BC) admired, originated out of large scale irrigation. His argument is that, toward the end of the Chou period, or during the Ch'in dynasty (or, since the exact periods of these dynasties were even less known in the 1930s, let's give the rounded date of during [and after] the fourth century BC): the material bases for the dissolution of the village commune were prepared by the increase in the productivity of labor through the introduction of [iron] metal implements, and especially by irrigation, which was coming more and more into use also in north China at the end of the Chou period. We cannot trace this trend in detail. We merely wish to establish that the development of public forms of labor (dyke and canal building), which **originally grew up out of its private forms**, now reached in a decisive manner upon the private forms of agricultural production. Although irrigation was first employed, in the central and western sections of China, in an incidental and **local manner**, the development of public works in the northeast (at first mostly dykes) led to an irrigational agriculture supported by public canal construction, which eventually rose to be the ruling form of agricultural production (my italics, 118). Wittfogel further says, and let's remember he is a China scholar writing in the 1930s: The economic and political importance of this canal construction is exhibited most clearly in the history of the state of Ch'in...The changing of the agrarian order, canal-building on *a great scale*, both linked with ruthless destruction of the old feudal structure, enabled the *young* bureaucratic, centralized state to defeat the other states, which were still feudal, and to enter into the heritage of the Chou dynasty...The growth of public works - dykes, canals, fortifications, luxurious buildings - requires **a new type of state officials** (my italics, 118-119). Now, no matter what disagreements one may have with Wittfogel's negative judgment of this new hydraulic state as a highly despotic and arbitrary form of rule, it is worth noticing that recent research supports his observation that it was more or less *after 500BC* that great irrigation works were brought into use in North China. Major hydraulic infrastructures were laid under the Chhin Emperor, Shih Huang Ti (256 BC -) with the construction of the Cheng Kuo canal in Shensi and the Kuan-hsien canal in Szechwan, works which were carried to enormous heights by Wu- Ti, first emperor of the Han dynasty (206 BC - ) with the building of a canal in Honan and Shansi that irrigated over a million acres of arable land (Bray, 587-88). Obviously, as Micheal Mann (1986, 97) concludes, there was no necessary connection in the ancient world between hydraulic agriculture and despotism, since the vast number of irrigation works, including in imperial Egypt (Butzer 1976), were relatively small, and locally managed. But I would suggest that in China the hydraulic infrastructures were of much greater magnitude than in any other civilization - a critical comparative fact which should not be underestimated. And while Wittfogel exaggerates the despotic power of the Chinese state, I still think we ought to explore the causal connection between *size and importance* of irrigation schemes and canal networks, and the degree of centralization of political power. The hydraulic works of ancient states were not all the same.
Yellow River: Facts on File
Mark Jones: I guess my problem comes down to not quite believing that you've etsbalished more than a kind of mentality, a mass or more properly, an elite psychology which consitututed lock-in: the elites were trapped not so much by scarcity of capital which could be diverted from hydraulic maintenance as by a moral investment in the past and by a political need to stabilise society in the conservative ways characteristic especially of the Ming. You may be reading this into my posts because I suggested that military expansionism and/or protectionism from the barbarians of the north, not just population pressure, drove the Chinese to build large hydraulic works starting in the third century BC, and because I have sometimes worded this as a falling out of the Garden of Eden. Yet it is a scientific fact that the augmentation of power requires, as Elvin puts it, the creation of means to capture and direct the flow of energy in nature just as much as its flow in other human beings (sometimes known as exploitaion) (21). The greatest flow of energy in Ancient China was in the Yellow River. But this river, *given its ecological characteristics*, was unwilling to relinquish its enormous energy, which was contained less in the current of the water than in the extreme amounts of silt it carried, without continuous and *expansionary* investments in hydraulic works. My disagreement with Elvin is that his explanation of lock-in is more technological than ecological although he is well aware of the sedimentation problem. He, however, makes no distinction between lock-in in the wet rice regions and lock-in in North which was specifically a characteristic of this River. Mark: Because in fact there was plenty of surplus available to redirect into take-off; if you compare with the English Industrial Revo you see there that the high-growth manufacturing industries were sectorally insignificant at the start and the amounts of capital which take-off required were relatively quite small (relative to what was avaialble, or to elite luxury consumption). So you end up wondering about the wider context of Chinese and Japanese failure to capitalise on early technological advances, and even the tendency to lose them and to regress. I agree there was plenty of surplus in China. Elvin does not present his notion of hydraulic lock-in, which he always calls technolgical lock-in except for one instance, as an attempt to explain China's long-term pattern of development. It is simply an observation he makes in a paper which is otherwise about the ecologically unsustainable growth of Imperial China. His well-known high- level equilibrium trap is his explanation why China did not industrialize; and it says that while China had ample supplies of capital, merchants were reluctant to invest it in new technologies due to lack of effective demand and availability of cheap labor...I think, however, we can develop this notion of hydraulic lock-in into a general theory. Other Sinologists have noted similar lock-in qualities in China most prominently the idea of population-lock in.
Yellow River: Facts on File
Tim: Yes, but doesn't the high-silt content of the river date back several thousand years at least? Isn't it pretty much the prehistoric, natural state of the river? I agree. It is not about sedimentation per se; it is about the excessive sedimentation of this River combined with its turbulent variations in flow.
Yellow River: Facts on File
You may know about this than I do, but the current would bring the silt down to the sea over time. If it just remained at the bottom of the river, there would be no problem. I was saying this is not the case because this river carries up to 40, even 60 perceny sediment by weight which is way more than that of nay other river. As I said, the land bordering the river and the bed of the river has been raised higher and higher - Cressy notes that the average level of the plain adjacent to the river has risen up about 7 feet per century, while the bed of the river has risen an additional three feet per century - so that when the river overflows again, the old dikes are overtopped, making it necessary to build higher and higher dikes. This is a lock-in situation precisely due to this: no amount of dyking provides a definite solution and new hydraulic works must be built.
Karl Wittfogel
Some weeks ago I mentioned Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism as a work worth consulting to counter the growing hegemony of neoclassical economics and its festive re-evaluation of Imperial China as a society of relatively unrestricted markets. Before we talk about those markets, one ought to think about the massive use of collective manpower for hydraulic maintenance and expansion. This, without fear of Wittfogel's later associations with the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War years. I concur with various criticisms directed primarily at Wittfogel's argument that strong states which by their nature were incapable of allowing or promoting trade and private property emerged in Asian societies in response to the functional need to undertake massive hydraulic works. But I think scholars have the bad habit of rejecting in toto too many classic interpretations the moment they discover a flaw or two. Not only are big theories out, but specialists cannot help distorting them by reshaping them into grids called models. Take it all or leave it. But I rather follow in the footsteps of Ernest Mandel (1971) who, even as he recognizes Wittfogel's flaws, appreciates his contribution to the advancement of the concept Asiatic Mode of Production. Not the anti-Eurocentrics but Stalin prohited any discussion of this concept on the supreme grounds it could not be fitted into the traditional four stages. Thanks to Wittfogel the discussion was revived, allowing Mandel later to clarify much of the issues, by realizing that the fundamental characteristics of the Asiatic Mode need not all be accepted (a mode which today I would prefer to call hydraulic even more than the current Marxist terms of Tributary or State), characteristics which Marx had already listed in his Grundrisse before Wittfogel's research. Let me list these traits below and state which are still valid. 1. There is an absence of private property in land. (Incorrect for Imperial China, Mogul India.) 2. Tribal village communities retain an essential cohesive force, through their close union with agriculture and craft industry, despite conquest and consolidation of states above them. (Mandel has # 2 here as two separate traits, 2 and 3, so that the following # 3 below is his #4): (Does not apply to the advanced societies of Asia which Marx had in mind). 3. For geographical and climatic reasons, however, the prosperity of agriculture in these regions requires impressive hydraulic works: 'Artificial irrigation is here the first condition of agriculture'. This irrigation requires nearly everywhere a central authority to regulate it and to undertake large-scale works (Still a very valuable idea worth further research) 4. Therefore, these are societies in which a powerful state manages to concentrate most of the surplus product, and in which stratification depends on access to this suplus, the 'internal logic' of which favors stability in the relations of production as the best way to gain control over this surplus. (True, but I would say the 'internal logic' was affected by point #3). 5. The consequence of this concentration of the wealth and power of society in the hands of state officials is that the accumulation of capital is retarded (Mandel's term). Hence, while it is undeniable that under the Ming dynasty China experienced - like India at the height of the Mogul period - an expansion of luxury production and private trade that brought the country to the threshold of manufacturing and commercial capitalism...this treshold was not crossed (Mandel, 124). (This #5 is not listed as a trait by Mandel but is an argument he soon makes after his list, as a historical feature distinguishing Asia from Europe). (True, but we need to avoid idea the state was anti-capitalist.) Now, I think Mandel is to the point when he criticizes people like Godelier for using just trait #2 as the key defining one, allowing themselves the application of this concept to a whole range of societies, specifically societies in transition from classless (where village community production prevailed) to class society (as conquerors placed themselves above the villages). Marx never intended this concept to apply to such societies; he was instead thinking of Indian and Chinese society as they were when European industrial capital encountered them in the eighteenth century (Mandel, 127). If you sum up Mandel's analysis, the message is clear: we don't even have to accept point #1 re the absence of property and how this may have curtailed capitalist accumulation. No, Mandel, and many others, as I keep finding, were aware China could have, in the long run, cultivated industrial capitalism; it is just that Europe took-off first. Mandel, however, puts more emphasis than I would on those traits relating to the class character and the functional role of the hydraulic state. My interest is more on the
Karl Wittfogel
S.K Sanderson (1995) also notes how anthropologists misappropriated Wittofogel's idea of Oriental Despotism as if it were a general theory of the *rise of the state*, when he was in fact examining a specific type of state - Hydraulic - which he claimed emerged in such regions as ancient China and India as well as Egypt and Mesopotamia. Perhaps because he included ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, where state-civilizations did *first* arise, but no longer existed in the eighteenth century, scholars thought he was advancing a general theory of the origins of the state, although he was really trying to understand the internal logic of large-scale irrigation states. This is not to say his theory cannot be used as a theory of the origins of the state to argue that large scale irrigated works functionally required an elaborate bureaucratic centre to finance, oversee, and expand such works.
Karl Wittfogel
Many thanks for this, will forwarded home and read it. Wonder if those conversations are the ones he had with Martin Jay in the early 70s. Re: Wittfogel, see Telos #43 in 1980, Conversations With Wittfogel, http://www.angelfire.com/biz/telospress/contents43.html and the book by G.L. Ulmen. And this from the Bulletin of Concerned Asia Scholars, Ulrich Vogel - K. A. Wittfogel's Marxist Studies on China 1926-1939 [11:4] http://csf.colorado.edu/bcas/main/backreg.htm http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/1713.html Europe-Asia Studies; July 1998 'THE PEOPLE NEED A TSAR': THE EMERGENCE OF NATIONAL BOLSHEVISM AS STALINIST IDEOLOGY, 1931-1941 - ...Moscow also attempted to court allies within the German-national and national-revolutionary intelligence communities. Thus, in January 1932, prominent figures such as Otto Hoetzsch, Klaus Mehnert, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, Adolf Grabowsky, Friedrich Lenz, and Ernst Niekisch could be recruited for an Association for the Study of the Planned Economy in the USSR (Arbplan), founded by party members Georg Lukacs, Arvid von Hamack, Karl A. Wittfogel and Paul Massing. In August 1932, an Arbplan delegation traveled to Soviet Russia. In a 1941 party report, Lukacs characterized the twenty-five participants as people from the Right, with sometimes fascist ideas, who were, however, for various reasons, supporters of a pro-Soviet orientation of German politics. Even if this undertaking remained a mere episode, it sheds light on Soviet foreign policy toward Germany before 1933. Michael Pugliese, who y'all ignore it seems... - Original Message - From: Ricardo Duchesne [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 8:35 AM Subject: [PEN-L:14211] Karl Wittfogel Some weeks ago I mentioned Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism as a work worth consulting to counter the growing hegemony of neoclassical economics and its festive re-evaluation of Imperial China as a society of relatively unrestricted markets. Before we talk about those markets, one ought to think about the massive use of collective manpower for hydraulic maintenance and expansion. This, without fear of Wittfogel's later associations with the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War years. I concur with various criticisms directed primarily at Wittfogel's argument that strong states which by their nature were incapable of allowing or promoting trade and private property emerged in Asian societies in response to the functional need to undertake massive hydraulic works. But I think scholars have the bad habit of rejecting in toto too many classic interpretations the moment they discover a flaw or two. Not only are big theories out, but specialists cannot help distorting them by reshaping them into grids called models. Take it all or leave it. But I rather follow in the footsteps of Ernest Mandel (1971) who, even as he recognizes Wittfogel's flaws, appreciates his contribution to the advancement of the concept Asiatic Mode of Production. Not the anti-Eurocentrics but Stalin prohited any discussion of this concept on the supreme grounds it could not be fitted into the traditional four stages. Thanks to Wittfogel the discussion was revived, allowing Mandel later to clarify much of the issues, by realizing that the fundamental characteristics of the Asiatic Mode need not all be accepted (a mode which today I would prefer to call hydraulic even more than the current Marxist terms of Tributary or State), characteristics which Marx had already listed in his Grundrisse before Wittfogel's research. Let me list these traits below and state which are still valid. 1. There is an absence of private property in land. (Incorrect for Imperial China, Mogul India.) 2. Tribal village communities retain an essential cohesive force, through their close union with agriculture and craft industry, despite conquest and consolidation of states above them. (Mandel has # 2 here as two separate traits, 2 and 3, so that the following # 3 below is his #4): (Does not apply to the advanced societies of Asia which Marx had in mind). 3. For geographical and climatic reasons, however, the prosperity of agriculture in these regions requires impressive hydraulic works: 'Artificial irrigation is here the first condition of agriculture'. This irrigation requires nearly everywhere a central authority to regulate it and to undertake large-scale works (Still a very valuable idea worth further research) 4. Therefore, these are societies in which a powerful state manages to concentrate most of the surplus product, and in which stratification depends on access to this suplus, the 'internal logic' of which favors stability in the relations of production as the best way to gain control over this surplus. (True, but I would say the 'internal logic' was affected by point #3). 5
Karl Wittfogel
Inasmuch as anthropoligists mistakenly attributed to Wittfogel a general theory of the origins of the state, it was tempting to overstress trait #2, that is, the village community aspect of the Asiatic Mode; and thus to somehow reconceptualize this mode as a transionary mode in-between primitive communism and the slave or ancient or feudal modes, such that in Asia the appearance of this mode broke the four stage chain near its beginning.
