The Rise of the West—or Not? A Revision to Socio-economic
History

By Jack A. Goldstone, University of California, Davis, February
2001

Any number of individual factors have been cited to explain Western
Europe's peculiar path, but one suspects that an extraordinarily
complex, poorly understood synergy was at work.

Lieberman 1997:499

The study of technological progress is … a study of
exceptionalism, of cases in which as a result of rare circumstances,
the normal tendency of societies to slide toward stasis and
equilibrium was [somehow] broken.

Mokyr
1990:16

INTRODUCTION

Looking back at the past from the standpoint of the present, we
believe we can sort out the pathways of various societies and
determine what happened. However, while this is skillfully done at the
level of individual national histories, and occasionally for regional
histories (e.g. Europe, Latin America, east Asia), it is all too
rarely done for world history. That is, we can readily find histories
of economic and political development in Europe, or in Asia, and even
comparisons of those trajectories. But what is not often undertaken is
a rigorous, step-by-step interrogation of how history unfolded in
various regions from a global viewpoint (although see Frank (1998);
Wong (1997), and Abu-Lughod (1989) for outstanding examples of such an
approach).

Such an approach is particularly important for the history of
Europe's industrial development. This story is sometimes told from
the perspective of England and its late eighteenth century
industrialization, sometimes told from a broader European perspective
reaching back to the late Middle Ages. But either way, it is a
European story, that proceeds by connecting elements of the distant
European past to Europe in the late eighteenth century. Geographic,
cultural, technical, or social factors that make European civilization
“special” or unique are asserted. Comparisons then take
the form of looking at other national or regional histories, and
finding differences: either “missing” facilitating
elements or inherent “obstacles” that prevented similar
industrial development outside of Europe.

A major problem with this approach to world history—comparing
already-composed national and regional histories—is that it
depends on the outcomes being known, and this biases our views. It
becomes overwhelmingly tempting to emphasize elements of the past that
seem to be connected to the present, and to ignore elements that lack
such connections, and pronounce the former to be causally significant
and the latter to be irrelevant. But this is not rigorous causal
analysis; it is instead a kind of post hoc, propter hoc (because
something came after, it was caused) narrative that assumes
causation. It is often said by statisticians that “correlation
is not causation.” Historians could well adopt a similar mantra,
that “concatenation is not causation.” That is, just
because events flowed along one particular sequence is not proof that
they were channeled into that sequence by long-term causes; nor is the
identification of particular events in that sequence the same as
identifying the causes of the final outcome. Often, what seems like a
plausible connection is simply the result of our biases. As James
Blaut (1993) has so well pointed out, the European colonizers of the
world have in fact done a similar colonization of history, marking out
favored territory and “occupying” it with their selected
facts to the exclusion of others.

To give a simple example, which dramatizes the way that facts are
exaggerated or minimized, let us consider the connection between
empiricism and medicine. Explanations for the rise of Europe often
stress its “empiricism,” arguing that Chinese science, for
example, was not empirical in the way that western medicine was. Yet
it now appears that Chinese traditional medicine, in particular
acupuncture and herbal remedies, was in fact based on remarkably
precise empirical observation, whose value is being proven today even
in the West (Sivin 1990). If Chinese medicine was often empirical and
accurate, how can we simply dismiss all of Chinese science as
“not empirical” and therefore fatally flawed?

Or again, David Landes (1998) poses the question of nineteenth century
European dominance in terms of Europeans' eagerness to trade,
asking why European (and American) sailing vessels called at Shanghai
and Canton, while no Chinese junks came to London. In fact, in the
fourteenth century China sent forth the largest ships and greatest
fleets the world had ever seen, voyaging as far as the east coast of
Africa. Sending ships to London was well within China's
technological capabilities. After a few great voyages, however,
Chinese shipping pulled back behind the Indian Ocean. Why didn’t
China continue its voyages? Landes argued that China—governed by
ignorant despots and lacking in thirst for profits or
adventure—turned its back on maritime trade, dooming it to an
inward, closed economy.1

Yet China did nothing of the sort. To argue that China lost its
maritime prowess because it ceased to send its own ships to Africa
would be like arguing that the United States must have entered a sharp
decline in its economic, trading, and technological capacity in the
last decades of the twentieth century because after a bout of daring
exploration in the 1970s, it completely ceased making manned voyages
to the Moon. The Chinese ceased voyaging to the coast of Africa for
the same reason the United States stopped sending men to the
Moon—there was nothing there to justify the costs of such
voyages. The further China sailed, the poorer and more barren the
lands that they found. Goods of value came mainly from India and the
Middle East, and they had already been pouring into China by
established land and sea routes for hundreds of years (Bentley
1998). Rationally, what should the Chinese have done? The prevailing
pattern of monsoon winds in East Asia, which blow south down the China
coast and east from India, and then reverse, leads to a highly
rational (and inexpensive) sailing pattern in which ships from China,
India, and the Arab world converge on Malacca and Aceh in Southeast
Asia and exchange their cargoes there, then sail home on favorable
winds with the shift in seasons. Quite reasonably, Chinese maritime
merchants therefore aimed to master the seas from Korea and Japan to
the Philippines and southeast Asia, a mastery that they gained early
and which provided China with a thriving maritime international trade
well into the nineteenth century (Goody 1996; Frank 1998; Das Gupta
1994:I, 408 and II, 39) The evidence for Chinese domination of
Southeast Asian trade is still before us in the Chinese trading
communities of Southeast Asia, which from Singapore to Indonesia still
dominate commercial enterprise in the region.

