Still in search of why the Industrial Revolution occurred, why it came first in Britain, and why the West beat the Rest to the punch, I turned to two more books: David Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence. Written in very different styles, and offering very different explanations, I’m glad to have read them together.
Please note I am not an expert in the topics covered by these books; rather, my perspective is that of an interested lay reader.
Landes offers, by and large, the “classic†explanation. Europe, he argues, built its Industrial Revolution on the back of (1) the Scientific Revolution (in contrast to the Islamic and Chinese worlds) that led to the creation of power technology; and (2) supply and demand making it practical to use that technology. That demand was for cotton; according to Landes, despite waterwheel-powered silk spinning machines existing long, long before, it could not have been done with that material due to its higher cost and hence, more limited demand. But with cotton, Landes writes, “the growth of the textile industry was beginning to outstrip labor supply,†and power machinery, installed in factories, was just the answer.
In turn, Landes argues that Britain industrialised before the rest of Europe for several reasons: greater pre-industrial purchasing power and a higher standard of living, which encouraged “a manufacture that aimed at a large national and international market and focused on standardized goods of moderate price—just the kind that lent themselves to machine productionâ€; and culture and institutions – i.e. blessed with the Protestant ethic, relatively greater liberty and less religious persecution than the Continent, etc.
Just as classic is Landes’ explanation for the failure of imperial China to industrialise. He claims despite the enterprising spirit of its people, it was closed-minded to science, stifled by hidebound mandarins whose “cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny†– the comparison with Pomeranz’s view, of which we’ll soon see more, is striking. However, Japan is a different story. Landes believes (though, he says, “with no way of proving thisâ€) that “even without a European industrial revolution, the Japanese would sooner or later have made their own†based on rising economic productivity, a cottage cotton industry, the work ethic of Edo-era merchants and more. The following description is worth quoting in full:
We have the inventory of a village “general store†in 1813. The variety of goods is astonishing, some of them distinctive markers of an economy in an advanced preindustrial stage: thus a large range of manufactures, including hardware and garments that farm households had once made for themselves; and writing implements and paper in a country where literacy was not easy to come by. One could not at that date have found such a store in the Continental European countryside, except perhaps in the watchmaking districts of Switzerland.
As a last note, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations benefits from brisk, punchy prose (though watch out for the odd broadsides fired at rival intellectual schools!), and beyond being an economic history, it also makes for an interesting read about world history.
At the bottom of this post, I’ll return to evaluating this book; for now, we’ll see how the other title differs.
Taking the opposite approach to Landes, Pomeranz argues that differences between institutions market structures, attitudes to women working, living standards, etc, cannot explain the divergence between Europe, China, and Japan, because the advanced regions within each (respectively, Britain, the lower Yangzi, and the Kanto and Kinai regions) were far too similar. All had similar forms of business organisation, and the early stages of industrialisation anyway did not have the same capital requirements as railroads did later. All were open to commerce. All were relatively prosperous (here, the same Japanese general store cited by Landes makes a return!), and all had elites who sniped at commoners’ consumerism:
Mirrors, clocks, furniture, framed pictures, china, silverware, linen, books, jewelry, and silk clothing, to name just a few items, all became increasingly “necessary†signs of status for well-off western Europeans…
China also became increasingly crammed with paintings, sculptures, fine furniture, and so on… and as wealth could increasingly be converted to status through consumption (rather than through buying office, or land, or education for one’s children), published guidebooks began to offer advice on how to evaluate and display such objects properly…
By the eighteenth century [in Japan, there were] strictures against ‘gold, silver and ivory’ decorations in the homes of peasants and complaints about how samurai and even daimyo had been ruined attempting to keep up with the consumption habits of wealthy commoners.
And, Pomeranz argues, they all faced similar ecological constraints: they could very well all have ended up in a “proto-industrial cul-de-sacâ€, where “the basic production and consumption of textiles, though often cited as the onset of ‘industrialisation’, could not have changed that path, since it offered no solution to a basic quandary: that the production of food, fibre, fuel and building supplies all competed for increasingly scarce landâ€.
How, then, did the West break out of that cul-de-sac? As far as Pomeranz is concerned, Europe – or, rather, Britain – lucked out. First, says Pomeranz, Britain had plentiful coal deposits that were close to its industrial heartland, whereas China’s coal deposits, in the northwest, were on the wrong side of the country from its most prosperous regions. Second, Britain benefited from access to the New World, which supplied calories (in the form of sugar – mass imports of North American grain only began well after the Industrial Revolution) and fibre (cotton), and thus freed it from the constraints of limited domestic land.
A note on readability – this is a crunchy academic work, not a lively popular history, and it reads as such. For a boiled-down version of Pomeranz’s thesis, you can check out Columbia University’s “Asia for Educators†page.
My assessment
For a reader looking for an introduction to the topic, I think the Landes book is well worth a look. It’s easy to read and provides a good overview of the “traditional†view. Landes’ tendency to stake out his beliefs is useful for someone who may not be aware of which issues are controversial to begin with! It doesn’t hurt that Landes’ asides are often just as thought-provoking as the main story. For example, as a free-trader myself, Landes deserves credit for making me sit back and think, when he points out the flaw in the textbook use of comparative advantage to dismiss concern about domestic industry: “today’s comparative advantage may not be tomorrow’s.†However, I would definitely want corroboration before accepting his description of, in particular, China’s economy/society.
And that takes us to Pomeranz’s book. On the face of it, his theory – and the underlying assertions that the richest parts of China had institutions the equal of Britain’s – are mutually exclusive with Landes’ arguments about European institutional/economic advantages. Which could be right?
Criticisms of Pomeranz’s thesis fall into three categories – disputes about the data underpinning his conclusions, disagreements with his logic, and those that are both (e.g. does he give adequate shrift to the acceleration of Western technological progress?). And while I might not be qualified to judge the former, I do find some of the latter to be convincing. For example, Pomeranz doesn’t explain why other Western countries – including coal-poor, water-power-rich France – plus Japan, but no other non-Western country, were able to follow Britain into the industrial age. Still, his ideas remain interesting, and I was particularly fascinated by his description of Chinese commerce and society, so far removed from the caricatures of oriental despotism. Given the density of Pomeranz’s book, I would hesitate to recommend it to a casual reader, but I found it a rewarding read all the same.
Am I fully convinced by either? Well, for one, does it have to be one or the other? Who’s to say that a future author will not be able to reconcile the two theses? Maybe a future author already has; Ian Morris’s claim that trade across the North Atlantic stimulated Western European inventiveness makes much more sense to me after reading about one area in which Pomeranz and Landes agree: the marvels of Western “instruments – clocks, watches, telescopes, eyeglasses, etc.†Certainly I feel enlightened by both, and that’s what matters.
For a specialist’s take on these two books, I refer you to economist Brad DeLong’s reviews, here and here.
You can buy The Wealth and Poverty of Nations from Amazon US here.
You can buy The Great Divergence from Amazon US here.
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