Yellow River: Faustian lock-in
By the *third century BC* the wonderful world of the Yang-shao farmers and Lungshan peasants living peacefullly together and practicing an extensive system of cultivation, i.e, shifting or slash and burn agriculture, with only a rudimentary degree of social stratification, had long been consigned to oblivion, and already replaced by the distant memory of the earliest recorded dynasty, that of the Shang (1766-1045BC). The extremely fertile and easy to work loess lands of the north had been capable of yielding good crops *without the need for elaborate intensive systems of cultivation* for thousands of years. But once the loess lands were fully colonized on an extensive basis and the gradual build-up of population speeded up the cycle of land clearance until the point was reached at which the forest could not replaced itself fast enough to permit shifting agriculture to continue, a more intensive system of farming based on irrigation and metal tools was adopted. The irrigation of water sustained the Shang and the Zhou (to 256 BC) dynasties. The semimythical figure named Yu the Great was the first of the Yellow River's dike builders (though some say that instead of dyking he cleared the river channel to facilitate drainage and alleviate floods). Either way, Yu is said to have mobilized thousands of people to dredge the riverbed and dig diversion canals. When the project was completed , the legend goes, Yu (or his son) founded the Xia empire (2205-1766 BC) - which some sources list as the first dynasty before the Shang, but this is still unverified. Yet, it seems that before about 500 BC or, more precisely, up until about the *third century BC*, there were no are no huge dike- building projects where hundreds of thousands of workers were mobilized to excavate millions of tonnes of earth. Before Ch'in (or the Chh'in or the Qirn) (221-206 BC), and the Han (206 - BC) dynasties China seemed to have enjoyed an ecological economic system with a political philosophy that put at the centre of its conceptions the conservation of a well-ordered nature (Elvin, 17). But such environmental wisdom could only coexist for so long with the need to overcome population pressures and the desire to achieve political and military hegemony. I have already cited Bray that The Chhin government had already built two considerable irrigation projects during the --3rd [BC], the Cheng Kuo canal in Chhin (Shensi) itself and the Kuan-hsien canal in Szechwan. Using different names, Elvins also sees this period as the one when China decided to take a great leap forward in hydraulic development: The state of Qirn was in due course to unify the empire, greatly increased the effectiveness of its war-machine in the third century BC by the improvement and creation respectively of two gigantic irrigation systems...systems that permitted a greater, cheaper, and more reliable production of food. The first of these was that in the present province of Sichuan [Szchwan] where the Mirn River leaves the mountain and flows out across a sloping fan-shaped plain. The principle was simple: water, moved by gravity, was first diverted from the main stream (in such a way as to stabilze, as far as possible, the quantity entering the system...); then it was directed through a network of distribution channels, used for irrigation, and the residue returned to the main course far downstream. The details required solving the problem presented by the deposition of sediments, as the slowing of the current reduced the competence of the flow to carry suspended particles, and thus the system was threatened with the infilling of its channels over time[regular dredging, flushing out periodically deposits, regulating the water supply] required the repeated use of a large quantity of labour...This is an early example of pre-modern lock-in: the initial investment, on which the productivity of the entire system rested, could only be preserved at the cost of perpetual expensive maintenance The Zheng Guor Canal to the north of the Weih River, in what is today Shaanxi province, and started in 246BC, took heavily silt- laden water from the Jing River to the Luoh River...so that water would be released onto the fields below where, in the words of a Hahn-dynasty ditty 'it served as both irrigation and fertilizer'...The canal needed continuous re-engineering because of siltation, including new adit channels As we also saw earlier from Bray, Wu-Ti, the first emperor of the Han dynasty, carried to new heights what the Chhin dynasty started through an enormous programme of canal building in Honan and Shansi that irrigated over a million acres of arable land, while lesser projests were realised in Northwest China and Wei and Huai valleys. By the middle of Wu-Ti's reign...productivity in the arid areas of the Northwest had been raised considerably. (588) A Faustian bargain had been signed; and
Yellow River: Facts on File
I have come to the conclusion that China's hydraulic lock-in and long term patter of development cannot be fully grasped without a clear appreciation of the ecological dynamic of the Yellow River. This, the most unsubordinate, intractable, turbulent river of the world, has long driven a hard bargain. In exchange for its heavily sedimented water, the fruit that nourished the Shang, the Zhou, the Chhin, the Han, the Sui, and the Tang civilizations (to 907AD), it killed more people than any other river in the world. Here are some facts on file: -- The Hwang Ho, with a lenth of 2,900 miles, is China's second largest river, and the 10th longest in the world. --Carrying up to 40 percent sediment by weight (in some stretches as much as 60 percent), it is the most silt-laden river of the world. Sediment over 10 percent by weight is very rare among the large rivers of the world; even 2 to 3 percent is high (Cressy, 1955). Much of the silt is loess, a fine wind-blown soil which the river picks up in its upper course as it flows through the yellow earth region. Much of this silt is then dropped in its more sluggish lower reaches, building up the height of the river bed, and making its course unstable (Blunden and Elvin, 17) --While the Yangzi River discharges a greater volume of water, the Hwang Ho is much more unstable in its flow; at low water, the flow may drop to 5000 cubic feet per second; in flood it can reach 1,000,000 (Cressy). But the most challenging engineering aspect is control of the exceptionally high sediment. As the river passes through the loess lands and erodes the loess, it becomes a river of yellow mud which is then deposited across the North China Plain. -- To deal with this shifting, sediment-loaded river, dykes were built, to keep the water stable, but as a result of dike building, the surplus sediment which nature would have otherwise spread far and wide has been confined between artificial barriers. Thus the bed of the river has been continually raised requiring dikes to be built higher and higher. This dyking has gone on indefinetely. Millions now live below the level of the diked floor water. Areas miles from the river have elevations many feet below the bottom of the river. --But this river refuses to be tamed. Not only has the river's levees been breached thousands of times, its lower course has changed 26 times in China's history. A highly devastating change of course occurred in 1194 AD when flood water rushed onto the Huai River basin taking over this river's drainage system for the next 700 years (Leung, 1996). Siltation at the mouth of the River has extended the length of the river by about 35 miles betweern 1975 and 1991. -- By the 1950s the northwest province of Shensi had 13 modern canal systems, with a total length of 600 miles. Currently the Chinese are constructing a massive new dam called Multipurpose Dam Project with 10 intake towers, nine flood and sediment tunnels, six power tunnels and an underground powerhouse. --The floods of Hwang Ho are the most destructive, since they persist for long periods and spread over the countryside in every direction (unlike the Mississipi where the flooded areas are usually a ribbon between the river and its bluff). When the flood ends, a veneer of sand and mud covers everything except for the few tree tops which had remained above water. While the Egyptians referred to the annual flooding of the Nile as the Gift of the Nile, the Chinese have nicknamed their unruly Hwang Ho China's Sorrow. --When the river's current slows, and the river loses its carrying power, excessive sedimentation takes place within a few days. The bed of the river is thus raised. When the next flood arrives, dikes are overtopped before there is a chance for the increased movement of the water to excavate previous accumulations. -- No amount of dyking can entirely eliminate the wide variations in its flow, which to an extent seen nowhere else in the world it is also a flow of mud. Each year 1,890, 000, 000 metric tons of silt are brought to the head of the delta plain. The control of the Hwang Ho is surely one of the most baffling hydrologic problems on earth; were the river in the United States it would tax all the country's financial resources and engineering skills (Cressy). -- Two million lost their lives from drowning or starvation after the flood of 1888. But too little rain can be worse than too much. Serious draughts have been a regular occurence in the dry north, particularly the provinces of Hopei, Honan, Shansi, Shensi, and Shantung, where 100 out of the 216 greatest draughts have been recorded
Yellow River: Faustian lock-in?
Marshall Berman on Faust 'The Developer' Suddenly Faust springs up enraged: Why should men let things go on being the way they have always been? Isn't it about time for mankind to assert itself against nature's tyrannical arrogance, to confront natural forces in the name of 'the free spirit that protects all rights'? It is outrageous that, for all the vast energy expended by the sea, it merely surges endlessly back and forth-- 'and nothing is achieved!' 'This drives me near to desperate distress! Such elemental power unharnessed, purposeless! There dares my spirit soar past all it knew; Here I would fight, this I would subdue!' ...the Faustian enterprise will be less quixotic and more fruitful, because it will draw on nature's own energy and organize that energy into the fuel for new collective human purposes and projects of which archaic kings could hardly have dreamt 'And it is possible!...Fast in my mind, plan upon plan unfolds'. Suddenly the landscape around him metamorphoses into a site. He outlines great reclamation projects to harness the sea for human purposes: man-made harbors and canals that can move ships full of goods and men; dams for large-scale irrigation; green fields and forests, pastures and gardens, a vast and intensive agriculture; waterpower to attract and support emerging industries; thriving settlements, new towns and cities to come -- and all this to be created out of a barren wasteland where humans have never dared to live 'Daily they would vainly storm, Pick and shovel, stroke for stroke; Where the flames would nightly swarm Was a dam when we awoke. Human sacrifices bled, Tortured screams would pierce the night, And where blazes seaward spread A canal would greet the light' He has replaced a barren, sterile economy with a dynamic new one that will 'open up space for many millions/ To live, not securely, but free for action' In order to understand the developer's tragedy, we must judge his vision of the world not only by what it sees -- by the immense new horizons it opens up for mankind -- but also by what it does not see: what human realities it refuses to look at, what potentialities it cannot bear to face Faust becomes obsessed with this old couple and their little piece of land: 'That aged couple should have yielded, / I want their lindens in my grip, / Since these few trees that are denied me / Undo my worldwide ownership...Hence is our soul upon the rack, / To feel, amid plenty, what we lack'. Faust commits his first self-consciously evil act. He summons Mephisto and his 'mighty men' and orders them to get the old people out of the way. He does not want to see it, or to know the details of how it is done. But now he has staked his whole identity on the will to change, and on his power to fulfill that will, his bond with his past petrifies him. 'That bell, those lindens' sweet perfume Enfolds me like a church or tomb' For the developer, to stop moving, to rest in the shadows, to let the old people enfold him, is death (pp 60-69)
Geras vs Laclau
Justin: I haven't read the debate for a long time, and I can't recall the details. But I did read the _whole_ debate, and LM's book, too, quite carefully. However, this isn't going anywhere unless someone starts posting arguments rather that confessio fidei about which arguments they liked. I take it, first, that you think that LM can avoid a radical antirealism that makes the existence of soccer balls or rocks to be mind-dependent. Please explain, and explain why the scope and limits of their antirealism is. I was impressed by Geras' argument that LM caricature the sort of determinations that historical materialism involves in its explanations, making it out to be a flat, monocausal economic reductionism. G's explanation of relative autonomy is pretty good, in my view. I was also impressed by his argument that, in going through actual Marxist thinkers, LM, whenever faced with textual counterexamples, conclude that therefore Luxemburg, Gramsci, whoever, had simply contradicted themselves. You're right this will go nowhere unless we explain their respective positions. I was afraid to be locked-in elaborating the little I know. If I recall Laclau's point is that there are different, even conflicting ways to 'see' a soccer ball, no one view being all-inclusive or capable of telling you what the ball is really like - a common argument which is consistent with the realist claim that the ball exists outside the interpreter. The complaint that LM offer a simplistic, straw man version of historical materialism is one that no marxist will ever fail to make. Marxists have outdone Ptolemy in their deployment of epycycles, eccentrics, and equants, in all sorts of contradictory combinations, to reconcile their theories with observed phenomena. But this accusation is a red herring. *Hegemony* is exactly an examination of the many, yes, creative strategies marxist have employed to overcome monocausal explanations. LM's conclusion, after detailing many such strategies - by Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, Althusser, Gramsci, and others - is the correct one that, whatever the level of complexity in the system of mediations achieved, everyone retained the metaphysical idea that there was a single underlying principle fixing - and hence constituting - the whole field of differences. Geras, I might add, has changed his views since that debate. On two occasions, at a conference and as an invited speaker at York, I noted that in his presentation he seemed to be trying to get away from the idea of a 'single principle underlying the differences'. I asked, in a roundabout way, if he no longer stood by the position he had adopted in that debate, and he answered he no longer thought marxism could be the rallying point of a radical politics - a conclusion reached earlier by LM with their idea of radical democracy.
Hydraulic lock-in
Mark: I'm still having problems with how an agriculture which has sustained itself for several millennia can be called ultimately unsustainable, but I suspect I haven't been paying close enough attention to your argument and I'm wondering if you can repeat the salient bits You and Michael are right to question this idea that Chinese agriculture was ultimately unsustainable. It is not as if China stopped growing after 1800. Perhaps it is best to speak of blockages and solutions, regional scarcities and conquest of new habitats, as I was trying to do in the basic theme thread. I don't accept Pomeranz's rosy (neoclassical) picture of China's environment, or his claim that western Europe was encountering similar ecological limitations. The forested areas in China which P compares to Europe were the southwestern frontier regions where people had been moving into for awhile, but which still had room for expansion. Michael's idea that the Chinese returned everything back to the land should not detract us from the massive afforestation China suffered through centuries of empire-building. Deforestation and its environmental effects troubled the Chinese long before the rise of modern China. I have found additional evidence indicating the population of China may have already reached a maximun of 50 something million during Zhou times (1027-256BC), when the center of Chinese civilization was in the North. When the North was still the center, the population was still recorded at 59 million in 2AD, of which Tuan has calculated 43 million lived in North China at the time of this census. In 140 AD, the Chinese population had dropped to 49 million, and even more in North China since by that time many had migrated to the south. The Tang census of 742AD recorded 48 million, of which 32 million were estimated to have been in North China. These numbers do seem to suggest that North China had long reached a Malthusian limit, the only way China's overall population kept on growing was thanks to the conquest of new space. The North somehow could not sustain further increases due to famines, plagues, civil wars, frontier wars, floods. By 1900, as Elvin writes, most of China Proper [which includes the now decimated frontier regions of the past] had been stripped of the forest cover that three millenia earlier had covered it in almost unbroken succession from the tropical rainforests of the far south to the conifer forests on the northern mountains. The only forests that remained in areas that were relatively easy of access were in Manchuria, *an area mostly debarred to Han Chinese immigration before the middle of the nineteenth century, and which thus escaped Chinese-style exploitation*
Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
Marx doesn't talk about the identity of the working class, the identity of a mode of production, The idea is to examine phenomena as (historically evolved evolving) ensembles of social relations which social relations?
Geras vs Laclau
OK, but this is an old point, due to Kant, and while true, it is not informative about the question of realism. After all, no one pretends his account of whatever, given by fallible humans in real time, is complete. But that does not mean that there is not a complete account that could in principle be given; it does not mean that an adequate account is not a fragment of that complete account; it does not mean that accounts that are inconsistent with that complete account (or with each other) are acceptable, in fact, it tells us zippo, except to be modest and careful. Which is important, but not news. I don't know why it is supposed to be newsto historical materialists, who have always emphasized the partiality of knowledge claims nad the interestedness of inquiry. I do recall Lenin saying something along these lines. I am not a relativist, nor a social constructionist. These terms are too loaded. I think marxists committed a grave error rejecting Hegel and turning back to a pre-Kantian metaphysical materialism, the one which postulates a substratum called matter. I like to examine truth as it has been constructed by generations of human beings. Only when we look at its many shapes or forms, at its phenomenology, do we learn something about the truth. The truth lies in the very effort to achieve it, in the ongoing effort to overcome the contradictions of one one shape leading to the formation of another. I wrote: The complaint that LM offer a simplistic, straw man version of historical materialism is one that no marxist will ever fail to make. Marxists have outdone Ptolemy in their deployment of epycycles, eccentrics, and equants, in all sorts of contradictory combinations, to reconcile their theories with observed phenomena. But this accusation is a red herring. *Hegemony* is exactly an examination of the many, yes, creative strategies marxist have employed to overcome monocausal explanations. LM's conclusion, after detailing many such strategies - by Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, Althusser, Gramsci, and others - is the correct one that, whatever the level of complexity in the system of mediations achieved, everyone retained the metaphysical idea that there was a single underlying principle fixing - and hence constituting - the whole field of differences. Justin: In other words, you admit that Geras is right in hsi criticism, that LM insist that the essence of Marxism is class reductionism, and that anyone who insiste on the importance of class but amplifies it with other considerations is inconsistent in abandoning the essence. No I don't. It is clearly stated above that marxists will always bring the straw man excuse the moment you remind them they are still conceiving the relations of production as the unifying point. Is class the truth, or is it a truth? I think this is a bettter way of posing the issue that saying, in Leninist fashion, we only have a partial truth because we only have a partial understanding of class dynamics. I reread LM's discussion, and thought that Geras has them dead to rights. They have a straw man that no serious historical materialist has ever maintained. LM reject _any_ attempt to give explanatory primacy to some causal factor, insisting as a matter of _principle_ that all explanatory factors are of equal or indeterminate weight, and they say, quite clearly, that class is not one that should be given serious weight at all--not because they think it lacks serious weight, but because it would be politically foolish to collapse back into Marxsim with with bad essentialism. LM, in rejecting explanatory primacy as matter of principle, thereby reject explanation in social theory, except in a local sense in microcontext, and they urge us to avoud cloass as a factor even in those microexplanations. This is intellectual nihilism. I agree LM go too far in avoiding any sort of primacy but they are correct in claiming marxists have privileged one last instance. _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
You said it Justin: Primarily the social relations of production, i.e., the class relations whose structure primarily explains the nature and development of the mode of production, the state, and, less directly, ideology. This is elementary. Surely you knew this is the historical materialist view? LM attack it (wrongly) as monocausal, narrowminded class reductionsim and bad essentialism. --jks It is essentialist. Relations of production DO NOT, in all case, in all historical epochs, explain the nature of the state. War has been in many instances far more important.
Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
which social relations? Social relations of production reproduction (the latter must be broadly conceived). Yoshie That's right, so why waste my time pretending LM have no right calling your position essentialist?? Take heed from what Benjamin really says in his Theses.
Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
Oh, never mind, Yoshie, this is hopeless. Instead of a reasonable argument that class doesn't account for as much of the variation as historical materialists say (though it really depends on the HM--Marx put a lot of emphasis on military factors in the rose of feudalism), we have the classic straw man that it doesn't account of all of it all the time, which no Marxist has ever maintained. Michael, I am cool: this stuff is too innocent for words. I'm out of it. which relations are you joining now?
Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
You said it Justin: Primarily the social relations of production, i.e., the class relations whose structure primarily explains the nature and development of the mode of production, the state, and, less directly, ideology. Jim: I don't see why the phrase bracketed by asterisks is essentialist. Instead of saying that the structure of class relations _completely_ explains the nature and development of X, so that any differences among different concrete examples of X represent mere epiphenomena, Justin says that the structure of class relations _primarily_ explains the nature and development of X. In the latter case, we can see the nature and development of X as being overdetermined, as having its character determined not only by class relations but by other social relations such as those within the family, between ethnic groups, etc. Every postmarxist is aware of this distinction. If we are going to go beyond pretensions, answer the following: does war primarily explains the nature and development of X; does the family primarily explain the nature and development of X; does etc. explain the nature and development of X; does X explain the nature and development of the structure of class relations?
Re: Geras vs Laclau
There have been only two serious criticism written of Laclau Mouffe-- one by Geras and the other by Wood. You have to admit Laclau fried Geras in his response. Wood simply misunderstood what Laclau was about. To attack Wood is to praise Laclau. Either/Or. Also, any attack on Wood is a defense of market socialism. She has written the only _marxist_ criticism of it. All other criticisms of it are merely growls of disapproval, without grounds for attacking it. Either capitalism is an historically unique social formation, historically marked, or some version of market socialism is our only possible escape from it. There is really a lot of similarity between Jones Proyect, Laclau and Mouffe. What holds all four together is their rejection of historical analysis in favor of moral condemnation and replacement of history by just-so stories. Carrol
Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
Leo: If I had to locate myself on the terrain of theories of power relations, I would define myself, following Laclau and Mouffe, as a post-Marxist, rather than a Marxist, precisely because I do not see power relations as an unified, closed field, defined by some primary, essential contradiction. In my paper Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst: The Origins of Capitalism and the Origins of Post-Marxism (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 2000) I contend that HH's works, starting with their 1975 *Precapitalist Modes of Production*, were the first daring efforts ones to push historical materialism in a postmodernist direction. The passage I sent from Laclau and Mouffe's *Hegemony* might create the misleading impression - as this book in general did among all Marxists - that LM were advocating a totally contingent view. The following passage clarifies their position: The problem of power cannot, therefore, be posed in terms of the search for *the* class or *the* dominant sector which constitutes the centre of a hegemonic formation, given that, by definition, such a centre will always elude us. But it is equally wrong to propose as an alternative, either pluralism or the total diffusion of power within the social, as this would blind the analysis to the presence of nodal points and to the partial concentrations of power existing in every concrete social formation (142).