Chinese ships, in fact, were larger and more capable than European
ships for hundred of years. Nor were they just clumsy cargo vessels:
in Qing times (the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries)
“standard warships began to be equipped with two 1,000 jin [1300
pound] main cannons … and five 700 jin [900 pound] side
cannons” (Deng 1997: 510). It was only well into the nineteenth
century, in the Opium Wars, that British steamships going upriver and
bringing troops and modern guns to bear on inland cities claimed
maritime superiority over China.2 It is one of the ironies of
misunderstanding of Asian history that while many comparative and
Japanese historians laud Japan as an example of a nimble, energetic,
and almost “western” society during the Tokugawa period (a
topic we return to below), comparativists also denigrate China for
lacking those qualities, as shown by its lack of maritime
activity. Actually, the true facts are completely the reverse: China
was the dominant maritime power of the western Pacific for at least
eight centuries with vast fleets of warships and trading vessels,
while the Japanese under Tokugawa rule turned completely inward and
abandoned international trade to the Chinese and Europeans for over
two hundred years (Wills 1979, 1993; Deng 1997; Goldstone 1993).

How can we overlook centuries of China's dominance in Asian
maritime trade? The answer is simply that, via hindsight, we have
often drawn from China's nineteenth century “laggard”
status the conclusion that China lacked capitalism. Indeed, even a
generation of Chinese scholars, much as they borrowed clothing and
technology from colonizers, adopted the European idea of Marxist
stages of development, and described their own nation as
“feudal” until well into the twentieth century (Brook
1998).3 In fact, China was the site of enormous capitalist
enterprises, from the vast export-oriented ceramic works of the Ming,
to the huge internal trade in cotton and cotton textiles, to the
enormous internal and foreign trade in processed products , such as
soy sauce and tung oil (Finlay 1998; Chao 1977; Goody 1996; Pomeranz
1993). Why doesn’t this tremendous capitalist activity stand out
in world history? Because all too often, we view world history in
terms of “winners” and “losers,” and elevate
to prominence much in the “winners'” history, and
obscure or lose sight of similar items in the history of retrospective
“losers.”

As a last warning, we can point to a few other errors that come from
this retrospective approach. All too often, comparative historians
extrapolate backwards into Chinese history a condition of being
“overpopulated” and “undernourished.” True as
these observations may be for early twentieth century China, those
decades were exceptional, not typical; as late as the end of the
eighteenth century southern England had equal or lesser levels of
nutrition and agricultural output per capita than the major economic
hub regions of China. Calculating per capita consumption of calories,
of pounds of tea and of sugar, of clothing and of furniture, Kenneth
Pomeranz has shown that in material terms, the average Chinese in the
eighteenth century lower Yangzi and coastal provinces was at least as
well off as contemporary English (Pomeranz 2000; Li 1998). If the
proof of this pudding is in the eating, then the Chinese apparently
ate well enough to outlive Europeans: life expectancies calculated for
tens of thousands of Chinese from genealogies and village studies show
that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Chinese males could
expect to live into their late thirties at birth; roughly the same as
the English into the late eighteenth century and substantially longer
than the French and even the Dutch in the same period (Lavely and Wong
1998; Livi-Bacci 1989:109).

Indeed, this view of China as “overpopulated” led to the
further erroneous belief that European's were somehow wiser, more
prudent, more individualistic, or more “something” that
enabled them to control fertility and restrict population growth,
while Chinese families bred without limit (Hajnal 1982). We now know
that while Chinese women married at younger ages than European women,
the Chinese delayed childbearing longer after marriage, spaced their
births further apart, and ended fertility at an earlier age, than
European women, and thus had on average the same size families as
Europeans. It is true that northern Europeans restricted access to
marriage, but Chinese families achieved the same fertility reductions
by restrictions on fertility within marriage. Indeed, age-specific
marital fertility for Chinese women in their twenties was only
one-half that of married women in their twenties in Europe (Lee and
Wang 1999a:46; 1999b). For most of China's imperial history, its
population growth has been equal or less than that of such European
countries as England and Russia. For the two and a half centuries that
led up to the Industrial Revolution in England, c. 1500—1750,
England's population grew much faster than that of China: England
increased 150% from 2.3 million to 5.7 million inhabitants; over the
same period China grew only 100% from 125 to 250 million (Lee and Wang
1999a:36; Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Thus aggregate population
growth was half again greater in England than in China over the long
period preceding industrialization, and China—but not
England—added substantial new territories in the north, west,
and south during these centuries. It is thus impossible to claim that
greater prudence or slower aggregate population increase was crucial
to the emergence of industrialization in England, or to its absence in
China: the facts are simply the opposite.

