Why the Industrial Revolution didn't happen in China

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Hendricks Dewayne <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 30, 2016 at 2:01:38 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Why the Industrial Revolution didn't happen in China
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Why the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in China
> By Ana Swanson
> Oct 28 2016
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/28/why-the-industrial-revolution-didnt-happen-in-china/>
>
> To economic historians like Joel Mokyr, there's nothing inevitable about the incredible wealth and health of the 
> modern world. But for a spark in a little corner of Europe that ignited the Industrial Revolution — which spread 
> incredible advances in technology and living standards first across the north Atlantic coast in the 1700 and 1800s 
> and gradually around the world — we could all be living the nasty, brutish and short lives of our ancestors centuries 
> before.
>
> Mokyr, who teaches at Northwestern University, dives into the mystery of how the world went from being poor to being 
> so rich in just a few centuries in a forthcoming book, “A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy.”
>
> Drawing on centuries of philosophy and scientific advancements, Mokyr argues that there's a reason the Industrial 
> Revolution occurred in Europe and not, for example, in China, which had in previous centuries shown signs of more 
> scientific advancement: Europe developed a unique culture of competitive scientific and intellectual advancement that 
> was unprecedented and not at all predestined.
>
> This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 
>
> Why is it important to consider this question, of why the Industrial Revolution occurred?
>
> It is a question that needs to be asked if we want to know how we became what we are. The 19th and 20th centuries are 
> in many ways the most transformative centuries in all of human history. Until about 1800, the vast bulk of people on 
> this planet were poor. And when I say poor, I mean they were on the brink of physical starvation for most of their 
> lives.
>
> Life expectancy in 1750 was around 38 at most, and much lower in some places. The notion that today we would live 80 
> years, and spend much of those in leisure, is totally unexpected. The lower middle class in Western and Asian 
> industrialized societies today has a higher living standard than the pope and the emperors of a few centuries back, 
> in every dimension. That is the result of one thing: Our ability to understand the forces of nature and harness them 
> for our economic needs.
>
> If we understood how that happened, we would understand human history. For thousands of years, the material 
> conditions that people lived in changed very little. Then all of a sudden, in 1800, it just zooms up.
>
> That came out of Western Europe and its offshoot in North America after 1800. If it hadn’t been for that, you and I 
> would be looking at a life expectancy of maybe 40, and I probably I wouldn’t be sipping cappuccino from a fancy 
> machine and talking to you on my smartphone. Look at what we have achieved in every dimension. Technology hasn’t just 
> increased our income, it’s changed every aspect of daily life.
>
> The question is, was all this inevitable? My answer is, absolutely no.
>
> So why did this dramatic change occur? And why did it start in Europe, rather than in China?
>
> China has a glorious past in its scientific achievements. And yet they were never able to turn it into economic 
> growth as the West did. If you look at Europe and China in the 19th century, Europe is advancing at breathtaking 
> speed. It’s building a rail network, steamships, factories. By the early 20th century, China looked like it was going 
> to be completely occupied by imperialist powers. Clearly the technological and economic development of East and West 
> diverged from 1850 on. The $64,000 question is “Why?”
>
> People have given different answers, and I’m giving mine. One way of thinking about it is culture. But to state, 
> “Hey, the Chinese have a different culture because they were Confucianists, and the Europeans were Christian,” I 
> don’t buy that for a second. It’s much more subtle and complicated. The way I would phrase it is that culture is not 
> independent of political and institutional circumstances.
>
> China and Europe are different in many ways, but one is that after the Mongol conquest in the 12th century, China 
> remains a unified empire run by a single Mandarin bureaucracy. There is nothing that competes with or threatens 
> China. China does get invaded by Manchu tribes in 1644, but they don’t change the structure of the state. They 
> learned to speak Chinese, dress like Chinese and eat like Chinese.
>
> In Europe, no one ever succeeds in unifying it, and you have continuous competition. The French are worried about the 
> English, the English are worried about the Spanish, the Spanish are worried about the Turks. That keeps everybody on 
> their toes, which is something economists immediately recognize as the competitive model. To have progress, you want 
> a system that is competitive, not one that is dominated by a single power.
>
> [snip]
>
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