Re: Hydraulic lock-in
Yoshie: Why, though, should it have occurred to the direct producers, imperial bureaucrats, sovereigns, etc. of large-scale premodern hydraulic systems to direct a significant proportion of the economic surplus to other ends? Maybe they didn't have practical other ends. Maybe they just didn't live in a kind of society (like our capitalist world) that would make them say to themselves, Well, we could be doing something else instead -- something else more efficient, more productive, more profitable. It's not as if any class of pre-capitalist peoples were or should have been thinking in terms of scarcity and opportunity costs. Elvin does tend to assume the surplus could have been used in ways that might have allowed China to develop modern capitalism. But your last point, it is not as if any class of pre-capitalist peoples should have been thinking in terms of scarcity, should not be assume to be true either. All societies - to use Braudel's apt phrase - face limits of the possible. China's organic-energy based economy was encountering serious shortages...save for the southwestern frontiers which gave the old regions of the Yellow basin and the Yangze Delta extra slack...but China's intensive agrarian growth was ultimately unsustainable.
Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
Ricardo quotes: The passage I sent from Laclau and Mouffe's *Hegemony* might create the misleading impression - as this book in general did among all Marxists - that LM were advocating a totally contingent view. The following passage clarifies their position: The problem of power cannot, therefore, be posed in terms of the search for *the* class or *the* dominant sector which constitutes the centre of a hegemonic formation, given that, by definition, such a centre will always elude us. But it is equally wrong to propose as an alternative, either pluralism or the total diffusion of power within the social, as this would blind the analysis to the presence of nodal points and to the partial concentrations of power existing in every concrete social formation (142). = And the punchline is? Michael K. BTW, I slightly misquoted myself, the words I took from my own article re Hindess and Hirst. Punchline would be that L M's idea about the presence of nodal points is a reasonable in-between stand pluralism and determinism - but only as far as political or hegemonic questions are concerned. Geography is a huge nodal point which sets limits to the possible.
Hydraulic lock-in
Here are Elvin's concluding thoughts on the way the premodern Chinese economy was locked in. He says, first, it became locked- in to the patterns in which its technology interacted with the environment. This, and some of the other passages cited before, do suggest that Elvin's concept of technological lock-in does consider the way the environment (e.g. flooding, sediment clogging, direction of water) might have locked-in China, that it was not just a matter of the hydraulic *technology* per se, as the contemporary concept has it, but of the way that technology interacted with the environment. But when you read the conclusion, it is clear the accent of his analysis is on the technology of hydraulics. He writes: This term [locked-in] can be defined by three criteria: (1) the exit costs to different and perhaps ultimately better patterns tend to be high...(2) further expansion runs, after an initial boom period, into enviromentally imposed constraints...(3) large and often increasing amounts of resources and income have to be devoted to maintaining existing systems if the original investment incurred creating them is not to be lost... (46). The emphasis is on the way China became locked-in to a particular technological system which could not be abandoned because exit costs were too high, and which requited continuous maintenance *and further expansion* if the system was to continue working. He obviously knows this expansion was no just built into the technology but was occasioned fundamentally by the search for state military and political power and by the pressure of a population growing at an ever increasing rate. But except for some implicit observations, Elvin does not situate this hydraulic technology within China's ecogeographical locales. Once we gain some appreciation of the respective locales we can explain China's unsurpassed political/demographic power in the region as well as its long-term dynamic and limitations.
Geras vs Laclau
You have to admit Laclau fried Geras in his response. Wood simply misunderstood what Laclau was about. No you don't. I thought that it was quitew the other way around. I thought you were a pragmatist and not a crude materialist which was the philosophical stand from which Geras attacked LM. the below came from Carrol, not me. To attack Wood is to praise Laclau. Either/Or. Also, any attack on Wood is a defense of market socialism. She has written the only _marxist_ criticism of it. All other criticisms of it are merely growls of disapproval, without grounds for attacking it. That's a bizarre thing to say. I am, as you know, a market socialist. But there are a lot of serious criticisms of MS, including some by indisputable Marxists, e.g., Ernest Mandel. Wood's attack on MS does not strike me as particularly impressive, certainly not in comparison to Mandel. --jks _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
Re: Geras vs Laclau
I don't have to agree with Geras' total philosophy to see that his attacks on LM's arguments are effective and well-founded. He does rather go at it with a shovel rather than a scapel, but when he's done, they're buried. Did you read Laclau's response to Geras's long review of Hegemony? Really, it is not that Geras's review was bad, not at all, but that the principle that tied his entire argument was the rather juvenile one that rocks (perhaps he used the example of a soccer balls) do really exist. I cannot check the notes I took of this debate as they are at home. All I can say is Geras's subsequent response, to Laclau's response, was pathetic; you could tell that, having been revealed as the philosophical jejune he was, the only option he had left was to rant about how Laclau was acting like politicians who don't answer straight questions. He could not appreciate that in philosophy there are no straight answers. You know well that Lenin knew he could get straight answers only if he call the debate off the way he demanded the Bolsheviks to do.
Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
Your caveat (only as far as political or hegemonic questions are concerned) makes LM sound more reasonable than otherwise, but if that's the line of inquiry, why not Lenin, Mao, Gramsci, Althusser, or any number of other Marxists? Because the very intention of *Hegemony*, and I think it was brilliantly argued, was that Marxists have long tried to deal with the question of difference or plurality but only to 'domesticate it' (in various ways depending on the names you read) inside a theory dominated by 'an identitary logic'. Not surprisingly Wood would respond it is capitalism itself which has an identitary logic...to which one could respond 1) capitalism does not have an essence but is continually reconstructed through a proliferation of diverse elements (Japanese capitalism vs Greek capitalism) or 2) modern society does not = capitalism, but includes a number of hegemonic centres and not so hegemonic points.
Hydraulic lock-in
Before I point to those passages in Elvin (1993) where he elaborates what he means by hydraulic lock-in, I should state where my analysis is likely to differ from his. Elvin's conception of lock-in is similar to the technological lock-in problem that is the subject of much current debate in policy analysis of innovation and product design. Lock-in involves a situation in once a particular technological path is taken, the barriers to switching may be too expensive eventhough there is another path available which is superior. A recent example of technological lock-in was the take over of VHS over Beta tapes. Although Beta was technically superior, we were locked-in with VHS tapes because VHS arrived in the markets in high volume earlier than Beta, and as there were more and more VHS tapes and players, it was easier and less costly to make new tapes in the format that would fit most of the players than to try to maintain multiple formats. This was a self- reinforcing process in a positive growth feedback, which is what made it a lock-in. There are many other examples. A classic one is the QWERTY key board, which was developed in 1873 as a way of solving the problem of jamming keys on typewriters. By spacing out the most used letters, typing was slowed down to lessen this jamming. But today there is no reason to continue using this keyboard as the electronic keys of our computers do not have this problem. A better keyboard could be designed which would speed up typing, but we retain the QWERTY board because changing it would involve re-learning a whole new system which no one company wants to risk being the first one to change. Economists also refer to this problem as path dependency to refer to cases in which markets cannot always be relied on to produce the optimun technological/energy choices. When Elvin writes about China's traditional pattern of development as a form of pre-modern lock-in he has in mind this concept of technological lock-in, which is the term he really uses except for one instance where he says hydraulic lock-in. My disagreement with Elvin is I do not think the Chinese case can be classified as a form of technological lock-in in the way that term is understood today. China was locked into a particular pattern of development due to the nature of the environment it relied on rather than the technology it employed. I would also make a distinction between the types of lock-in China faced in the northern wheat dry regions and the southern wet-rice regions.
Hydraulic lock-in
What follows are those passages in Elvin's 1993 paper which touch on China's technological lock-in, a paper which is otherwise about the related topic of unsustainable growth in China from archaic times to the present. These pasages are worth highlighting as they do convey the idea that China's hydraulic system, once established, acquired inertial momentum (Fairbank's term). - A Chinese-style rice-field is a useful initial example. It has to be levelled and dyked, which requires substantial investment of human energy. It has to be supplied with water, which means the creation of a hydraulic system of dams, storage basins and distributary channels. The system will alsmost always be to some degree unstable, mainly because of the progressive deposition of sediments in distribution channels (due to the slowing down of the flow of current), siltation upstream of barrages, and degradation of the bed downstream. Hence it will require indefinetely prolonged further inputs of energy for maintenance if the original invesments is not to be lost. This latter is a form of premodern technological lock- in, the mortgaging of a proportion of future energy resources... (12) - ...Removing, and later replacing, these baskets, which were 3 feet in diameter and 10 feet long required the repeated use of a large quantity of labour, as did the annual dredging. This is an early example of pre-modern lock-in: the initial investment, on which the productivity of the entire system rested, could only be preserved at the cost of *perpetual expansive maintenance*.. (my italics, 22-23) - Clearly, though, the historical balance-sheet of the pluses and minuses of north-western agricutural expansion in imperial China has to take into account these hydrological consequences. Simply as an illustration of the costs directly involved...consider the dredging of deposited sediments and the new dyking that had to be done in 1606 at Xurzhou, where the Grand Canal - supply artery for the capital - crossed the Yellow River, to keep the crossing workable. Half a million men had to be conscripted to work for six months, and the state had to pay 0.8 million ounces of silver. this was not routine, but it was not exceptional for large scale intermittent maintenance (33-34) [We will see later that smaller- scale works were routine].
Hydraulic lock-in
The following passages clearly show that China's lock-in problem was less technological than environmental. - The low discharge of winter and spring water had all to be directed into the Canal, because it was relatively sediment-free, but the higher summer discharge, with its heavy load of sediment that would quickly have clogged the waterway, had to be deflected into an alternative channel, the Kaan River that descended directly to the sea. This was done by building a spillway across the mouth of the Kaan at an appropriate height. At the same time, it was necessary, when the flotilla of ships carrying the tax rice was on its way north (usually in late summer and early autumn) temporarily to direct all avialable water into the Canal, in order to ensure that they did not ground. This was achieved by building a temporary dyke each year across the entrance to the Kaan, and then demoloshing it as soon as its work was done. This required a heavy and continuous input of labour and money. The situation was complicated by the tendency of the Wehn to shift its course entirely to the Kaan, and an embankment had to be built downstream of the spillway to prevent this. (38) - At the heart of historical Chinese hydraulic systems there was a paradoxical combination of increased stability and increased instability. The paradox can be explained in the following way. The central fact of the environment of northern and central China is the variability of the weather, and the natural disasters that arise from this variability. As a result it is difficult to stabilize agricultural yields. Insofar as, therefore, as farming serves as the fiscal basis of the state, instability of agricultural yields makes state revenues, whether taxes or corvees, unstable in turn. Hydraulic installations functioned, in the phrase used in the early first millennium AD, as reliable 'artificial clouds and rains'. For about four hundred years following the end of the Hahn dynasty early in the third century, for example...the majority of the hydraulic systems that appeared were created and run by the state, its generals, or its bureaucrats, often with the explicit intention of improving logistic capacity and stabilizing revenues...Diao cut a new inflow channel from a point higher up than the original one, but it is unlikely that this remedied the inherent long-term hydrological instability, and the need for a heavy burden of maintenance - in perpetuity - if the system was to continue to survive... (40-43). - What this [pre-modern technological lock-in] amounted to was essentially the committing for an indefinite future of the use of a proportion of income and resources simply for the maintenance of existing hydraulic systems, if the previous investment in construction and maintenance was not to be lost. It would seem that the proportion of income, resources, and organizational capacity required was large, but no systematic quantitative study has been done, and this is, for the time being, an impression only (44). - Technological lock-in is a feature of most large-scale premodern hydraulic systems, and it seems likely that it pre-empted the use of a significant proportion of the economic surplus that might otherwise have been directed to other ends (44).
(Fwd) EH.R: Clark on origins of capitalism in England
Re this forwarded post: Not sure the paper Clark sums up and cites below is the one Mark Jones cited a few days ago. Below Clark does not say anything about the agricultural revolution. Either way, I am forwarding this post which Clark sent to the EH list last March as a way of clarifying his position in this whole debate. One can certainly use Clark's estimation that agrarian productivity increased little between 1700-1850 against Brenner's contention that once leaseholds spread in the 16th century and lords invested in innovations productivity rose in a sustained way. But one should not forget Clark's 'Smithian'/neoclassical approach that England was long a land of capitalist agriculture and wage laborers before any Parliamentary enclosure. Clark even argued against what he saw was a romantic Marxist view of the medieval peasantry as a class in full control of its land before the nasty lords enclosed their land. People in the Eh list, including me, criticized him for thinking that Marx had a romantic view of the peasant; and it is to those criticisms that he responded with this post. - EH.RES POSTING - What is the evidence Marx romanticized the past? In Chapter 27 of capital he regards the state of nature from which capitalism arose in England as being a world where most of the peasantry owned their own house, had four of more acres of their own land, worked as wage laborers only periodically when they chose, and derived considerable additional income from the exploitation of common lands where they pastured cattle, got timber for building, and firewood and turf for fuel. But What the capitalist system demanded was the reverse of this: a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, their transformation into mercenaries, and the transformation of their means of labour into capital. Their property was ripped from the peasantry by legal and extra-legal methods by an emerging capitalist class. Did this happy peasant Eden ever exist in England? What I contend that research into English agriculture since then suggests is that: COMMON LAND 1. Most common rights had been transferred into private property that could be traded long before the Enclosure Movement. And such rights at least in the eighteenth century were not owned by the poorest members of the community, otherwise landless laborers. Before any Parliamentary enclosure there was a large class of landless laborers in the English countryside who would not even own the cottages they lived in (see Leigh Shaw Taylor). 2. These common rights were respected under Parliamentary Enclosures, and their owners compensated with land. 3. Truly common land which anyone in the community could exploit (Waste) was rare in England by 1600. Only four percent of land in 1600 was common with free access to all the community. And by 1600 truly communal property existed only on lands of marginal value, as revealed by its rental value after enclosure. This was not land that was going to graze many cows, or supply much construction timber. (see Clark and Clark, Common Rights in Land in England, 1475- 1839 forthcoming, JEH (http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark). Under any reasonable specification the additional income derived in rural communities from this residual waste land was trivial. 4. Access to the waste by the poor was not formally compensated upon enclosure, but many Parliamentary Enclosures did provide allotments for the poor that given the small extent of this land could well have been ample compensation. WAGE LABOR The question of how large the wage labor force in the countryside was back in the seventeenth century and earlier is a tricky one. Certainly farm accounts reveal some workers were full time year round laborers. In England in the seventeenth century there were about 35 acres per adult male farm worker. That meant that most farms of more than 60 acres would be employing hired male workers. Bob Allen (_Enclosure and the Yeoman_) finds for the South Midlands that even by the early seventeenth century most of the land in estates was rented out in farms larger than 60 acres. Thus 72% of land is then held in farms of more than 60 acres. If you assume each family supplied the very high figure of 1.7 male workers then 38% of the labor on these farms in the early seventeenth century was hired labor. A more reasonable number of 1.3 male workers per family would imply that more than half the labor force on these estate farms was hired labor by the early seventeenth century. This excludes farms occupied by their owners, but estate land is generally believed to have been the majority of land in England even in the seventeenth century. In my own view it is a romance to believe that in any stable economy such as England, where property was freely
Reply to Clark
Forwarded is my reply to Clark. My response uses Marx himself (against Clark) to argue as well (in agreement with Clark) that prior to any landlord-initiated enclosure movement, a process of peasant differentiation was well under way in England before the sixteenth century. In this post, however, I don't follow Clark's neo-classical line but simply bring attention to another road to capitalism to which Marx gave a full chapter in Capital but which Marxists hardly ever discuss (except Rodney Hilton), namely, the peasant road. Oh, I called him Grog because he called me Richard. - EH.RES POSTING - To the question what is the evidence that Marx romanticized the past?, Grog directs us to Chapter 27 of Capital as a place where Marx regards the state of nature [!] from which capitalism arose in England as being a world where most of the peasantry owned their own house, had four of more acres of their own land, worked as wage laborers only periodically when they chose, and derived considerable additional income from the exploitation of common lands where they pastured cattle, got timber for building, and firewood and turf for fuel. Well, anyone who knows something about Marx and has read this chapter, as well as the following ones, will know that he is not describing any state of nature but, rather, outlining the condition of the peasantry after the end of serfdom. Marx's analysis is indeed a sharp rejection of the idea wrongly attributed to him that post- serfdom peasants were self-sufficient farmers all in favor of communal rights against the consolidation of private property. If instead of reading random, isolated passages we were to read the respective chapters as a whole, we would find that Marx's argument is that the rise of free farmers in post-14th century England created the initial conditions (Hilton's term, 1990) for the development of capitalist agriculture via a process of peasant accumulation and differentiation. Economic individualism, Marx was struggling to say, was not a peculiar legacy of the urban bourgeoisie: The private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its classical form, only where the labourer is the *private owner* of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso (Vol. 1, Chapter 32, p713). How close can you get to the 'wonderful world of Adam Smith'? Had Grog not been so groggy towards Marx he would have realized that this concept of peasant individualism, of a freeholding peasantry advancing by purchasing and leasing land from less well-off tenants, by nibling away at the waste and by leasing part of the lord's demesne (as Tawney was to specify already in 1912) fits quite well with Greg's own research-orientation. Tawney may not have offered as precise a set of numbers as Wordie was to do in 1983, but the basic idea that a sizable proportion of the land was already enclosed before 1500 - either because it was removed from the customs in the preceding centuries, or because that was the initial (early medieval) condition under it which was held - was already clearly articulated in his 1912 classic, *The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century*. There's not much I can say about the following sentence: Marx may have thought, as Ken notes, that the peasantry were dullards. But if so he thought them happy and well fed dullards. For the large class of landless laborers present in England even in the early seventeenth century with little of no access to common Marx would have appeared the real idiot. except that after 150 years or so of Marxist scholarship, we should know that: capitalist/peasant/merchant/landlord accumulation is, by Marxist definition, a process of expropriation, of the driving of the peasantry from the land. FOOTER TO EH.RES POSTING For information, send the message info EH.RES to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: lighten up
Rob: A list does seem to need a certain critical temperature if it's to keep bubbling along, Though I do think we should pay serious attention to Foucault's words - something which has psychological roots as well - I agree with Rob's remark. The H-World list, unless I and a few others contribute, regularly fizzles out into petty exchanges, really, bulletin board postings, about what history text is best to use for a course, what movies would you recommend for this course (a hot topic as everybody is into videos now, lectures are a thing of the past) or conference announcements. Rob: and much useful cut'n'thrust is put at risk by pursuing the sort of good manners for which American table talk is so notorious (y'know, no talk of religion, politics or sex, lest offence be given). This is a difficult problem. Offence should be avoided, but the result may be no talk, which is the growing norm with academics, who much prefer to talk about their administrative responsabilities/accomplishments than anything else. Heated debates occur mainly over hirings; otherwise everybody agrees with the trend, in public. Dare anyone suggest that world history may be more important than how Lucio was transformed into Lucia...