How could we miss such simple facts? Because of our eagerness to find
“the factor” or factors that produce, what from our
present perspective appears as a powerfully divergent outcome, we
grasp at any obvious factors that differentiate Europe and Asia (such
as apparently greater population density and poverty in the latter for
much of the twentieth century) and treat it as the long-standing and
historical roots of that outcome.

In the last decade, a variety of formerly accepted “facts”
about the differences between European and Asian societies have been
overturned. This research forces us to be skeptical about the
“colonizer's view” of the advantages of European
civilization.

THE RECEIVED WISDOM VS. THE “CALIFORNIA” SCHOOL

Since Max Weber's (1950) comparative study of world civilizations,
scholars have believed that some factors that were unique to the
nations of Europe—or perhaps to Europe west of the Russian and
Ottoman empires, the unit known as “Latin
Christendom”—conferred on them a collective comparative
advantage relative to other societies. Western scholars have differed
mainly on when this advantage arose, and which factors constituted
this advantage. Some, such as Lynn White (1962), place the advantage
in the High Middle Ages (c. 1000 AD), pointing to advances in
heavy-soil cultivation and use of water-power; others, such as Alfred
Crosby (1997) and David Landes (1998), place the advantage in the
later Middle Ages (c. 1300) with the spread of mechanical clocks,
spectacles, and a variety of measuring and mechanical devices. Eric
Jones points to these factors plus an unusually favorable geography
and environment in Europe for the accumulation of physical capital
over many centuries (Jones 1987, 1988). Immanuel Wallerstein (1974)
finds the advantages of the West rooted in the gains from leadership
in an expanding world-system of trade that developed from the
sixteenth century; still others, such as Joel Mokyr (1990), point to a
growth of knowledge begun in Medieval Europe that flowered in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A number of scholars, including
Douglass North and Robert Thomas (1973), and Jean Baechler, John
A. Hall, and Michael Mann (1988; Hall 1986) stress the influence of
government; for them Asian governments were generally too disordered,
or too rapacious, to provide a stable framework for private
enterprise. In short, the “received view” is that the
divergence of Europe and Asia, a “big outcome,” if you
will, was rooted in a “big” difference in their histories
or cultures that can be traced back two centuries or perhaps many
centuries before the onset of Europe's dominance in Asia in the
nineteenth century.

Against this received wisdom a number of scholars, building on prior
outstanding regional histories, especially that of Mark Elvin (1973),
have staked out differing claims. I give these scholars the collective
label “the California school,” because the majority of
them are affiliated with universities in that state; but it includes
scholars across the United States and around the world. Among them are
R. Bin Wong, Jack A. Goldstone, Kenneth Pomeranz, Richard von Glahn,
Wang Feng, and Cameron Campbell in the University of California
system; Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giraldez of the University of the
Pacific in Stockton, California; James Z. Lee of the California
Institute of Technology; Robert Marks of Whittier University in
Southern California; Andre Gunder Frank ( a scholar with multiple
bases, but whose major anti-Eurocentric work on development was
published by the University of California Press); Jack Goody of
Cambridge; James Blaut of the University of Illinois; Janet Abu-Lughod
of the New School for Social Research; and many others whose research
is reshaping our sense of Asia/Europe differences.

These scholars, in a wide variety of publications, have documented the
following arguments:

1. Chinese family structure, although differing from that in Europe,
produced neither unlimited fertility nor unusually large or rapid
population growth (Lavely and Wong 1998; Lee and Wang 1999a, 1999b).

2. Chinese and Indian domestic economic activity in such areas as
textile production and food processing was quite sophisticated with
regard to large-scale mass production and trade (Pomeranz 1993, 2000;
Blaut 1993).4

3. Chinese and Indian merchants operated with substantial autonomy,
and had far larger commercial fortunes than most European merchants
well into the late eighteenth century (Goody 1996; Frank 1998;
Goldstone 1993).5

4. Chinese international economic activity was vigorous and dynamic
through the entire Ming and Qing periods (Frank 1998; Blaut 1993).

5. Chinese agricultural productivity and standards of living were
comparable to those in the leading regions of Europe as late as the
eighteenth century (Pomeranz 2000)

6. China's eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were marked by
substantial geographical expansion and economic integration of new
regions (Marks 1997)

7. It was not European eagerness for trade, but China's desire to
obtain silver bullion via trade, that was the motive force in the
global trading system of the sixteenth through early nineteenth
centuries (Flynn 1996; Flynn and Giraldez 1995a, 1995b)

8. Chinese and Ottoman political dynamics were not wholly different in
nature from those of European monarchies, for the major political
crises in seventeenth century China and the Middle East had similar
fiscal, social, and material causes, and often greater institutional
consequences, than European revolutions and rebellions of the same era
(Goldstone 1991).