Re: Dependency theory
Dependency theory doesn't make much sense unless we understand that class relations were transformed into capitalist relations earlier in England other imperial nations than in colonies. If you have a better explanation than theirs, you might lay it out here. Yoshie I have, and continue to in my review of Pomeranz, which is where this debate is at. I think it is unscholarly in the extreme for anyone to think that a 1976 article by Brenner contains the required History on this truly difficult issue. I, as a contributor to this list, would find it very embarrasing if Brenner ever looked at the pen-l archives to find out that he is the central subject in a debate over the rise of capitalism. He himself knows he could never defend his 1976 article at this point - which may be why he has moved on leaving the pupils behind to pick up the litter.
Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas
You applaud Poulantzas's critique of Leninism, welcome his later Gramscian stand, but still think that Poulantzas may not have gone far enough: My differences with Poulantzas rest on the extent to which he sees the organizing logic of the state as one defined by its intrinsic capitalist nature. I am not convinced of this essentialist view of the state. Rather, I find more plausible a view of the state as an articulating center, one which combines relations of power which have no necessary, or intrinsic, linkage. I am not convinced, for example, that capitalism needs homophobia and racism, or that homophobia and racism need capitalism; certainly, they have been historically articulated to each other, but that may be a matter of historical contingency. And while you add that Foucault may have gone too far, you even suggest that one can dispense with the Marxist premise that capitalism is the defining essence of all power relations, and see what Marx and Foucault can tell us about a more contingent, more articulated field of power. So, my question is would you go as far as Laclau and Mouffe, would you agree that if we renounce the hypothesis of a final closure of the social, it is necessary to start from a plurality of political and social spaces which do not refer to any ultimate unitarian basis. Plurality is not the phenomenon to be explained, but the starting point of the analysis (L M,140)? Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 212-98-6869 Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- .
Hydraulic lock-in
The best way to tackle this difficult question may be to start with what has already been said, which is not much apart from a little known yet long paper by Mark Elvin titled Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth: China's Environment From Archaic Times to the Present (1993, 7-46). Elvin is well known for his high level equilibrium trap hypothesis about why late Imperial China was unable to industrialize. If you hear anything about Elvin, it will likely be about this trap. No one will mention his technological or hydraulic lock-in. Reading Frank, Landes and Pomeranz, or just looking at the bibliographies of their recent books, would give the impression Elvin has written only one book (1973). Not only has Elvin re-analyzed his high level trap in various other papers, he is now suggesting (in this 1993 article) that China may have long been trapped in a pattern of development which require[d] indefinetely prolonged further inputs of energy for maintenance if the original investment [was] not to be lost (12). The high-level equilibrium trap was something which he thought had affected China in the late eighteenth century. The idea of hydraulic lock-in, however, goes to the very roots of China's pattern of economic development.
No agrarian revo?
Why does it have to be either/or? Not possible unless one side accepts a secondary position, i.e. Brenner will grant a role to colonialism *only after* you accept his claim that there was something peculiar about the nature of English feudalism which led to capitalism there and nowhere else. Singing the same tune about class struggle and modes of production is besides the point, or at least that's not Brenner, that's Dobb. Capitalism, for B, was the legacy of the position the [English] lords had established and maintained throughout the medieval period on the basis of their precocious self-centralization (1982, 293). As I argue in the just released RRPE paper (written in 1994 when I was still a kid trying to get Wood or Comninel to act as my supervisors which they would not unless I gave in to them) intra-lordly struggles play a far more influential role in B's argument than lord-peasant struggles. Because no one seemed to get this point, I gave a lot of space in that paper just explaining B's argument (making the much shorter published version look a bit ackward). And even if one could consolidate both positions you will still not have an explanation of the 'transition'. Of course, you don't even have to bother with any such synthesis if you believe like Yoshie and Carrol (a man or a woman, I really don't know) that knowledge is possible only through dogmatic closure.
Asiatic-Hydraulic Mode of Production?
I don't disagree China was heavily commercialized after AD 1000. I just think the essential component of the economy was hydraulic planning; still seems to beg the question of why (in your view) the existence of a large powerful centralised state is somehow inimical or antithetic to the coexistence of large and diverse markets, rather than actually (and always and everywhere) a condition of existence of large etc markets. I see your point, and I guess this is a problem for those neoclassical scholars who have tended to play state centralization against markets, yet now find themselves dealing with an area where both coexisted. Reading P you would never know there was a state in China. I don't think it is inimical. I just think the first premise of history is Nature, not markets or technology.
Basic Theme of Chinese History
One basic point in my last thread should be clear by now. Rather than arguing in general that Chinese agriculture was experiencing serious limitations by the later eighteenth, we should focus on specific regions in China and write about regional cycles of growth and blockage, the ecological constraints of old areas and the progressive expansion of Han cultivation into new areas. China's economy continued to grow through the nineteenth century (total output and population was increasing at about the same rate) because of the possibilities that still existed in the peripheral provinces of the southwest and in Manchuria. But the old regions of the Yellow Plain (Northeast) and the Wei basin (Northwest) as well as the Lower Yangze had reached their limits. The final theme I would want to explore is how China's economy became locked-in a highly productive/labor intensive system of cultivation. All humans are created equal but Nature gave the Han Chinese two of the most fertile valleys of the world: the Yellow-Wei valleys and the Lower (and Upper) Yangze valleys. What should amazed us is not just that China's share of the world's population was about 25 percent in 1800. It is rather that so few square miles of land fed so many. While England in 1801 supported 166 people per square mile, the province of Jiangsu (located at the eastern end of the Yangtze River) in 1787 supported 875 people. But the Chinese did not get a free lunch. The rivers valleys never surrendered their windfall without the sacrifice of enormous inputs of labor.
(Fwd) CUBANALYSIS
** CUBANALYSIS #35 ** THE INVASION OF THE GRAY-HAIRS As Cuba's president Fidel Castro gets older, speculation increases about his legacy to the country. Opinion runs the spectrum from Cuba staying firmly in the socialist camp to Cuba quickly returning to the capitalist mode. For some Castro will produce no legacy; others think that his stamp will be eternal. However, little attention has been paid to one legacy that is indisputable and will present a tremendous challenge to the country: an increasingly older population. The World Bank has released population projections for the island that are entirely sobering and should be playing a big role in all the talk about the future of Cuba. According to the Bank, the population of persons 65 and older as a proportion of the total is projected to increase as follows: 2000: 10% 2010: 14% 2020: 15% 2030: 19% 2040: 26% 2050: 27% Perhaps even more sobering are the projections for persons 75 and older: 2000: 4% 2010: 5% 2020: 6% 2030: 8% 2040: 11% 2050: 15% By way of comparison, the projections for the United States in 2050 are 22% for 65 and older and 12% for 75 and over. Cuba is aging even faster than the United States, but it can be argued that the implications are more onerous for the former than for the latter. What are those implications for the post-Castro era? (Cubanalysis goes out on a limb assume Mr. Castro will not be present in 2050.) Two major ones stand out. One will be the increasing burden on Cuba's healthcare system. Already between 1989 and 1999 healthcare's share of the government's budget increased from 6.5% to 10.7%. What will happen, as more and more senior citizens begin to press the system for more frequent medical attention? Will the system have to become less generous? Or will expenditures in other sectors have to be trimmed? In addition to the economic questions there are the institutional ones. Who will care for the aged? Is care to be family oriented or institution oriented? Will the institutions be run by religious and other private entities or by the state? Many of these questions are equally applicable to other societies with aging populations. However, one of the bastions of the Cuban revolution has been free and universal healthcare from the cradle to the grave. Thus the problem of aging is of particular relevance to Cuban society. Either a core value of the society is modified or the state will have to plan for ever-larger chunks of its budget being destined to the elderly. The other salient implication is the clear need for increasing the productivity of the working sector of the population. Higher productivity is needed just for Cuba to completely regain the steep economic losses of the early 1990's. However, as the number of working people begins to decline as a proportion of total population, the remaining workers will have to become more productive just to keep away from further economic stagnation. Again, this is true of all countries with aging populations. But the problem becomes particularly acute in Cuba where there has been no tradition of saving for retirement or later years. There are no mutual funds, annuities, bonds or dividends in Cuba as supplementary sources of income for the elderly. The upcoming retirees will be entirely dependent on government pension schemes which have been part of Cuban life for decades. People coming into the workforce during the next couple of decades will thus have to provide completely for a very large older generation. Despite all future uncertainties, life in Cuba after Castro will have one certain and notable feature: a lot of old folks. In all the talk to come about a transition to capitalism or of perfecting socialism, it will be gratifying to hear how this foreknown problem will be tackled by the sage planners. CUBANALYSIS Sources for this issue included www.worldbank.org CEPAL La Economia Cubana (2000)
Asiatic-Hydraulic Mode of Production?
Viewing Imperial China as a society of relatively free markets is the fashion among economic historians. But what would these markets be without the massive use of collective manpower for hydraulic maintenance? Don't ask polycentric historians; they would rather emphasize how humanity has long been bonded in a world of neoclassical markets. Only a traditional historian like Mark Elvin would assert it is impossible to understand the economic history of China without an understanding of hydrology and hydraulics (1993). Most others fear the ghost of Karl Wittfogel. I would insist that Imperial China was the hydraulic state par excellence. But was not China, as Francesca Bray argues, a society of two highly contrasted natural environments...the continental zone of the Northern plains and the subtropical zone south of the Yangtze...of dry-grain and wet-rice agriculture (xxiv-xxv)? True, except both these areas were in their own ways AS dominated by hydraulic works. I think Bray pushes too far - for reasons I cannot get into here - the similarities between Europe's wheat agriculture and the dry wheat region of North China. There was no Hwang Basin in Europe. I remember not long ago wondering how I could answer for the (anomalous) fact that even in China's wheat areas the seed-to- yield ratio may have been two to three times as high as the 18th- century European average of about 1:5. The ecology of wet-rice alone could not explain this. China had pushed its pre-industrial technology in wheat farming much further by 1800 than Europe. I still think the ecology of the Yellow River and the Loessland is the key which explains the demographic pattern *and* the technology.
Basic Theme of Chinese History
Bray's analysis of agricultural development in North China in the Han period fits quite well with my line of thought. She says that the Han state economy was based chiefly on the regions of Kuang- chung and Chung-yuan, that is the Yellow river basin. Although we know that by Han times (202-bc-ad220) China had long been a great agrarian empire, Bray explains that [i]t was imperative for the Han government to increase agricultural production (and thus its tax receipts), for not only was the population expanding, but also expensive wars were being fought along the southern borders and in the Northwest and Central Asia...An intensive campaign was therefore mounted both to improve agricultural methods and to expand the agricultural area. Expanding the area meant carrying intensive irrigated methods of cultivation into the North*west*. Thus, we can say that, before the Grand Canal was completed in the late 6th century, which started the development of the Lower Yangzi, and which culminated in the wet-rice revolution of the Song period, the Chinese made systematic efforts to expand into the northwest i.e. west Honan, Shensi, western Shansi. The Chhin government had already built two considerable irrigation projests during the --3rd [BC], the Cheng Kuo canal in Chhin (Shensi) itself and the Kuan-hsien canal in Szechwan...Wu-Ti was the first emperor of unified China to realise the importance of water control, and he carried out an enormous programme of canal building in Honan and Shansi that irrigated over a million acres of arable land, while lesser projests were realised in Northwest China and Wei and Huai valleys. By the middle of Wu-Ti's reign...productivity in the arid areas of the Northwest had been raised considerably. (588) Despite this intensification the land laready under cultivation could not produce enough to feed the growing population, maintain the large bureaucracy and sustain prolonged military campaings. Land hunger was growing in the central states, and a singel crop failure could turn the small but steady stream of vagrants into a flood of refugees. Here were ready candidates for opening up new land, and the government sometimes resettled several hundred thousand refugees at a time in sparsely populated areas such as Kiangsu or the banks of the Yangtze...During Wu-Ti's campaigns vast tracts of land in Shensi, Mongolia, Nighsia and Kansu [areas further to the west] were recaptured from the Hsiung-nu and extensive areas of Central Asia were brought under Chinese dominion. Coloniaion by Han Chinese was desirable both to consolidate Chinese claims to the territory and to provide maintenance for the troops stationed there, and so military colonies were set up throughou the Northwest (590) Even though land productivity was raised in many areas, pressure on land due to population growth must rapidly have reduced government allotments, and the peasants livelihood became increasingly precarious (591)
Basic Theme of Chinese History
No, they didn't reject it because I wrote access instead of assess but who can blame me after reading Puglieses's postings?
Basic Theme of Chinese History
If China is third and the US is after Brazil doesnt that make the US fifth? Perhaps I could not make myself say Brazil is larger than the US since these numbers may be leaving out Alaska. Just taking the US mainland by itself, I am never quite sure if the US or Brazil is bigger.
Basic Theme of Chinese History
Last time I wrote that once the Hwang-ho basin was fully colonized on an intensive basis the build up of population led to the progressive settlement of southern lands. However, despite the southward shift of demographic growth during and after the Song (960AD-1276), the North China plain remained throughout the largest *single* region in terms of people. During Han times (206BC- 220AD), when settlement of the south was in the early stages, the official census of AD 2 recorded a population of 58 million... Now, it is extremely difficult to determine when agricultural expansion in the Yellow plain had reached a demographic limit. Population continued to grow in this area through China's history, remaining the largest single region in terms of people. Feuerwerker says that at the height of the Han dynasty (206BC- 220AD) [this region] had reached a plateau of sorts with respect to the possibility of sustained increases in *per capita production* using the best technology available (in Ropp, 1990, 225) - which, of course, means there was still room for *total population* to increase. But then F adds that China's population reached perhaps 60 million by the Han dynasty and did not exceed that total in the millennium before the Northern Sung dynasty (960- 1126), when it grew sharply to 100 million (227-28). It then increased more slowly to 120 million in the Southern Sung (1127- 1279). The idea, then, is that before the Sung dynasty (960-1279), China's population did not go over 60 million, but then increased sharply during Sung times. The Sung period is associated with a new cycle of per capita economic growth, brought on by the spread of wet rice cultivation in the newly colonized areas south of the Yangtze river. Thus, while we cannot say with certainty that North China had reached a Malthusian limit by Han times, it does seem that per capita increases could no longer be sustained by the Yellow basin region, and that possibly the maximun amount of people that could be supported in that area was reaching a limit by Han times. Elvin, too, writes that, before the Song, the population of China (which was then concentrated in the North) never rose above a maximun of 60 to 70 millions. Why the population of north China later surpass this maximun of 60-70 million is another matter we can leave to the side now (though one factor was that the dry hills and mountains of North China which were still largely virgin about 1700...were turned into maize and potato farms (Ho, 1959). The point remains that, between 880 and 1150 (more or less during the Sung period), there was a massive migration of Han peoples to the Lower, Middle, and Upper Yangzi regions, stimulated by foreign invasions and political instability, as well as by certain Malthusian blockages in the Yellow basin. Let me quote Hartwell (1994): The result [of this migration] was a complete reversal of the relative proportion of the population located in the two major agrarian regions of China. Before 750, 2/3 of the Chinese lived in the dryland wheat farming areas of the north. By 1150, 2/3 of the inhabitants of the Song-Jin-XiXia empires farmed fields in the irrigated paddy agricultural areas of the South. This transformation was accompanied by at least one hundred per cent over-all growth in the population from about 70 million in 750 to over 150 million by 1150 (Notice Hartwell's numbers are bigger than the ones just cited above from Feuerwerker). The economic core of the Chinese empire had shifted to the Yangtze Delta. During Song times per capita productivity increased again, supported by a veritable agricultural revolution i.e. early ripening rice, drought resistant seeds, including differential ranges of early ripening which allowed for infinite incremental alterations in cropping systems adapted to maximize yields in different soils, water control and fertilization. But this cycle of growth was reversed in the Yuan, or Mongol dynasty (1279-1368) by a spectacular decline in population from 120 million to 60-80 million (228).While it would be a grave mistake to say that this reversal was brought on by overpopulation, it is worth knowing that when a new cycle of growth began during Ming times (1368-1644), it was no longer one of per capita production but one of feeding an expanding population. On the other hand, one can only be amazed that China's population rose four or five times between the 14th and 19th centuries. I would argue that, while there was no agricultural revolution in this period, the wet-rice revolution was *diffused* through a new wave of migration into the southeastern and southwestern areas of China. As F notes, the area of cultivated land more than doubled (234) during this period.