There were thus no large and systemic differences between China (or,
for that matter the major Islamic states of India and the Ottoman
Empire) and Europe that entailed Europe's divergence; rather, the
divergence between European and Asian economies in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries was due to relatively recent changes that
occurred in parts of Europe—particularly in England—and in
Asia, and not to long-standing comparative advantages of European
civilization as a whole vs. other civilizations.

While the members of the California school are unanimous in opposing
the idea that European civilization had a deep-rooted basis for
eventual superiority over other societies, they do differ among
themselves in explaining why that divergence developed. Frank,
following lines of argument advanced by Elvin (1973) and Huang (1990),
suggests that Chinese demography eventually imposed an excessive
burden on land; Blaut and Pomeranz stress the chance acquisition of
assets in the New World. My own approach places more emphasis on
culture; I have argued that conservative cultural formations that took
root in major non-European civilizations after 1650 blocked progress
(Goldstone 1987, 1991). But what separates this view from the received
view of Eurocentric scholars is that I argue that such cultures were
not longstanding but a recent development, and that moreover, they
also developed in most European nations at about the same
time. England was a rare exception, and this was due to a rather
chance combination of political, social, and ecological trends that
produced a tolerant religious culture, a pluralist political system,
and an emphasis on coal-powered heating, motive power, and
metallurgy. Indeed, I have suggested that if not for this rare and
very unlikely chance combination of events, England c. 1800 would have
looked very much like the Netherlands, or like the Yangtze delta in
China or the Kanto plain in Japan; that is, a highly advanced but
pre-industrial manufacturing society engaged in large-scale
international trade, with a rich urban culture and wealthy merchant
class under the political rule of a conservative noble elite
(Goldstone 1998).

If the California school is right, we shall have to rewrite a lot of
the standard world history. At present, the major theme of world
history from the beginning of the Near Eastern fertile crescent
civilizations is the rise of the West. This is told as dominated by a
series of rises and falls in which the “West” always
advances. That is, from the rise of agriculture in the Near East to
the triumph of Greece over Persia and the spread of Hellenism under
Alexander, then to the conquests of Rome, the rise of the Carolingian
empire, then the founding of independent kingdoms in England, France,
and Germany; onward to the Crusades, the turning back of Islam in
Spain and on the Austrian frontier; the conquest of the New World by
Spain and Portugal, the founding of overseas empires by Britain and
France, and finally on up to the colonization of Africa in the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries—all is told as part of
“Europe's” progress. Other civilizations feature in
this story mainly as passive recipients of European trade and
conquest, and as oddly unimaginative bestowers of great
inventions—stirrups, gunpowder, the compass, the sternpost
rudder, paper and printing—whose potential was only realized in
European hands.

The California school reverses this emphasis and sees Europe as a
peripheral, conflict-ridden, and low-innovation society in world
history until relatively late. Superiority in living standards,
science and mathematics, transportation, agriculture, weaponry, and
complex production for trade and export, has multiple centers in
Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River Basin. From
these regions civilization spreads outward, with the rise of further
centers in Crete/Southern Greece/Western Turkey, Palestine, Anatolia,
Persia, India, and China, while western Europe remains a primitive
backwater. When civilization spreads West with Carthage and the Roman
Empire, it remains rooted in the Mediterranean and then—with
Byzantium—in Anatolia. From the eighth century, Islamic
civilization then rises to unify the core of the western civilized
world from Spain to India, while Sinic civilization spread through
Korea and Japan, and Indic civilization throughout southern Asia. By
1000 A.D., complex global trading routes link the centers of
manufacturing production in the Middle East, China, India, and
southeast Asia to underdeveloped suppliers of raw materials in Russia
and Europe. For the next six hundred years, the world will be
dominated by China; Chinese ceramics and textiles spread throughout
Asia and Africa and even find their way en masse to Europe.

China pioneers new technologies in textiles, metallurgy, ceramics, and
seaborne transport, as well as completing engineering works—the
Great Wall and the Grand canal—of unequaled size and
complexity. China adopts the world's first mainly meritocratic
system of officialdom, and brings the largest population yet known
under centralized rule. True, the Mongols briefly conquer China and
most of Asia, but they are quickly absorbed into Chinese culture, and
their century of control ends with a new Chinese dynasty that will
last nearly three hundred years. During this period, from 1000 AD to
1600, China explores central Asia, and sends enormous fleets of ships
westward to the coast of Africa, but can find no civilization
producing goods that it does not produce better at home. In contrast,
Chinese goods are sought throughout the known world.

On the far western periphery of Eurasia, in western Europe, is a
savage but nimble race of warriors, skilled forgers of arms and armor,
clever with clockworks and other trinkets, but dependent on crude iron
and cruder steel, and with no skills in the production of silks, fine
cottons, or other rich textiles, nor in the production of ceramics,
lacquers, nor any resources of precious jewels, jade, spices and
aromatics, or other valuables. From the perspective of Europe (and of
the rest of Eurasia), the Orient is the fountain of all riches; thus
the western Europeans scheme on how to get there. For centuries, they
have relied on Persians and Turks to convey the luxuries of the Orient
to the Eastern Mediterranean, from whence they can be carried by
Venetian, Genoan, Greek, Armenian, Jewish, and Turkish traders to
other parts of Europe. But having borrowed the compass and ideas on
ship construction and navigation, the Europeans set out courageously
for a direct route to the riches of the Orient. In the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, they send small fleets to the Indian Ocean and
adjacent seas, and manage to establish a few outposts on the fringes
of eastern civilizations. From there, they compete with vaster fleets
of Arab, Chinese, and Indian merchants in the carrying trade of East
Asia, creating a small fortune for some lucky merchants, but having no
real impact on Asian civilizations for the next two hundred years.

The received view of European expansion into the Indian ocean is one
of more advanced Europeans driving the primitive Asians out of the sea
and taking over international trade (Cipolla 1965). We now know this
to be wholly false. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1996: xvi) sums up recent
findings: “the fact that western European mercantile techniques
were not markedly ‘superior’ by 1500 to those east of Suez
is broadly borne out by the works of serious comparative
scholars.” He notes that even in their most prosperous years in
the late sixteenth century, the Portuguese rarely handled more than
ten percent of the pepper produced in southwestern India alone; and
when the Dutch entered Indian trade in the seventeenth century, they
were “unable to compete effectively with other [non-European]
merchant communities” (Subrahmanyam 1990: 361-62; 1996:xvi). The
Dutch were initially able to control a couple of small and nearly
unpopulated but spice-rich islands, but were confined to a small
outpost in Japan, while Chinese merchants handled the bulk of China
seas trade; and “at the turn of the eighteenth century Indian
shipping fully held its own against the English and Dutch
vessels” (Das Gupta 1994: XIV, 28-29). As late as 1700, when
Europeans had been trading in the Indian Ocean for two hundred years,
less than one-eighth of the trade at the major Indian Ocean port of
Surat was in European hands (Das Gupta 1994:VII,136). It was not until
the mid-eighteenth century, when the English managed to grab large
pieces of the crumbling Mughal empire, and the Dutch sought to
compensate for their declining position in Asian trade by extending
their taxation and control over Java and Indonesia, that Europeans had
a significant impact on the structure of Asia's trade and
economies.

The western Europeans have better luck, if a poorer sense of
direction, in seeking a direct route to the Orient across the
Atlantic. This “mistake” leads them to the New World,
quite fortunately for them at a time when the native civilizations are
riven by internal feuds. Taking advantage of alliances with enemies of
the Aztecs, and of a civil war in the Inca empire, small bands of
Spanish soldiers are able to seize and kill the native rulers of vast
empires. European diseases, unknown and horrifically fatal to the
indigenes, wipe out vast numbers of New World natives, and make it
possible for the Spanish and Portuguese to intimidate and colonize the
key silver and gold producing regions of the Americas.

Curiously, it is this “mistake” in direction that actually
does lead to the riches of the true Orient, because the silver mines
of Latin America finally give the poor Europeans something of value to
bring to Asian markets. As Frank puts it, Europe “used its
American money to buy itself a ticket on the Asian train” (Frank
1998, p. xxv). For the Chinese, seeking to streamline their economy
and fiscal system, are converting to a silver-based economy, yet
without domestic sources of the precious metal. They thus are willing
to pay a premium for good quality silver, which the Europeans can now
produce in abundance. Both via a Pacific route through Acapulco and
Manila, and via an Atlantic route through Seville and Amsterdam,
American silver pours into China (Flynn and Giraldez 1995a, 1995b).

From 1500 to 1650, the global silver trade helps familiarize Europeans
with the Orient; and their view is quite similar to the one expressed
by the California school. They are repeatedly impressed with the
wealth and sophistication of China as compared to Europe, and with the
wealth (if dismayed by the absolute power) of the Turkish sultans and
the Indian Grand Mughals. European nations remain eager but marginal
players on the world's economic and political stage, obsessed with
trying to catch up to the wealth, sophistication, and power of the
Asian civilizations who dazzle them, and who—in the Ottoman
Empire—confront them with expansion into the heart of Europe and
to the walls of Vienna.

Yet in the seventeenth century, the dominant powers of the
world—the Spanish Habsburg empire in Europe, the Ottoman empire
in the Middle East, and the Ming Empire in China—as well as many
smaller kingdoms, are beset with internal rebellion. The combination
of sustained population growth since the fading of the plague circa
1450, plus a vast infusion of silver, have combined to raise prices in
a dizzying spiral; taxes have not kept pace, weakening these
regimes. At the same time, increasing numbers of elites intensify
their competition for places in the army and the court bureaucracy;
while a vastly increased peasantry burdens the land, fighting against
increases in rents and taxation. Cities grow larger and more unruly;
merchant classes and commercial farmers grown richer in the preceding
age of commercialization and silver trade chafe under tax impositions
and exclusion from power. Rebellions against Spanish power occur in
Portugal, Catalonia, and Italy; provincial rebellions (jelalis)
undermine central power in the Ottoman empire; and rebellions of
unemployed soldiers and mercenaries led to peasant uprisings in China,
paving the way for the Manchus to seize Beijing and begin their
conquest of the Ming empire.