Re: Basic Theme of Chinese History
China is the third largest country in the world with an area of 3,657, 765 square miles. Canada is the second with 3,843,144, and the US is fourth, after Brazil, with 3,022, 387 square miles. But this great landmass is circumscribed by major geographic limits. Far in the eastern side of Eurasia, China is surrounded on all sides by huge physical barriers: to the east and south lie the widest of the Oceans, the Pacific; to the west lie the highest mountains of the world, the Himalayas; to the north a thousand miles of desert occupied by the most militaristic nomads of the world. Two-thirds of the country's land is mountainous or semidesert (more than the US, Russia, or India); only 600,00 square miles of the land is effectively inhabited; barely 15% of the land - some put the figure at 10 or 11 percent - is usable for agriculture. Yet more people have lived in China *throughout history* than anywhere else. It all started in the eastern part of the provinces of North China, much of Hopei province, the lowlands of western Shantung and parts of Honan province, in the basin of the Hwang- Ho or Yellow River, an area of loess-derived alluvium; the cradle of the Chinese race, the birthplace of Chinese civilization, of the Shang dynasty (1523-1027 BC), the home of Confucius, the center of state authority, the location of the capital Peking. This loess soil was ideal for farming; it was extremely fertile and easy to work. The Yellow river, one of the 10 longest rivers on earth, may carry up to 40 per cent sediment, much of which is loess, a fine wind-blown silt. (The Yangtze River deposits more silt than the Nile, Amazon, and Mississippi together; the Yellow River deposits three times that of the Yangtze). Once the Hwang-ho basin was fully colonized on an intensive basis the build up of population led to the progressive settlement of southern lands. However, despite the southward shift of demographic growth during and after the Song (960AD-1276), the North China plain remained throughout the largest *single* region in terms of people. During Han times (206BC- 220AD), when settlement of the south was in the early stages, the official census of AD 2 recorded a population of 58 million, that is a population larger than that of the whole contemporaneous Roman empire. Much of this population, to repeat, was concentrated in the Hwang- ho plain wich covers only 125,000 square miles. I want to argue that the most important theme of Chinese history has been the successive intense cultivation of highly fertile lands leading to the normal growth of population until a point of diminshing returns was reached at which point the Han Chinese were taken up with the need to absorb new lands. There were five or so major waves of migration, caused by Malthusian pressures as well as wars and natural calamities leading to a gradual occupation of south China, a process which took on a strictly Malthusian overtone after 1500, after the Lower Yangze wet-rice area had been intensively cultivated, *supported and facilitated by the introduction of New World crops*.
the gospel of buddha
Carrol Cox wrote: But the core of the left always has been and always will be materialist. Spirituality (in _all_ of its forms) leads to confused thinking and confused feeling. Just repeating one is a materialist does not make one. A metaphysical spiritualism - about history, nature, humans - has always coexisted with the confused thinking of marxist materialism. This is one thing John Landon is not confused about.
American Timber
Timber from North America is another product which P thinks offered England significant ecological relief; exports which he says were trivial before 1800, but by 1825 they were large enough to replace the output of over 1,000, 000 acres of European forest and soared thereafter (275). He adds that Britain paid for most of its Baltic timber imports with new world reexports and silver which replace the output of about 650,000 acres per year in the 1780s and 1790s. I would put the following questions marks to this claim re timber: 1) The American colonies were no longer colonies by 1800. This trade - and I mean not just wood - was consensual and beneficial to North America. In *The Economy of British America, 1607-1789* (1991), McClusker and Menard observe that the final thirty years of the colonial era were marked by a major improvement in the terms of trade as prices for American staples rose more rapidly than those for British manufactures...The early deterioration in the terms of trade, while it clearly benefited European consumers of American products, was not entirely harmful to colonial producers. It was fueled in large part by gains in productivity and lower staple prices, which permitted the capture of larger markets Nor did British manufacture necessarily suffer from the post-1740 shift in favor of the colonies, which in part reflected improvements in technology and business organization that allowed industrialists to expand output while maintaining low prices (68). 2) Though timber was still very important to the shipbuilding industry, by 1800, England had developed the technology for coal- based energy. 3) The heartlands of China, north China and the Lower Yangzi, imported huge amounts of timber from recently colonized areas like Guangxi. P says that Lingnan (and now I have learned that this area includes *Guangdong and Guangxi*) had larger remaining wood supplies than much of peninsular Europe (229). He also says the Lower Yangzi and North China were facing timber shortages in the 18th century, which they dealt with by importing timber from other provinces. He does not tell you that around 1600, natives were still the majority in Guangxi. Having devoured the forested areas of their heartlands, the Han began a massive campaign of land colonization after 1500 with the singular goal being exploiting untapped natural resources. The natives fought back. During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) there were 218 tribal uprisings in Guangxi alone. Refusals to submit to the pressures of Han colonial sttlement and Han political overlordship continued under the Manchu dynasty, and were suppressed in some cases with wholesale massacres of the utmost fericity (Blunden and Elvin).
Cotton
The case for the importance of American cotton imports to British industrialization is seemingly a stronger one. P argues that, without American cotton, England would have found itself relying on wool as the only worthwhile substitute. But raising enough sheep to replace the yarn made with Britain's New World cotton imports by would have required staggering quantities of land: almost 9 million acres in 1815...and over 23 million acres in 1830. This final figure surpasses Britain's total crop and pasture land combined (276). Now, even if we accept P's carefully constructed claim that the sourthern American states were the only place Britain could have obtained this cotton at this historical juncture, I need to ask, yet again, why does a resource have to come from the outside to count as ecological relief? What about China's internal cotton supplies? In 1800, afterall, the Yangzi Delta produced more or less the same pounds of cotton per capita as England. Once cotton reached China, during the Sung dynasty, first in the provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien, as well as Kansu and Shensi (from Indochina and across Turkestan respectively) it became a popular commercial crop, spreading to other regions. By the late Ming, cotton production was firmly established in the Yangtze Delta and the provinces further upstream, as well as Shantung, and attempts were being made to popularize its cultivation in Hopei; already cotton had become much the most important fibre crop in China (Bray, 539). Who enjoyed the greatest windfall of cheap resources? Poor England had to cross the Atlantic Ocean to obtain its cotton. Why coal can be classified as England's fortunate internal resource but not China's cotton? Why was the textile sector in China not mechanized despite its ample, cheap, cheap supplies of cotton?
China and the People Without History
China's colonial penetration and settlement into the south-western regions continued through Qing times (1644-1911). While Guizhou was turned into a province early in Ming times, with considerable Han migration following thereafter, sparking major rebellions including one led by a firerce female rebel leader, one Mi-lu, from a prominent Yi family, which lasted four years (1499-1502) (Mote 709), this region was still under colonial penetration and exploitation during as late as the 18th-19th centuries. Thus Guizhou, write Blunden and Elvin, yielded wood that was floated out on the rivers, and had mines that produced lead, copper, iron, silver, cinnabar and gold. The policies pursued by the Qing government to secure this rich and undedeveloped area included summary justice, limitations on the freedom of movement of the non-Chinese, the building of walled towns, implanting military colonies, confiscating tribal lands and giving them to the Chinese, and deliberate attemps to smash up tribal cultures...There were three large-scale Miao attempts at liberation, two in the course of the 18th century and one in the middle of the 19th [which lasted almost 20 years], all of them unsuccessful. Who would ever guess that behind Pomeranz statistics on Chinese economic output were so many minorities still without history: in Guizhou alone communities of Tujia, Miao, Gelao, Yi, Kam, and Sui? Actually the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64, a radical political and religious upheaval that was probably the most important event in China in the 19th century, has a lot to do with cotton and British colonialism, according to Marx. It ravaged 17 provinces took and cost an estimated 20 million lives.
Sugar
I am very confused. It is not that I think it is a waste of time to measure how many acres of land it takes to produce x calories of sugar, because sugar was inessential to the English diet; it is this: doesn't Pomeranz realize China was already blessed with land suitable for sugar cultivation? If one says England was fortunate to be in possession of easily available coal mines, should we say the same about sugar land in China? Does a resource have to be outside to count as an ecological windfall? Not that English coal was outside; but do tropical goods have to be exploited outside? Well, we need not worry about that: China actually obtained its sugar lands outside. Earlier in the book, as P is arguing about China's comparable living standards, especifically that Chinese sugar consumption in 1750 was higher than that in continental Europe, even in 1800, he teaches us that the vast majority of Chinese sugar output was in Guangdong, Fujian (including Taiwan), and Sichuan (120), with the former three areas accounting for 90 percent of cane crop output. Now, at this point, I don't want to get into the 'conquering-annexing' history of the Han Chinese. Just a bit. As early as the Qin dynasty (221-206 BC), Chinese armies had been sent into the Fugian, Guangdong, and Guangxi regions where garrisons, government officials, and settlers were established. But then a long period (220-589 AD) of disunity and little control of territories followed, until the Sui (581-617) and Tang dynasties (618-907) which re-started the expansive dynamism of the past. But these dynasties were more preoccupied with reuniting, strengthening, and standardizing China's heartland, and in protecting the northern borders against the very powerful Turks, than in reasserting their political power in the southern regions. The Lower Yangzi valley had yet to be fully colonized; and not until the Song dynasty (907-1276) did the pace of colonization accelerate in that most fertile region. The internal windfall of wet-rice cultivation in this valley was so enormous that no pressing need for further colonization existed. There was less military expansion under the Song than under the Han and Tang dynasties. But the expansion of wet-rice cultivation steadily increased China's population, which reached 100 million by 1100, and which led to a gradual migration of Han Chinese into south China. If in Tang times an official had commented on the presence in Fujian of indigenous peoples unable to speak Chinese who lived in caves or on rafts by mid Song population pressure in Fujian had resulted in the terracing of hills for cultivation and migration to less developed areas such as Guangdong (Ebray, 1996). But Song China lost the north to the Jurchens and through the 12th century regaining the north was the main preoccupation. Large numbers of Han Chinese, nonetheless, continued to open new lands in frontier regions like Hunan and southern Sichuan. Then the Mongols conquered China...in 1290 the registered population dropped to 60 million, and remained at that level a century later. Not until the Ming dynasty was founded (1368-1644) were the southwestern regions of Yunnan and Guizhou fully incorporated into Imperial China. *Politically incorporated; earnest colonization had just began.* By the end of the [14th] century some 200,000 military colonists had cleared at least two million mu (about 350,000 acres) in Yunnan and Guizhou. Subsequent settlements of military households during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought another half million government-sponsored settlers, coming as far as Shanxi, Shandong, Jingsu, and Fijian. These migrations had a major impact on the ethnic mix in the area, as Yunnan and Guizhou probably had only around three million people at the beginning of the Ming, well over half of whom were non-Han (Ebrey, 1996). Meanwhile, as migration into these lands intensified, *including further colonization in Guangdong, Sichuan, Hunan, and Guangxi, large-scale rebellions by the indigenous occurred: violent conflict between settlers and the indigenous population was not uncommon. In ways reminiscent of conflicts in the *American west*, provocations could come from either side: *individual Chinese would exploit or reduce to near slavery local tribal people, and tribal people, where they had the military means, would rob, enslave, or otherwise terrorize Chinese settlers...The largest uprisings occurred between 1464 and 1466 when Mia and Yao tribes in Guangxi, *Guangdong*, *Sichuan*, Hunan, and Guizhou left their remote border areas to attack... ...*Taiwan* was conquered in 1683. In just the next two decades, over 100,000 Chinese emigrated there, creating a booming frontier community...Fortunately says Pomeranz, we do have reasonably good figures for Taiwanese sugar shipments to the mainland circa 1720: about 104,000,000 pounds (120).
Easing constraints through trade
Comfortable with his highly fabricated argument that western Europe could not expand its import of land-intensive goods from eastern Europe, because there were crucial built-in limits to eastern Europe's ability to absorb western imports due to its limited market, Pomeranz moves on to the last part of his argument to tell us only the New World offered the Old World the kind of trading partner able to solve its ecological limits. Lucky Europe stumbled into this New World; unfortunate though dignified China stayed home with its free laborers practicing import substitution. Strange as it may seem. it was the slaves who solved the underconsumption problem western Europe encountered in the east: exports [from the Americas] had to be high enough to cover the costs of buying slaves and much of the cost of feeding and clothing them (264). Slaves were the magical commodity which overcame the spectre of Malthus. First, they were easy to buy, the large internal slave trade in Africa [it now suits our argument to admit] made it relatively easy for Europeans to acquire slaves (265). Second, selling slaves to the West Indies equalled about one fourth of Britain's sugar export revenues between 1760 and 1810. Products from Britain itself to the Indies covered about one- half of sugar revenues; and the remaining quarter was covered with food and wood from British North America. Third, unlike eastern European peasants who practiced subsistence farming, the slaves, eventhough they were poor, constituted a significant market for imports. These imports, mostly in the form of cheap cotton, represented most of the products from Britain itself to the Indies which covered 50 percent of sugar revenues. Fourth, Britain did not need to to ship food from Europe to its sugar colonies but could rely on continental North America to do so, which in turn bought English manufactures (employing labor and capital rather than [its scarce] land (267). Fifth, this whole trade induced certain shipping changes, not technolgical, which reduced transatlantic transportation costs, unlike dignified China which saw its costs increased dramatically as the search for wood moved into the interior. To conclude, Without the peculiar conditions created in the circum- Caribbean region, the mere existence of trade between a rich, free labor core and a poorer, bound labor periphery would not have had such epochal effects; western Europe's trade with eastern Europe, for instance, was in no way more dynamic than that between the Lower Yangzi and its various peripheries...New World slavery and colonialism were different in very important ways (268). What epochal effects? So far we have cotton and sugar. He has yet to show Britain was saved from a reaching a dead end by having other lands grow her cotton and sugar.
Silver
P first examines how silver eased Europe's land constraints. He agrees that silver and gold were insignificant sources of capital accumulation, doing little for Europe's economic development - does anyone out there still accept Hamilton's argument? His emphasis is rather on the way silver allowed Europe, both directly and indirectly, to acquire land-saving resources from other parts of the Old World particularly India where Europe obtained cloth in exchange for silver which it then exchanged for African slaves. Indian cloth alone made up roughly one-third of all the cargo by value exchanged by English traders for African slaves in the eighteenth century... (271). But he acknowledges that the silver that went to China was not exchanged for land-saving goods...Plus, as we saw in two earlier posts, one cannot help wondering why P ignores the benefits of the enormous flow of silver to China. This time he has no qualms looking for substitutes as he states in the absence of that flow, we must imagine either other imports of monetary media or a large reallocation of China's own productive resources, perhaps in turn expanding demand for other imports (272). But if I may cite F.W. Mote, By Ming times, mines that earlier had produced larger amounts of silver and copper were difficult to work or were exhausted...Midway in the 16th century the silver of New World mines also began to flow into China in exchange for Chinese manufactures...One must speak of 'flowing in' [as opposed to Europe where it flowed in then out] because the movement of silver was one-way; it was exchanged for Chinese goods, whether through Chinese businessmen in Manila and Macao or onshore, and it remained to accumulate and be circulated in China. Chinese importers bought virtually nothing for which they spent silver. China began to be the great repository of the early modern world's newly discovered wealth in silver (767). The vast increase in the amount of silver in circulation in China...made money more readily available, lowered the value of silver in relation both to copper and cash and to commodities, and greatly stimulated certain sectors of the economy, especially those supplying and serving the export of goods for the world market (768). Before 1800, silver flowed in and China's products flowed out in a trade starkly unbalanced in China's favor [unequal exchange?] (955) The question is not whether Europe gained something but whether it gained as much or more than China.
True Hegelian Hortons
Tim Hortons is almost the whole truth of New Brunswick. Coming back from Quebec City and its many unique small shops and cafes, it is all the more depressing to face this Hegelian truth once again. Well, according to Tim Horton's the hole is the Timbit. Jim Devine writes: As Baran Sweezy quote Hegel to say, the truth is the whole. = According to Paul Diesing, this should actually read the true is the whole. Michael K. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Sugar
I personally feel that Britons could have done without sugar in their tea.But P goes to the other extreme as he sets out to measure the exact ecological relief Britain obtained from sugar and timber. He calculates the caloric contribution of sugar to Britain's diet at 14 percent, or possibly 18 percent, by 1900 (274). He reaches an estimate of 4 percent for 1800, a figure which may seem low but not if we realize that an acre of tropical sugar land yields as many calories as more than 4 acres of potatoes (which most 18th- century Europeans scorned), or 9-12 acres of wheat (275). Before I get to the sugar, did you see this? - potatoes which most 18th century Europeans scorned! This is not the first instance P uses an argument/point to work in opposite ways depending on the objective he has at hand. I pointed to the gender claim three posts ago; recall however my first post on the potato in which I cited P saying (though I may have cited instead a similar passage in p58) ...I would add the adoption of New World food crops, particularly the potato which yielded what for Europe were unprecedented amounts of calories per acre (p57). Anyways, at least now he recognizes the potato was only minimally adopted in Europe before the 19th century. This stuff about how many acreas of land it takes to produce x calories of x crop is all aimed at convincing us that the actual calories of sugar consumed in England in 1800 (which provided 4 percent of the total coloric intake) would have [nonetheless] required at least 1,300, 000 acres of average-yielding English farms and conceivably over 1,900,000; in 1831 1,900,000 to 2,600,000 acres would have been needed. And if you are already wondering that sugar is just a sweetener, well, P has an answer although today sugar is often derided as a source of 'junk' calories, it can be valuable in poorer diets, preventing scarce protein from being burned for energy. Was this the argument Nestle was making to third world mothers? Look, it doesn't work: sugar provided ZEROecological relief; the old argument re the importance of sugar profits makes more sense. How could anyone take this argument seriously? The numbers, the numbers. They just look so precise and beautiful.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Oz Competition update
Yeah, I'm with you on this. But it's a bit odd to see competition implicitly praised on a Progressive Economists list. Doug Without competition (or without Kant's unsocial sociability) there would have been no history, nothingness, and certainly no pen-l.
mechant capital
1) a Europe/England without the Americas would not have been able to obtain as cheaply key land- intensive goods elsewhere, i.e. Baltic cheaply is the wrong word. Anyways, is it possible to say that mechant capital is not capitalism but that capitalism has historically shown itself to require all sorts of non-capitalistic forms of coercion?
Reply to Brenner/Wood, part 2
Yes, another excellent one is Blomstrom and Hettne *The Dependency Debate and Beyond: Third World Responses* Two excellent syntheses of these authors (in English) written by Latin Americans (based in the UK) are Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment (Cristobal Kay, 1989, Routledge) and Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism and Dependency (Jorge Larrain, 1989, Polity). I have used both, I really liked Larrain and many of the things Lou brings up can be found in it. Cheers, Anthony xx xx Anthony P. D'Costa Associate Professor Ph: (253) 692-4462 Comparative International DevelopmentFax: (253) 692-5718 University of Washington Box Number: 358436 1900 Commerce Street Tacoma, WA 98402, USA xx x On Fri, 25 May 2001, Ricardo Duchesne wrote: Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 12:32:40 -0300 From: Ricardo Duchesne [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:12197] Reply to Brenner/Wood, part 2 colorparam7F00,,/paramDid Wood and Brenner plagiarize from Laclau? do you have evidence to back up this accusation? /colorIt is not so much that he plagiarize as that he has said nothing that had not been said before re importance of class relations. Besides, Brenner and Wood have zero knowledge of Latin America. If you want sophisticated studies of Latin American development from both a dependency and a class perspective consult Dos Santos, Gabriel Palma, Osvaldo Sunkel, Raul Prebish, Rodolfo Stavengen, Ernesto Cardoso, Celso Furtado, Enzo Faletto, and Ruy Mauro Marini. Better a ECLA Latin American than a UCLA Californian. nofill
Re: IMF
In my own way I wish to second Fred Guy. Brad DeLong has no doubt overplayed the no-argument argument, which most be quite irritating to someone like Keaney who has put forth serious, well researched responses. But look at the position of DeLong trying to cope with relentless attacks coming from Keaney, Devine, Project, Perelman and others, on top of which he is continually blamed (personally) for everything that is wrong with the economic profession. Devine complains DeLong does not answer; well, isn't there a point at which one should ceased talking to a stalker? And this stuff about Berkeley? Two times, even ten times, but every post?? It is ridiculous. Are Americans this infatuated with their Ivy Leagues?
Reply to Ellen Meiksins Wood, part 1
I agree with Jim. That's basically the crux of the debate: what is the most important causal mechanism that gave rise to capitalism, i.e., M-C-M'? Not culture, not climate, not environment, not geography, not demography (understood in the Malthusian sense), not quantitative growth of markets towns, but class struggles that gradually led to free labor eventually to wage labor. Yoshie no books, no research, no debate, no history. just jim
Re: Did the Potato save China?
A, if not the, crucial claim of the Great Divergence is that a Europe facing similar ecological constraints as China was saved by New World silver, timber, sugar, cotton and potatoes. The more I research this question, however, the more it seems China, not Europe, was recued from such a crisis thanks to Europe's conquest of the Americas. First, recall my earlier point about how careful P has to be in his assessment of China's looming crisis, arguing simultaneously that China was facing similar constraints by 1800 but had not yet slided into a Malthusian world of poverty and falling living standards. That China could not have reached a dead end by 1800, since grain production kept pace with a doubling of the population between 1750 and 1850, yet acknowledging that there was little room left for further per capita growth without significant innovations. Indeed, how could anyone claim that 1800 China was in the middle of an overpopulation crisis when its population continued to grow by 150 million, or possibly 225 million, between 1800-1930? A crisis was looming, yes, as in Europe, rural living standards did not improve much, if at all, between 1800 and 1850, and the next twenty five years were catastrophic, featuring no less than four major civil wars, massive floods, droughts, and other calamities... (144) - but only because China was not as lucky as Europe to avoid this looming crisis through the exploitation of new world crops. Yet, there are some hints in P's book suggesting that, as one focuses on specific regions in China, we get a different, more accurate, picture of China's Malthusian situation. Writing about cotton output in the Lower Yangzi, China's richest and most *intensively cultivated* area , he leaks the observation population grew little between 1750 and 1850 (p139). Meanwhile, still on cotton, we also learn that the population of Shandong and Zhili/Hebei increased over 40% between 1750 and 1870, and by about 80% by 1913 (p141). Is this an indication that China's richest area, which P had said should be compared to England/The Netherlands in Europe, was indeed in the middle of a Malthusian crisis by 1800, forcing people to occupy the poorer, marginal, mountainous lands of Shandong, and the northern Zhili/Hebei regions? - POSSIBLY THE AREAS WHERE NEW WORLD CROPS HAD THEIR GREATEST INFLUENCE?
Re: Did the Potato save China?
A crisis was looming, yes, as in Europe, rural living standards did not improve much, if at all, between 1800 and 1850, and the next twenty five years were catastrophic, featuring no less than four major civil wars, massive floods, droughts, and other calamities... (144) - but only because China was not as lucky as Europe to avoid this looming crisis through the exploitation of new world crops. I should have said that China was not as lucky to avoid the actualization of this crisis. Yet, there are some hints in P's book suggesting that, as one focuses on specific regions in China, we get a different, more accurate, picture of China's Malthusian situation. Writing about cotton output in the Lower Yangzi, China's richest and most *intensively cultivated* area , he leaks the observation population grew little between 1750 and 1850 (p139). Meanwhile, still on cotton, we also learn that the population of Shandong and Zhili/Hebei increased over 40% between 1750 and 1870, and by about 80% by 1913 (p141). Is this an indication that China's richest area, which P had said should be compared to England/The Netherlands in Europe, was indeed in the middle of a Malthusian crisis by 1800, forcing people to occupy the poorer, marginal, mountainous lands of Shandong, and the northern Zhili/Hebei regions? - POSSIBLY THE AREAS WHERE NEW WORLD CROPS HAD THEIR GREATEST INFLUENCE?
Did the Potato save China?
I don't want to suggest that the potato was planted only in the regions (Shandong and Zhili/Hebein), regions which P so happened to mention (accidentally) as areas of substantial demographic growth after 1750. As we will see below, it came to occupy a critical role in Shandong but am not sure about Zhili/Hebei. Anyways, I don't need to establish an exact correlation between the demographic dynamics of just these regions and the potato. I think that, if the potato was grown in some lands in some southern (rice-growing) regions, it was precisely as a means of famine-relief, since the potato could grow on marginal lands not used for rice. But in addition to the evidence I already forwarded from Mote (1999) three weeks ago, I have additional textual evidence from the great Francesca Bray, foremost English scholar on Chinese agriculture, that sweet potatoes were in cultivation in Fukien and Yunnan by mid-16th (428). Now, it so happens that, according to Marc Elvin, Yunnan, which is in the north-west, was one of the few areas in late 18th century China where productivity per area could still be increased using traditional technologies and where the population rose from 3.1 to 6.3 million between 1775 and 1825 in response to opportunities in farming (1983/1992, p147). And, here's the evidence given by Bray on *Shandong* and the overall significance of the potato: The rapidity with which the sweet potato spread throughout China in the 17th and 18th centuries is, however, clear enough proof of its late introduction. The sweet potato had many advantages to offer: it was high yielding, nutritious, had a pleasant flavour, was more resistant to drough than the native Chinese tubers, and *grew well on poor soils*. By the 18th it was grown in all the Yangtze provinces and Szechwan had become a leading producer; by 1800 it accounted for *almost half the year's food supply of the poor of Shantung [Shangdon]*. The sweet potato did not take long to become the *third most important food crop in China* after rice and wheat* (532).
Did the Potato eased China's constraints?
The subject title of this thread should not have been did the potato save China for China was not saved. Rather, the potato benefited China more than Europe and eased her constraints, allowing her population to grow after 1800, more than it would have, but China still reached its *absolute* limit soon after because threre were simply no remaining ways to increase *land productivity*.
An letter to Against the Current
Where can we access those comments against Blaut? Rethinking will soon publish my long review on Wood's *Origin* which ends with a criticism of Brenner. Latest issue of RRPE has article of mine, Brenner on political accumulation and the transition to capitalism. Article is just ok. Wrote it back in early 1994 as part of chapter for Diss., sent it to RRPE Sept 1998. I can't find the words to describe the disgust I feel at seeing Ellen Meiksins Wood scoring points off my friend Jim Blaut in the pages of the latest ATC. I guess Brenner and Wood, who were evidently too cowardly to debate him when he was alive, find it easier to refute somebody who now can't talk back. Shame on you. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Re: Michael Mann
Ricardo wrote: I did not say we can't compare rice per hectare and wheat per hectare. We naturally can since these are both measures of land productivity. Jim naturally? I'm sorry, but you can't do it. Comparing rice per hectare to wheat per hectare isn't just like comparing apples per hectare to oranges per hectare, it's like comparing air pressure and temperature. They are in different units. One can't even really compare output of seeds/input of seeds across crops to get a measure of relative productivity of different agricultural systems because different crops have different natural ratios of output to input of seeds. Such comparisons have been made many times as we saw in the passages I posted from Braudel. So, they can be compared, they tell us something about the respective yields per seed, per acre, of these two farming systems. But, again, as you say (and I am trying to tell you I have been trying to make a similar point here) we need to be aware that these are, to use your own words, different crops with different natural ratios of output to input of seeds, and with different ecological characteristics, so that, for example, in the case of a paddy field, it can absorb a lot more labor inputs than a wheat field without diminishing returns. Or, to put another way, more labor can be applied to a paddy field to raise land productivity. the neoclassicals would make the valid point that if land is scarce (relative to labor), that encourages land-saving technologies. (Similarly, in a place like the US in the 19th century, where the man/land ratio was low, land-saving technologies are secondary to labor-saving technologies and forced-labor techniques.) Yes, P has not really said anything new when he emphasises that China pursued a land-saving technological strategy; it has been a common argument that when land is scarce (as it was in China relative to the people they had) people were encouraged to create technolgies which saved it. But I don't think this neoclassical argument fully differentiates ecology and scarcity. As Geertz observed, there is something about *wet* rice that encourages/directs/forces people not just to save the land but to keep adding labor to it, because somehow this land will keep yielding. Of course, there's a limit, and China reached this limit whereas Europe did not, because it had more slack (the agrarian revolution of the 18th was mainly in land-saving technologies) but also because Europe (only England?) was slowly increasing its labor productivity after 1600s. However, labor productivity increases where negligible in the 18th century (and this is what Clark has noticed and has decided that there was not revolution). But I disagree with Clark, reason labor productivity was negligible was because the land-saving innovations they were pursuing were labor intensive, but after in the 19th century labor productivity starts going up again. one could argue that the Europeans enjoyed an ecological windfall in the crops that grow best in Europe. I don't understand how anyone could measure the relative benefits of the ecological set-up. No, you cannot give precise measures. As I say below: ... But one point is certain, P cannot have it both ways: if he wants to talk about Europe's ecological windfall in the New World and how the exploitation of land-saving resources in the Americas (i.e sugar, potatoes, timber, tabacco) gave it additional slack, then the door has been pushed wide open for a full investigation of the ecological endowments of these respective societies (and, recall, I have also suggested that China benefited from these New World resources i.e. posts on potatoes and silver). But China didn't conquer huge swaths of territory after 1500, and so can't receive the lion's share of such benefits. Further, the benefits of silver are typically fleeting, since increases in supply typically encourage inflation (devaluation of silver money). P has a strong argument to fall back on against me, by insisting that he only looks at ecological windfall in the context of a specific global conjuncture, one in which both China and Europe were facing Malthusian constraints, and that in that context Europe was fortunate to have recieved so many land-saving products from the New World. He can also say that when he looks at the fortunate location of coal *inside* England he is doing so, again, withing the context of a possible timber-famine crisis, which saved England just at the right time and allow it to make the industrial breakthrough. But I will respond that 1) his entire argument about China's comparable living standards presupposes some understanding of China's agrarian system and its ability to produce such high yields, plus he himself rates China higher technolgically in land-saving technologies; 2) true, coal was used specifically to solve energy crisis of 17th-18th
Re: Michael Mann
What if the question is tweaked and we're asking kilocalories available for consumption per hectare, would we have a better measure? Ian One of the passages I cited from Braudel showed that rice yielded many more calories per area. They can be compared.
Reply to Ellen Meiksins Wood, part 1
In contrast, Perry Anderson, who was sympathetic to the more globally-oriented Trotskyism, offers this alternative approach: For all the power of this case (Brenner's thesis), there were always difficulties with its overall context. The idea of capitalism in one country, taken literally, is only a bit more plausible than that of socialism. For Marx the different moments of the modern biography of capital were distributed in a cumulative sequence, from the Italian cities to the towns of Flanders and Holland, to the empires of Portugal or Spain and the ports of France, before being 'systematically combined in England at the end of the 17th century'. Historically it makes better sense to view the emergence of capitalism as a value-added process gaining in complexity as it moved along a chain of inter-related sites. In this story, the role of cities was always central. English landowners could never have started their conversion to commercial agriculture without the market for wool in Flemish towns--just as Dutch farming was by Stuart times in advance of English, not least because it was conjoined to a richer urban society. REPLY: To speak of capitalism having a beginning leads one down the wrong path. A beginning invokes a point in plane geometry, when a more appropriate symbol would be a series of moving points, parabola-like, such as those identified in calculus, which is to mathematics as Marxism is to society. Marxism is the science of society in *motion*. To try to pinpoint the origin of capitalism is as sterile an exercise as identifying when socialism began in the 20th century. Brenner-Wood can't escape eurocentrism (actually, anglocentrism); it is built into their very argument that capitalism came out of England fully fledged with no prior signs or moving points elsewhere. While I do think England played a key role particularly in the last phases - or moving points - leading directly to industrial capitalism, I have learned that the transition to capitalism is a world historical question. Brenner-Wood-Comninel have been left behind by new world historical studies.
Michael Mann
I'm sorry, but in economics (or any other field that at least tries to be scientific), just because something has been done many times doesn't mean that we should do it. Just because many economists often assume that markets are perfectly competitive doesn't mean that we should do it. As my Mom used to say, if everyone else is jumping off a cliff, does that mean you should do it? - I feel lazy today - the sun finally came after 5 days of rain, cold, and wind; now I just wanna get high - so I will respond to this, which only requires repetition (and incidentally, I repeat, agreement with your basic point): such a measurement could be misleading if we conclude that higher land yields imply a more efficient system. Duby mentions an appropriate case re two wheat fields, showing us that even when we are dealing with same grain the yields were extremely variable, depending on the quality of the soil (the wheat yields of two quite close Cluniac estates were in the ratio 6:1 and 2:1 respectively..., and on the climate... (Fontana Economic History).
Re: Silver
Leaving aside China's internal windfall, let's look further at the external windfalls she might have earned as an integral part of the expanding world economy. (Fair is fair, if China was the power Pomeranz and Frank claim she was, why portrayed her as a victim incapable of gaining from world trade, and only exploited later by the Europeans?) Frank runs into this very dilemma as he tries to argue that China, not Europe, was the most powerful economy in the world market during the very creation of the Atlantic system. Europe had very little to offer China in the way of finished goods except the silver they took out of the Americas (which we now learn from P, China was anxiously trying to get as its main medium of money) so that China received a very large share of the world's supply of silver: Using Attman's estimates of proportionately higher European remissions to Asia, the latter would have received 52,000 tons directly from Europe plus a share of the transAtlantic shipments of silver then remitted to and via the Baltics and the Levant, plus the tranpacific shipments. That adds up to 68,000 tons, or half the silver production accounted for in the world between 1500 and 1800 (Frank, 147). Of these European recipts of silver, about half (or 39,000 tons) were in turn remitted onward to Asia, 13,000 in the 17th and 26,000 in the 18th. This silver ultimately went predominantly to China...Additionaly, Japan produced at least 9,000 tons of silver, which were absorbed by China as well. Therefore over the two and a half centuries up to 1800, China ultimately received nearly 48,000 tons of silver from Europe and Japan, plus perhapd another 10,000 tons or even more via Manila, as well as other silver produced in continental Southeast and Central Asia and in China itself. That would add up to some 60,000 tons of silver for China or perhaps half the world's tallied production of about 120,000 tons after 1600 or 137,000 tons since 1545 [T]his very conservative estimate by van Glahn leaves China with between 1/4 and 1/3 of total silver production. That is still more than any of the shares left for the use individually of Europe and West, South, and Southeast Asia... (149) You cannot have it both ways: either China was or was not a world trade power. Europe no doubt gained from having this medium of payment in the world market but so did China having ended with the largest share of world silver output.
Fernand Braudel's Daily Bread
One major difference between wheat and rice is that the later tends to grow in a system of polyculture. Along with the rice, fish or ducks and sometimes even pigs are grown. Comparing grain yields can be misleading. That is a major difference as I take that term to mean multicropping. Yields can be compared and the results are that China had far higher yields per area than Europe at the expense of higher inputs of labor but offering employment to its growing population and generating comparable living standards right until 1800. But I think my name has popped out too many times in this list last few days.
Re: Michael Mann
I don't get this. You seemed to conclude something about the relative efficiency of agricultural production in China vs. agriculture in Europe. Are you now saying that it can't be done? Is this your either-or question?