From this point onward, different members of the California school
offer somewhat different scenarios, so let me make clear that what
follows is solely my own view. After the wars and internal struggles
of the seventeenth century, elites and rulers seek to reestablish
unity and stability. In China, the Manchus promote an orthodox and
unusually rigid form of Confucian culture, and enforce their rule
throughout not only the Chinese heartland, but also the southeast
coast and central Asia; in the Ottoman empire, the viziers seek to
restore order through reinforcing the “traditional circle of
equity” based on orthodox Sunni Islam, eschewing innovation and
western influences; in the Habsburg domains in Spain, Italy, and
Austria, the Catholic Counter-Reformation takes hold; in France Louis
XVI revokes the Edict of Nantes and expels all Protestants, and even
in England Charles II upholds the unity and authority of the Anglican
church and cracks down on dissenters. Everywhere in Eurasia, the old
empires are restored and gain new strength and unity, economic growth
and political expansion return; but that strength and unity comes at
the price of cultural conformity and intensifying traditional
orthodoxies regarding beliefs, social hierarchy, and state power
(Goldstone 1987, 1991).

Except that something goes haywire in England. Charles II dies without
an Anglican heir, and the throne passes to his Catholic brother
James. The conundrum of a Catholic monarch reigning over a Protestant
state and its Protestant state Church upsets all the desired unity of
this period. James II, secretly allied with France, schemes to create
a Catholic army to preserve the throne for his Catholic son, while a
segment of the English elite schemes to put a Protestant
claimant—William of Orange, leader of the Netherlands—in
his place. The result, in one of the turning-point events of world
history, is William's invasion of England in 1688, supported by
the English political elite, and the exile of James and his
descendants. Instead of James II leading England into a Catholic
alliance with France that would aim to destroy the independence of the
Protestant Netherlands, England now joins with its erstwhile enemy,
whom it had fought repeatedly in the seventeenth century, and as King
of England, William leads an Anglo-Dutch Protestant alliance against
France that contains Catholic power in Europe (Kishlansky 1996). The
Protestant leaders of the Royal Society, such as Isaac Newton (who led
the battle at Cambridge against the Catholicization program of James
II), emerge in glory instead of being suppressed.

But this event is not of world-historic importance simply because it
prevents a Catholic-domination of the whole of Europe. Two very
particular, chance factors also are critical. First, William's
triumph is not total. He needs to compromise with the diverse
religious and political factions in his new kingdom of Great Britain;
facing the need to defend the Netherlands from French aggression, he
has no time or energy to spare for imposing a uniform orthodoxy in the
British Islands. Thus the 1689 settlement established limited but
secure tolerance for Catholics and Dissenters—they cannot hold
political office, but are otherwise free and secure in their person
and property. This creates the same kind of pluralistic open culture,
and a substantial minority that can only advance economically, as was
found in pluralistic and innovative periods in other societies, such
as the Netherlands in their Golden Age, Spain in the Muslim/Jewish
Golden Age, Italy in the Renaissance after the influx of Byzantine and
Arab influences, the early Ottoman Empire, the Caliphate of Baghdad,
and China in the Era of Warring States and again in Northern and
Southern Song. In the space opened by this settlement, innovators and
entrepreneurs emerged and flourished.

Second, a distinctive Newtonian culture takes hold, in which the
Anglican church—unlike all continental Churches—favors and
even promulgates the new mechanical world view. In strongholds such as
the Royal Society, and in new schools and academies throughout
Britain, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs come together to
learn mechanics and discuss how this knowledge may be applied to
improve production and society.

It is true that there were contributors to scientific innovation
throughout Europe, and that changes in economics and technology are
found in all societies to some degree. Yet innovation usually has been
slow in most societies, while the explosion of power and output based
on applications of fossil-fuel power to manufacturing and transport
was dramatic and occurred only in one place and time. Could this have
happened anywhere else? I do not believe so. It required three
fundamental breakthroughs: one cultural, one scientific, one
technical, all centered in England.