Re: Fernand Braudel's Daily Bread
However much Braudel is impressed by the superior productivity of wet-rice farming, he seems to think that the spectacular increase in population in the Far East was only possible because of the small amount of meat eaten (104). Sock-raising takes over land that could be used to feed people, and land used for stock-raising could feed ten to twenty times as many people. Thus, Europe could not support as many people because they were meat-eaters willing to reserve vast lands for pasturing, something which Braudel, in fact, sees as an advantage since it gave Europe animal power, manure, and nutrients lacking in China. This, of course, does not answer Braudel's own observation that a hectare of arable land in Europe, under crop rotation, could nourish far fewer people than a hectare in China . If, as we saw last post, he offers us some valuable hints on the ability of wet paddies to generate two to three harvests per year without rest, he does not analyze land productivity per se as a separate measurement but instead reiterates that the higher output per hectare in China came at the expense of an enormous concentration of work (or that another disadvantage of rice is that it holds the world record for the amount of man-handling it requires) leaving us to wonder whether China's labor productivity was lower. He knows that labor is not the only factor involved in agricultural productivity, and that everything varied with the fertility of the land, the methods of cultivation and changes in climate from year to year (121); still, this is as far as he goes, and in the end we just don't know why these paddies were capable of yielding such large harvests without rest. We need to understand that it was not just a matter of applying additional inputs of labor to get higher yields. Question is why the labor input per unit of land could be increased for so long without diminishing land returns. Why, if labor productivity did not increase, agricultural productivity continued to rise despite a downward trend in the man/land ratio? Was it simply a matter of land-saving technologies? The ecology of wet rice? Or, should we argue that the ecology of wet rice was such that it lent itself to continuous land-saving innovations which required greater inputs of labor but which raise land productivity?
Book on the Eonic Effect: A Note German Ideology
John: The work was cited and summarized this year in History and Theory. But no respectable journal will touch it. C'est la vie. --- Actually, mad dog, History and Theory is a highly respected journal.
Re: pen-l malaise
>Several people have communicated with me in the last day or so, >wanting to get off the list were complaining about the tone of >the list. Personal attacks seem to be becoming a bit more >common. Arrogant forms of communication in which people talk >down to other people is creating dissatisfaction. How many are subscribed to pen-l? has the number remained stable? what percentage are regulars? thanks -
Fernand Braudel's Daily Bread
It might be convenient to look at what Braudel says specifically about wheat (oat and barley) in contrast to rice. Two comparartive features that stand out are i) wheat cannot be cultivated on the same land for two years running without serious harmful effects. It has to be rotated (114), and ii) wheat's unpardonable fault was its low yield...Wherever one looks, from the 15th to the 18th century, the results were disappointing. For every grain sown, the harvest was usually no more than five and sometimes less (120). Re i, let's recall that rice can be grown continuously on the same plot year in year out. But in northern medieval Europe the land had to be divided into three fields, i.e., winter wheat, spring oats and fallow in successive triennial rotation. There was always, therefore, a part of the land (33%) lying fallow. This part had to be manured in order to regain its fertility, and the main source of manure was livestock, which meant that, if the fertility of the land was to be retained (and increased), more land had to be reserved for horses and cattle as grassland *at the expense of arable*. Of course, as Braudel insists, this grassland was not wasted since it was used to feed animals which provided manure, meat, dairy products, and muscle power. Nonetheless, as Braudel also tells, arable land on a given surface area will always have the advantage over stock- raising; one way or another it feeds ten to twenty times as many people. It was well understood in Europe that the best way to increase productivity was to shorten/eliminate the follow period, which they began to do in a few limited areas in the 14th century, by adding forage crops to the rotation, that is, instead of leaving the land fallow, they began to plant forage crops like beet and cabbages, which had the double benefit of restoring to the land key minerals and of providing fodder for horses and cattle. But this agricultural revolution, Braudel argues, only began to make headway after 1750 (117). Hence ii: on average, from the 15th to the 18th century, the yield per seed planted was no more than 5:1 (minus 1 seed for the next sowing). Citing Slicher van Bath's well known figures, the specific pattern of change (am only citing those for England and France) was: England 1200-493.9:1 England 1250-1499.4.7:1 England 1500-1700.7:1 England 1750-1820.10.6:1 France before 1200..3:1 France 1300-1499 .4.3:1 France 1500-1820...6.3:1 What were the figures for China?
Book on the Eonic Effect: A Note German Ideology
John, Glad you took what I said in the lighthearted manner intended. You have to be careful, some lurkers here are easily upset if we don't serve them and write about the cute things we do in academia. They can't see the difference between deciding over ideas and over 50 different flavors of ice-cream. From what I read in the web about your book, it looks interesting. I also believe in universal history, that despite the inundating contingencies, history does exhibit a rational pattern, not a predetermined one, but simply a detectable one, right from the big bang on. But 95% of readers are too positivistic to contemplate, let alone think about this claim. I also like the way you try to incoporate Kant into your account. But I am not sure exactly what it is about this incomparable thinker that attracts you enough to include him. I thought I mentioned that it was cited and summarized in History and Theory. Did I miss something? What is the problem with History and Theory? Perhaps, since the founder was Isaiah Berlin...? The real problem is ideological, mes amis, propaganda for the college educated, Darwinian propaganda machine, and the you know what other variety, and the remarkable perceived threat that Kant rightly interpreted poses to theories of history and evolution. Now asocial sociability is proof Kant is a Darwinist, and most Kant scholars are too hushed to contradict this. C'est la guerre. Actually this one is clever. Asocial sociability, hm. About the time of Adam Smith. Competition? Theoretical induced violence? So it goes? German ideology indeed. Anyway, Robert Wright is making a bundle distorting my thesis. I thought the public might like to see the original version of the argument. Seems he will get away with. Great career, journalist. You get to fix Kant, sociobiologize your public. The left won't say much. Remarkable. I thought the left was supposed to specialize in ideology. My mistake. The left has always lied about Darwinism. It takes about a day in a good library to get the goods on the theory's flaws. You can read stinking old Mivart if you get stuck. But read Desmond and Morris, Darwin: Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. Studying biology, it's good to have a good short history on Whigs and Tories as you work through the fossil record. Did Perelman download a copy yet? John Landon author World History and the Eonic Effect [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://eonix.8m.com
Re: Micheal Mann
Reading Mann's impressive work, *The Sources of Social Power, volume 1*, one would never know that China's agricultural sector was far more productive than Europe's not just in the medieval period but right until the 1850s! Mann uncritically accepts the eurocentric account of a Lynn White, or a E. L. Jones, that Medieval Europeans were primarily concerned with *intensively* exploiting their own locality. They penetrated deeper into heavier, wetter, soils than *any previous agrarian people*. They harnessed more effectively the energy of their animals. They struck a more productive balance between animals and crops (1986, 412). Mann is really convinced that Europe alone followed a path of *intensive* agrarian cultivation (through the diffusion of such technologies as the water mill, heavy plough, three-field system, horseshoe, shoulder harness) which began in the medieval period, and which resulted in the continuous, though modest, rises in yield which Slicher van Bath estimated. (Note: a path of intensive cultivation via new technologies, not of intensive labor inputs, or land-saving technologies as such.) Yet, the fact is that compared with the yields per seed (as estimated by Bath) for medieval *and modern England* (i.e. 1200- 49...3.7; 1500-16997.0; 1750-182010.6) the yields obtained in Imperial China were really outstanding: 20:1, or even 30:1. Again, how were these yields obtained?
Michael Mann
how does one compare productivity between countries when the products are different? Comparing rice production per hectare to wheat production per hectare is like comparing apples and oranges. Your point may be consistent witht the very claim I have been developing here with full clarity, that one cannot assume that Chinese agricultural technology was superior to European technology (though it was for a long time) on the basis of output per hectare, since the ecology of these two grains is quite different. continues: BTW, the stats reported here are consistent with Adam Smith's Eurocentric view that even though China was very productive, European -- specifically, English -- productivity was _growing much faster_ than China's. The fact that Europe caught up in the 1850s -- and presumably, England caught up earlier, since that country had an agricultural revolution earlier -- fits with Smith's casual empiricism. If we accept your initial (suggested) point, and if we accept the ecological distinction I am in the process of making, and if we also accept the other argument I have already developed here that we need to differentiate between labor and land productivity, then we cannot accept a blanket statement that English productivity was growing much faster; for, as I have shown here, English *land* productivity (as measured by yield per seed, and yield per acre or hectare, was inferior to China's right until the 1850s. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Michael Mann
On 16 May 2001, at 13:21, Jim Devine wrote: BTW, in the previous item in this thread, Michael Mann was cited as saying that Chinese agricultural productivity was higher than European ag. productivity. check the post again, Mann was cited as saying that Europe was unique among agrarian civilizations in following an *intensive* path of development via the use of certain technologies. I started to argue that China had long been following an intensive path via land- saving technologies. Furthermore, that China, via this path, achieved far superior yields per seed than Europe right up to the 1850s. However, I also been suggesting that we cannot assume, as Pomeranz does, that these yields were simply a function of land- saving innovations: we need to look at the ecology of wet rice.
Re Michael Mann
I can see Jim Blaut up on a cloud right now, with a harp in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, smiling down at Ricardo's post. Yes, he has every right to if we continue making blanket statements about superior European productivity without drawing distinctions between land and labor productivity; between labor saving and land saving innovations; between the ecology of wheat and rice cultivation, and perhaps as well between land and *grain* productivity, because these grains have very different chemical/organic characteristics. Every post I have sent here is connected to every other in a systematic way. Each makes sense in light of the others.
Michael Mann
Ricardo Duchesne writes: Your point may be consistent witht the very claim I have been developing here with full clarity, that one cannot assume that Chinese agricultural technology was superior to European technology (though it was for a long time) on the basis of output per hectare, since the ecology of these two grains is quite different. If we accept your initial (suggested) point, and if we accept the ecological distinction I am in the process of making, and if we also accept the other argument I have already developed here that we need to differentiate between labor and land productivity, then we cannot accept a blanket statement that English productivity was growing much faster; for, as I have shown here, English *land* productivity (as measured by yield per seed, and yield per acre or hectare, was inferior to China's right until the 1850s. Jim Devine: I'm not clear what my initial suggested point was, but no matter. The fact is that even if one can't compare rice per hectare (or hour) vs. wheat per hectare (or hour), we _can_ compare rates of growth. I did not say we can't compare rice per hectare and wheat per hectare. We naturally can since these are both measures of land productivity. What we should avoid is the assumption that, if China had a higher productivity per hectare, that was only a function of its superior land-saving technolgies (as P assumes). I agree that China had better land-saving technologies, but I also think that China enjoyed an enormous *original endowment* in wet-rice cultivation. This claim is part of my general claim that China, not Europe, was the beneficiary of an ecological windfall. But, apart from what I sent on Geertz, and the hints Braudel makes, I have not demonstrated this to any solid extent. But one point is certain, P cannot have it both ways: if he wants to talk about Europe's ecological windfall in the New World and how the exploitation of land-saving resources in the Americas (i.e sugar, potatoes, timber, tabacco) gave it additional slack, then the door has been pushed wide open for a full investigation of the ecological endowments of these respective societies (and, recall, I have also suggested that China benefited from these New World resources i.e. posts on potatoes and silver). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Timpanaro
I really enjoyed reading Timpanaro back in the mid-80s. He seemed a proper corrective to the vulgar sociologism then dominant in much of marxist theory which seemed stuck with the phrase social being, unable to comprehend the way biological- geographical factors set limits to the possible. Much of his polemics with western marxism (or critical theory) is not relevant today. As he acknowledges in the Foreword to his collection of essays 'On Materialism', requirements are stated and a polemical position taken up; but their theoretical stance is neither rigorously grounded nor fully developed. But I still like the healthy pessimism of Leopardian materialism in Tmpanaro. Read this: I continue, despite the smiles of many comrades, to believe that Engels was perfectly right not to consider futile the problem of the 'end of humanity', not merely as a result of catastrophes by capitalist madeness, but due to 'natural causes' (18). 'Physical ill' cannot be ascribed solely to bad social arrangements; it has its zone of autonomous and invicible reality (20) 'Nature is ever green, or rather goes/by such long paths/that she seems still', says Leopardi. If therefore we are studying even a very long period of human history to examine the transformations of society, we may legitimately pass over the physical and biological level, inasmuch as relative to that period it is a constant (43). It is certainly true that the development of society changes men's ways of feeling pain, pleasure and other elementary psycho- physical reactions, and that there is hardly anything that is 'purely natural' left in contemporary man, that has not been enriched and remoulded by the social and cultural environment. But the general aspects of the 'human condition' still remain, and the specific characteristics introduced into it by the various forms of associate of life have not been such as to overthrow them completely (45) There's another related aspect to this materialism concerned with epistemological questions about the existence of a reality external to us, and the knowability of that reality through empirico-deductive methods, which should be of little interest to Leopardian pessimists, but which English marxists like Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Sean Sayers have dedicated their lives to - as if dogs had not already taughts us that bones do exist. What matters is the specific ways the material world both enables and constraints what we have done as historical beings. The historical possibilities of cultures throughout the world have been shaped fundamentally by their ecological/geographical settings. But we know that marxists are willing to go only so far in their materialism - better the save academic epistemolgical realism of a Bhaskar than the geographic insights of a Braudel. Timpanaro [...] Judging the overwhelming propensity of the Western intelligentsia to be anti-materialist [...] For Timpanaro, Leopardi had at his best represented a synthesis of firm republicanism. and unswerving atheism. Timpanaro conceded that the poet's republican convictions had receded as his cosmic despair -- existence is a disfiguring birthmark on the face of nothingness -- deepened, prompting sporadic expressions of political indifferentism. But by the end, he argued, Leopardi had reached some kind of difficult equilibrium between them. Yet it was true that this understanding of society always remained limited it was absurd to present him as a proto-socialist. Still more absurd was the attempt to make of him an ecologist ante diem [...] Suffering from another kind of deformity, he arrived at a parallel pessimism, equally impersonal, equally reasoned. It was not because Timpanaro had so much stronger a sense of social oppression and injustice, above and beyond our natural caudacity. At times, in the scales of misery, society seemed of small account to Leopardi and beggar alike pitched into the grave. So conceived, philosophical ways risked becoming-political defeatism. Timpanaro was not subject to this temptation. He was intensely even on occasion he admitted, too vehemently political. But he was also quite free from the of pan-politicism, as he once called it. The ideas of historical progress and natural catastrophe were not at odds in him.
Re: Timpanaro
The passage below from Timpanaro, which I cited in the last post, would seem to run against the point I am trying to get at, but I agree with Timpanaro that even when we are studying *some* long term questions like the Reformation and the the French Revolution we would be foolhardy to conceive geography as the main factor shaping the whole thing (though you cannot ignore the Mediterranean in looking at the Renaissance). If therefore we are studying even a very long period of human history to examine the transformations of society, we may legitimately pass over the physical and biological level, inasmuch as relative to that period it is a constant (43).
Fernand Braudel's Daily Bread
When we hear something about Braudel it is that a tripartite schema - material life, market economy, real capitalism - frames his three volume work, *The Structures of Everyday Life*, *The Wheels of Commerce*, and *The Pespective of the World*. While Marxists quibbled about his definition of capitalism, world-system theorists happily appropriated his perspective of the world; literally, the Fernand Braudel Center was born. Both ignored the structures of material life. Economic historians were intrigued by what Braudel had to say on the daily living conditions of pre-industrial societies, but otherwise felt these volumes were not hard enough to warrant serious reading outside the Sunday coffee table. The result is that possibly the most important chapter of these three volumes, Chapter 2 of Volume 1, Daily Bread, has been disproportionately neglected. This amazing chapter teaches us how three little grains - wheat, rice and maize - have profoundly organized man's material and sometimes his spiritual life, to the point where they have become almost ineradicable structures. Their history and the 'determinism of civilization' they have exercised over the worl's peasantry and human life in general are the subjects of the present chapter (107). Braudel first examines wheat and other grains which prevail in the West, but, to follow directly on Geertz, let's look, in point form, at some of the more salient features of wet rice cultivation: - Rice is an even more tyrannical and enslaving crop than wheat (145) Water must always be kept in motion so that oxygenation is possible. *Hydraulic technology* has therefore to be used alternately to create and suspend the movement of the water (145). All in all, an *enormous concentration of work*, human capital and careful adaptation was involved (149) - Another disadvantage of rice is that it holds *the world record for the amount of man-handling it requires* (145) -However, [i] wheat yields much less to the hectare than rice (145). In Lavoisier's time one hectare of land under wheat in France produced an average of five quintals; one hectare of rice- field often bears thirty quintals of rice in the husk. After milling, this means twenty-one quintals of edible rice at 3500 calories per kilogram, or the colossal total of 7,350,000 calories per hectare, as compared with 1,500,000 for wheat and only 340,000 animal calories if that hectatre were devoted to stock-raising and produced 150 kilograms of meat (151). - Moreover, (ii) wheat cannot be cultivated on the same land for two years running without serious harmful effects. It has to be rotated. Hence the amazement of Westerners at the sight of rice growing 'on the same ground' wrote Father de Las Casas (1626) 'which they never leave fallow any year, as in our Spain (114). - Furthermore, not just the same plot is cultivated continuously but (iii) 'All the plains are cultivated', wrote the Jesuit Father du Halde (1735) 'One sees neither hedges, ditches nor almost any trees, so afraid are they losing an inch of land'. That other admirable Jesuit, Father de Las Cortes, had said the same thing a century before: 'there was not an inch of land...not the smallest corner that was not cultivated' (148). - Furthermore, the real achievement of the rice-fields was not their continuous use of the same cultivated area, nor their water technology designed to safeguard the yield, *but [iv] the two or sometimes three harvest they produced every year* (150). - But achieving 2 to 3 harvest per year involved additional labor inputs: In order to make sure of another [harvest], five months later, in the tenth month, all speed must be made. The harvest is hastily taken to the barns, the rice-fields must be ploughed again, levelled, manured and flooded. There is no time to sow broadcast - germination would take too long. The young plants are taken from a seed-bed where they have been thickly sown on a well-manured soil. Then they are planted out at intervals of 10 to 12 cm. The seed-bed, which is abundantly manured with both human excrement and domestic refure, is vital to the operation: it saves time and produces strong seedlings. The harvest of the tenth month - which is the important one - is in full swing by November. Immediately afterwards begins the ploughing for the Janurary planting (150). - Rice's greatest claim to fame is the second harvest...as for the precise date of this crucial revolution, it was at the beginning of the 11th century that varieties of *early-maturing rice (which ripened in winter and thus made the double harvest possible)* were first imported from Champa...gradually innovation reached all the warm provinces, one by one. By the 13th century, the system had been established. And thus *the great demographic expansion* of southern China began (152). - ...rice-fields occupy a very small area of ground...their high productivity enables
Land Productivity
Wittgenstein once commented that the most important truths are usually right in front of you. The land productivity differential between Europe and China was basically a function of their environmental resource endowments. Explaining this will demonstrate it was China which enjoyed the greatest ecological windfall. P's entire thesis hinges on the claim that Europe would have followed a normal Malthusian path were it not for the massive ecological relief it inherited through its *internal* coal supplies and its *external* colonial products. The industrial pattern of growth it enjoyed in the 19th century was an aberration. Lucky Europe, Normal China, says Perdue. But China was not one bit normal. On a wide range of environmental factors, it was exceptional, far luckier than Europe. The word around is that Pomeranz has changed dramatically the way we think about the origins of the modern world by refocusing the analysis away from technological innovations or cultural factors to geographical contingencies. Sifting through his book carefully rather than just advertising its contents demonstrates just how tendentious his geographical/ecological investigation really is. There is simply nothing on China's ecology. Europe and only Europe was the beneficiary of internal and external endowments. First, internally, if China achieved the highest yields in the world, it was on the strength of its land-saving technologies and not any natural endowment. If England achieved a breakthrough in the use of coal, it was fundamentally a function of geographic good luck. If China had less slack resources, it was because of its efficient use. If Europe has more slack, it was because of inefficient use. If China kept soil fertility high despite intensive use of the land, it was due to better land management and effective use of fertilizers. If Europe still had large amounts of grasslands and pasture that were sufficiently well watered to be converted to arable, it was because it had a relative abundance of water as **a matter of original endowment** Did Europe really have an advantage in original endowments?
Geertz on the ecology of wet-rice
P effectively smothers this whole question re the impact of evironmental factors in China's land productivity. One may think the ecological superiority of wet-rice is too obvious to be hidden completely. But P is excellent, and the only occasion he refers to the ecological fertility of wet-rice is to demonstrate, rather, that China's environment in the 1800s was not worse-off than Europe's despite its high population density: it probably did not face a much greater threat to its ability to reproduce its existing standard of living than a hypothetical Europe without the Americas would have faced; indeed, it may have been slightly better-off. Wet-rice farming - in which water, rather than soil, carries most of the nutrients, and one year's algae can replace the nitrogen depletion caused by twenty-four successive paddy crops - made intensive cropping in south China quite sustainable... (226). To which he attaches a footnote which reads, For a classic description of the ecology of paddy rice, see Geertz 1963: 29-37. If only he had elaborated on what Geertz says therenot possible, it might have led readers to ponder about a hypothetical China without wet-rice! This is, of course, Clifford Geertz, the now famous anthropologist who recently wrote a piece in NYRB on the Yanomamo-Napoleon controversy. The above 1963 citation refers to his book, *Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia*. Let me paraphrase the respective pages. The micro- ecology of the wet-paddy field has yet to be written. First and foremost, Geertz argues that the most striking feature of wet-rice under irrigation is its extraordinary stability or durability to continue to produce a harvest, year in year out, and two harvests a year, without diminshing crop yields per unit of land. Even after long years without fertilization, soil fertility does not appear to be affected. Cites the geographer Murphy, On virgin soils a rapid decline in yield usually takes place, in the absence of fertilization, within the first two or three years, but after ten or twenty years the yield tends to remain stable more or less indefinitely. The answer to this puzzle, says Geertz, lies in the nutrients which irrigation of water brings: through the fixation of nitrogen by the blue-gree algae which proliferate in the warm water; through the chemical and bacterial decomposition of organic material, including the remains of harvested crops in that water; through the aeration of the soil by the gentle movement of the water in the terrace Cites another source which adds that given an adequate and well- controlled water supply the crop will grow in a wide range of soils and in many climates. It is therefore more important that the type of soil Note the argument: it is not that soil fertility per se is unimportant; it is that the water performs the ecological function of bringing nutrients to the soil, and after long irrigation water will positively reshape the fertility of the soil even if the soil was initially poor. plays returns virtually undiminished yield. Therefore the supply and control of the water is the key to the fertility of wet-rice agriculture. Of course, the water supply has to be managed. The gross quantity of water, and the quality of the water has to be controlled. Timing is also very important. [P]addy should be planted in a well- soaked field with little standing water and then the depth of the water increased gradually up to six to twelve inches as the plant grows and flowers, after which it should be gradually drawn off until at harvest the field is dry. The water should not be left to stagnate but should be kep flowing gently, with periodic draining for weeding and fertilizing. The most important technology is associated with water-control: ditches must be dug and kept clean, sluices constructed and repaired, terraces leveled and dyked; and in more developed true irrigation systems dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, tunnels, wells and the like become necessary. This is a technology which requires high inputs of labor, on a regular basis. But once the land gets this attention, it will respond. **[T]he sociologically most critical feature of wet-rice agriculture: its marked tendency (and ability) to respond to a rising population through intensification; that is, through absorbing increased numbers of cultivators on a unit of cultivated land** Hence the title of the book...Involution: population increases need not encourage extensive expansion into new lands, but the practice of working old plots harder, because the land, through more careful water regulation, has an enormous ability to feed an ever-increaing number of farmers from the same unit. Indeed, I would add, that because the productivity of the land can be increased through improvements in water irrigation, *the marginal productivity of labor falls more slowly than in dry farming
Re: Land Productivity
Michael Perelman: Ricardo, I know of nothing to say that China had an ecological advantage. Almost all of its good land is on a narrow strip along the coast. Most of its land had to be manufactured into rice paddies. The interior is mostly desert or mountain. - You're right and that's why it is so fascinating to find out how the remaining good land (only 10 to 11 per cent of the land is arable, as compared to 25% in the US) was able to feed so many people per square mile.
Re: Silver
No time left to go on with China's internal windfall, just enough to consider the less complicated subject of silver and the obvious benefits China enjoyed from its import but which P refuses to recognize. He says that Europe was fortunate that China was increasingly adopting silver as a store of value, money of account, and medium of state payments (160-61); for without that demand, i) the mines of the New World would probably have ceased within a few decades to be able to keep earning a profit while paying the rents that kept the Spanish empire functioning (p190); ii) the Europeans would have had little or nothing to offer the Asians in exchage for the fashionable luxuries they bought in Asia; iii) would not have been able to expand their imports of real resources from the peripheries, because they also used this silver to obtain Indian goods which they then sold to Africa to buy slaves...(270-1) But what would China have done without the silver which was in very high demand as it *became the monetary and fiscal base* of the world largest economy? We must, he says, imagine either other imports of monetary media or a large reallocation of China's productive resources, perhaps in turn expanding demand for other imports (272). That's it, with the emphasis on the fact that due to accidents of geology (160) China could not produce its own silver. This is one more instance in which P ignores the benefits China received from *external* resources. I already mentioned the potato, and demostrated, just briefly for now, that it was China that enjoyed an ecological windfall from this crop.
Agricultural Revolution?
that small scale agriculture is not inherently inefficient, Efficient or inefficient at what or by what measure? Efficient at producing food, or efficient at providing surplus value? Or efficient in competing with other capitalist firms? Carrol The context out of which that remark came was that small-scale farming was not as inefficient as it had been portrayed by those who accept - like Brenner and other neoclassical economists - the economies of scale argument. But this is not a rejection of the neoclassical notion of efficiency, since the claim is that small- scale farms have been as efficient. It would be a different matter if one were to use other criteria of evaluation such as ecological diversity, family ownership, treatment of animals, waste disposal and so on. (Surplus is important but let's not make a fetish of it.) Reading Pomeranz gives one the impression that land productivity is as important a measure of efficiency as labor productivity; and to that extent he challenges the western model of development. Not that Eurocentric scholars have ignored land productivity, but have tended to argue that, if land productivity was increased at the cost of higher inputs of labor, then the overall efficiency of agricultural production may have been reduced - and they have a strong point, if it can be shown that, without increase in labor productivity, increases in land productivity will not be sustained in the long run. But I wonder, if one could argue, that without increases in land productivity you cannot have sustained increases in labor productivity.
(Fwd) land productivity
I would like to see the post you are responding to? And Deirdre is not by any chance Deirdre McCloskey is she? If so she is very brilliant but quite vicious. Deleted it. You probably could find it in the EH archives (March 2001). It is McCloskey. She never responded to this post. It came out of a short exchange with Greg Clark who was really having an exchange with Michael Perelman. As a woman she's not as vicious. Everyone is Dears now. From what Pugliese sent, Deirdre now notices that academic men are a lot more hierarchical, obsessed about their accomplishments. She's happier. It is tough being a man in this world.
Land Productivity
While P questions the western model of developmet, he still seeks to convince us that the Chinese model achieved the highest agricultural yields in the world due to their efficient land-saving practices. That they were as efficient, as rational, as developed, as powerful as the westerners. This is called polycentrism in world history. Never mind the poly, if you can show that either China, Japan, or India were as advanced as Europe, then you're ready to join the multicultural crowd and sing We are the World. What about the Africans? Well..Nubia, yes, that's right, it has a nice ring to it. But that's way back, isn't that Black Athena? That too should be included, and later there's the Songhay empire of West Africa, the largest state of modern Africa, including the Oyo Empire in Nigeria, Nupe, Igala, and Benin in the lower Niger valley, or the Hausa states of Northern Nigeria, and Kongo in central Africa. Other ethnic groups? Oh yes, there others like the Jahaanke of the Gambia-River Niger region; the Juula of northern Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, and Upper Niger River; the Wolof of Senegal; and the Awka and Aro of Iboland in Nigeria - they were also powerful and wealthy; they were the ethnic groups that facilitated and controlled the slave trade. We are all equal. A challenge to the western model this is not.
Land Productivity
Louis: Is this diatribe going into your article? Is this meant for Science and Society? If so, expect angry letters from black readers. Actually, no problem since I doubt any African-American reads the journal--let alone writes for it--even though there are articles commenting on them from time to time. I have an agreement to send it to another journal. I have to choose journals that allow discussion of big questions which most don't. Unfortunately Universities/Journals are still dominated by specialists. A lasting merit of classical thinkers is they encourage real literacy and education. John Kenneth Galbraith said he can't understand why academic specialists are taken so seriously or held up as examplars of knowledge.
Re: Black Athena
I think the Lou's question had to do with the way you presented your thought. Bringing up the Black Athena is an emotional subject. I'm far from an expert in the field -- not even a novice, but I suspect that most professional journals would be reluctant to give a fair hearing to the Afrocentric perspective. I also suspect that some Afrocentric writers overstate their position, offering easy targets to those who oppose Afrocentrism. I don't know that I was really arguing against Black Athena. I am only glad to hear the Greeks learned much from their neighbouring civilizations. I was instead suggesting that any polyism has to come to terms with the Other 99 percent cultures that must by necessity be left out in any uniformitarian argument (that not just Europe but other parts of Afro-Eurasia had comparable levels of development and potential for modernization).
Agricultural Revolution?
Joseph Green asks whether Pomeranz has intentionally ignored findings which run against his thesis. Anyone can be accused of this charge; and on the surface P appears to be following recent trends in his claim that English agricultural production seems not to have changed much between 1750 and1850. Clark himself concludes there was no agricultural revolution in the period between 1770 and 1850, though in his 1991 article he says there was an agricultural revolution from 1600 to 1770. But I get the impression (from stuff I have seen recently in the net) that Clark has joined other quantitative economic historians in underplaying altogether the agrarian changes that took place after 1600. As we saw here some time ago, George Grantham thinks that early medieval Europe already had the agrarian tool kit that it went on to use fully only in the 19th century as a result of market incentives. Indeed, Clark is working right now (and perhaps has already finished) a paper arguing there was no Industrial Revolution but that instead the IR, as the abstract says, was most likely the last of a series of localized growth spurts stretching back to the Middle Ages...Accidents of demand, demography, trade and geography made this spurt seem different than what had come before - but it was really more of the same. Yes, accidents: S. J. Gould has penetrated deep into the social sciences and has added spark to otherwise dull econometric papers. On the other hand, we saw that Pomeranz misreads Clark's 1991 article in a rather serious way, for Clark's estimation was that there was little change in labor productivity after 1770, whereas P's general message (using Ambrosoli's work as well) was that English agriculture was experiencing diminishing crop returns after 1750, due to declining soil fertility *despite* using methods which raised labor productivity (216)!? I believe - by taking seriously not just one or two but many of the findings out there - that there is substantial evidence showing that English agriculture was experiencing substantial increases in land productivity (and in labor productivity) after the 1600s through the 1800s into the 1830s/50s when truly scientific/mechanized agriculture took off. In an article that will come out soon, where I evaluate closely Frank's Reorient and Wong's China Transformed, I go into this a bit. As I look back into that paper, however, I must say that I was too preoccupied with those stats which demonstrated increases in *labor* productivity and paid less attention to those relating to land productivity. I was too westernized in my appoach and took it for granted that productivity should be defined in terms of labor-saving technologies. But Pomeranz has reinforced on me the idea that advances in land- saving technologies (even if they are labor intensive) are measures of efficiency as well.
Agricultural Revolution?
I can think of three reasons why land productivity is such an important indicator of agricultural efficiency. 1) Obviuosly since we are talking about land - which also happened to be the largest sector of pre-industrial societies - we should be concerned with those practices which increase or decrease land productivity, i.e. yield per seed sown, and yield per sown acre. 2) Assuming that agrarian societies were close to a Malthusian equilibrium, and assuming, furthermore, that some agrarian societies were reaching, by the late 18th century, a point at which additional increases in output were increasingly difficult, land- saving-innovations become all the more important irrespective of increasing labor inputs. 3) Measuring economic efficiency purely in terms of labor saving technologies merely reflects a westernized bias which defines progress using exclusively capitalistic criteria of efficiency. Is a large farm of 250 hectares specializing in wheat maintained by three people better than numerous small farms cultivating sixteen different crops and keeping many families busy? Even the HDI is biased in this direction. The Province of Alberta would probably rank first among all Candian provinces in the 1980s and 1990s using this indicator. Yet, as was reported two weeks or so ago in the Globe and Mail, the social life in that province has deteriorated. Divorces, obesity and stress-related maladies have all increased - to which I am sure one could add gambling addictions, traffic jams, school bullying, teenage suicide, drug addictions, environmental diseases...
Land Productivity
If P asks us to drop our Western biases and look at Chinese economic performance in terms of its specificities most fundamentally at its superior agrarian sector and its land-saving innovations, he says next to nothing about Chinese agricultural productivity. We are definitely told indirectly it was highly successful in the way it was able to sustain relatively high living standards right through the 1800s. Even as China apporached the soon-to-come Malthusian limitations of the 19th century, its population doubled between 1750 and 1850 without any generalized fall in per capita income (p125). Why? Because despite the worsening person/land ratios so visible in regions like the Lower Yangzi, the Chinese were able to attain large gains in per-acre yields through such land-saving innovations as greater use of fertilizers, more multicropping and extremely careful weeding (p141). But P will hardly go further than this. He no doubt offers substantial numbers showing how much they consumed and produced crops like sugar, tabacco, tea and rice. But there is really no analysis of the agrarian system as such or the land saving technologies. There is an Appendix (B) comparing 'estimates of manure applied to North China and Europeans farms in the late 18th century, and of resulting nitrogen fluxes'. However, I would say that the Appendix, like the rest of the book, equivocates on the most crucial questions determining land productivity.
(Fwd) land productivity
The following forwarded message is from a short exchange I had in EH.R last March which briefly shows that I don't view productivity increases, including per capita income increases, as progress. Having said this, I still think we should acknowldge that productivity increases through labor-saving innovations bring power. The Soviets knew this as they went on to exterminate small-scale peasant agriculture during the collectivization program of the 1930s. Millions died, lost their land, became destitute; and, in fact, total agricultural production declined, yet the Soviets obtained their *surplus* which they used to finance the First Five Year Plan which eventually transformed the Soviet Union into a world power. --- Forwarded message follows --- From: Ricardo Duchesne [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:EH.R: Clark on Perelman, _The Invention of Capitalism:..._ Date sent: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 17:06:25 EST Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - EH.RES POSTING - Commenting on Deirdre: That a cheery (though I would prefer promising) view of peasant life has characterized various Marxist interpretations is true enough (not enough, of course, to warrant Greg's misreading of Chapter 27). But we need a proper context. It appears cheery only if we restrict ourselves to changes in productivity and per capita income a la Maddison. But perhaps less so if we care as well about economic concentration and self-control. We have enough evidence suggesting that small scale farmers in England were under serious threat particularly after 1600: First, an additional 24% of the land was enclosed during the 17th century; second, in the early 17th century small farmers occupied 1/3 of the cultivated area, yet by 1800 they occupied only 8%. Moreover, whereas farms of 100 acres and more had constituted only 14% in the 1600s, by the 1800s they represented 52% (O'Brien, 1996). Given these facts, is it cheery to argue that small scale peasants were better off in 1600 than in 1800, even if agricultural productivity increased? Is it not silly to insist, or view this whole process of concentration as one in which small farmers were too poor to be worth ripping off ? Finally, why don't we find the respective sources from below so we can hear the voices of the peasants themselves instead of just relying on abstract productivity numbers generated by we comfortable academics? --- End of forwarded message ---