First, toward the end of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton
published his Principia, showing that universal laws of gravitation
could explain the elliptical motion of the heavenly bodies by the same
principles used to explain the motion of falling bodies on the
earth. The impact of this was not practical—Galileo had already
shown how to calculate projectile trajectories, and Leibnitz had
already developed the calculus as a tool for computations involving
time and motion. Rather, the effect was a tremendous break in
culture. Despite all that we are told about how Europeans were
uniquely “innovative,” “empirical,” and
“numerical,” the fact remains that until the seventeenth
century, they relied mainly on the physics of Aristotle and the
astronomy of Ptolemy, both of which postulated a complete
discontinuity between the heavenly and earthly spheres. The former was
perfect and immutable the realm of perfection and (for the Church) the
realm of God; the latter was imperfect, irregular, and changeable, for
the Church a realm of sin and redemption. Though many scholars had
challenged classical wisdom—as they had done in China and in the
realm of Islam—Newton's demonstration of universal
principles for heavenly and earthly motion wholly subverted the
classical cosmology of the West. Though Copernicus, Kepler, and
Galileo all accepted a sun-centered solar system, with a spinning
earth just one among the planets, all still believed in varying
degrees in the separation of heavenly and earthly motions;
Kepler's mystical “harmony of the spheres” was as
central to his work as the discovery of elliptical orbits and
proportional periods of movement around the sun. Newton's
comprehensive proofs that the motion of projectiles on earth, the
movements of the tides, and the orbits of the planets around the sun
could all be explained by the same, identical principle, elevated
Newtonian science to the level of a fully alternative cosmology. The
Renaissance had seen a revival of classical learning. The early and
mid-seventeenth century had witnessed a crisis in natural philosophy
as Copernicus and Galileo challenged key classical assumptions, and
yet throughout the continent the Catholic Church had withstood those
blows and maintained its orthodoxy, treating the solar-centered view
as a useful hypothesis. Only by the late seventeenth century in
England could the entire cultural elite agree that “the ancient
understanding of the natural world bears little or no relation to our
own” (Jacob 1988:3).6

Other civilizations, also experiencing turmoil, heterodoxy, and
pluralism during the seventeenth century upheavals, responded by
seeking stability, unity, and orthodoxy along classical
principles. Only in Protestant Europe was the entire corpus of
classical thinking called into question; Catholic regions under the
counter-Reformation preferred to hold to the mix of Aristotelian and
Christian cosmologies received from Augustine, Ptolemy, and
Aquinas. And only in England, for at least a generation ahead of any
other nation in Europe, did a Newtonian culture—featuring a
mechanistic world view, belief in fundamental, discoverable laws of
nature, and the ability of man to reshape his world by using those
laws—take hold . The spread of such beliefs to a wide variety of
engineers, merchants, ministers, and craftsmen reshaped the entire
nation's approach to knowledge and technology (Dobbs and Jacob
1995; Jacob 1988).

Although France had Descartes, and the Netherlands (where Descartes
fled and published after France banned his works) had Huygens and
relative freedom for writers, neither moved in the direction of
England—to a Church-endorsed and widely preached anti-classical
Newtonian mechanical world view, with practical instruction for
craftsmen and businessmen in the tools of the new
science. Descartes' physics, although it gradually spread in
France, was widely suspected of encouraging atheism. More profoundly,
Descartes believed that all matter was extension and that all forces
were conveyed by the impact of particles of matter; thus there could
neither be a vacuum nor action-at-a-distance. While like Locke,
Descartes challenged the Aristotelian idea that color, taste, and
shape were inherent properties of things, arguing instead that only
mass and extension mattered, in other ways his physics was not nearly
so radical as that of Newton. Indeed, in Descartes' physics, both
vacuums (and thus steam engines) and gravitational force were ruled
out as impossible. Nor were Descartes' followers inclined to
discover these errors, for Descartes' physics was deeply
non-experimental, relying instead on logical deduction from simple
observations. Throughout Catholic Europe, even where science was
taught in a mechanistic, Cartesian, mode, it was taught mainly as a
theoretical, deductive practice rather than as experimental and
inductive. Thus after the mid-17th century, “science …
became an increasingly Protestant … phenomenon” (Jacob
1988: 24-25). While scientific innovation continued for another
half-century in the Netherlands, the separation of the English and
Dutch monarchies after 1714 also led to a change in Dutch religious
culture.

While Calvinism in the seventeenth century may have produced scientific
rationalists … by the eighteenth century its orthodox clergy had grown
fearful of heresy among the laity, and the power of Calvinist orthodoxy
in popular culture produced widespread public opposition to aspects of
the new science, for example, smallpox inoculation.

Jacob 1988: 189

While the new science continued to be taught at Leiden, it became a
more elite, more deductive, more abstruse practice. Only in England
was the new science actively preached from the pulpit (where Anglican
ministers found the orderly, law-ordained universe of Newton both a
model for the order they wished for their country and a convenient
club with which to beat the benighted Catholic Church), sponsored in
the Royal Society, and spread through popular demonstrations of
mechanical devices for craftsmen and industrialists (Jacob 1988:
112ff).

The second breakthrough was in the understanding of the principles of
atmospheric pressure and the vacuum. Continental
Europeans—Torricelli and Pascal—had long since shown that
the atmosphere had weight, and could support a column of fluid. But it
was Robert Boyle who, in his systematic experiments with the vacuum,
made widely known how these principles operated and that air not only
had a vertical weight, but presented a “spring” or
pervasive pressure (Shapin 1998). This knowledge filtered down to
craftsmen like Thomas Newcomen, who solved a particular engineering
problem with the third and crucial breakthrough, the steam-powered
pump, forerunner to James Watt's steam engine.

Pumping apparatus had a history of thousands of years; Egyptians used
water wheels to lift water for irrigation; the Chinese had used pumps
on locks on the Grand Canal; and the Dutch had perfected the use of
the windmill to pump water to reclaim land from the sea. But pumping,
milling, manufacturing, transportation, and every other operation that
required the movement of things had from time immemorial been powered
by the movement of other things. The human body, animal bodies, wind,
falling weights, falling water—all could be set in guided
motion, and thereby used to power moving components. Motion to
motion—that was the principle on which all human manufacturing
and transportation had relied. Unfortunately, most raw motion was
expensive and irregular. Animals and people had to be fed and
sheltered, and their muscles gave out periodically with heavy use;
falling weights and water and air provided cheaper motive power, but
were far more difficult to harness. Wind changed direction and
intensity moment by moment; water changed its flow depending on the
weather and the seasons. Thousands of years of experiment and
innovation had produced clocks, sails, waterwheels, spinning wheels,
and other mechanisms to take the raw motion of the sources and
transform that into steady, directed motion in boats, mills,
clockworks, and factories (going back to ancient factories for
producing bricks to more recent ones producing textiles and ceramics
for export, China and Islam had factories with mechanized power using
ramps, wheels, and mills). But what was not available was a cheap
primary source of dependable and regular motion, for—except in
the heavenly bodies—no such primary motion was known.

The problem that faced England was as follows—as an island of
limited extent, with few regions of significant mountains (most of
those, in Scotland, covered with scrub and grass instead of forest),
the natural forest cover shrank as the population took more land for
agriculture. Fortunately, coal was plentiful and readily transportable
by seacoast and riverine transport, so England early on came to rely
on coal for much heating, cooking, and industry. By the seventeenth
century, however, the shafts of the deep vertical seams were filling
with ground-water, and it was becoming ever more difficult to keep
them clear. Newcomen, who was familiar with the high cost of using
horses to pump water from tin mines in his native Cornwall, realized
that if a vacuum could be created in a chamber holding a piston, air
pressure would push the piston into the chamber; the motion of the
piston could then be harnessed to drive a pump. One way to create a
vacuum would be to fill a chamber with steam, then cool the chamber so
that the steam condensed to water. Using the scientific principles of
air temperature and pressure discovered by Boyle, Newcomen was able to
create and use a vacuum to power machinery: a true breakthrough.

Of course, the early engine developed by Newcomen was horribly
inefficient. Of the huge amount of heat energy needed to create the
steam, and to move water in and out of the cylinder, only a tiny
fraction (less than 1 per cent) was available as usable energy from
the motion of the piston (Mokyr 1990: 85). However, efficiency was not
the main point—what was sought, and accomplished, was the
conversion of one form of energy (heat) into another (motion) on a
regular and dependable basis. Still, the inefficiencies were so
enormous that this awkward contraption was only worth using in
circumstances where there was abundant and extremely cheap fuel for
heat, and abundant water to channel for steam and cooling. (Martin
Clare, a schoolmaster and lecturer on mechanics—a uniquely
English combination, incidentally—recognized that a steam engine
would not return a profit if used “where fewel is not very
cheap” (Jacob 1988: 146)). In short, the early steam-engine was
only practicable to develop for one particular purpose—pumping
water out of mines near ample sources of coal. Still, within a few
decades of its first installation in 1712, over a hundred such engines
were operating in Britain. In 1765, James Watt and Matthew Boulton
made a further significant leap; they moved the condensation process
to a separate condenser, so the entire cylinder did not have to be
heated and cooled at each cycle, and they added a rotary mechanism and
flywheel, to produce uniform circular motion from the up-and-down
movement of the piston. As a result, Great Britain had what no other
nation on earth had, or would for more than a generation: a cheap and
reliable means of converting heat energy (mainly from coal) into
uniform rotary motion. This made it possible to free the entire range
of manufacturing, transportation, and grinding/milling processes from
the costs and limitations of animal, human, and wind/water motive
power.

A plethora of inventions followed that opened up the world to British
industry. The steam-powered spinning factory employing spinning mules
made huge advances in efficiency and output over the early
ring-spinning factories. Railroads and steamships opened continents
and oceans to upstream and upwind travel of bulk commodities and
weapons platforms. Of course, England and its Newtonian culture also
made notable advances in mass-production of ceramics and in
agriculture, and in metallurgy, throughout the eighteenth century. But
these latter advances, however laudable, simply helped England and
Europe catch up to the more advanced manufacturing of Asia. Novel as
they were in England, none of these advances—coke smelting of
iron and steel, factory production of porcelain for mass export, mass
production of cotton textiles for distant sale—were new in
global history. And, as critics of the concept of an “Industrial
Revolution” have pointed out, these advances did not
significantly increase living standards for many decades (Crafts and
Harley 1992). Such improvements in production of consumption goods
increased production output; energy conversion of coal-heat to regular
motion transformed the production frontier.

The rest of the story is familiar. Newtonian science became the
accepted mode of studying nature, producing further advances in the
understanding of chemistry and electricity; railroads opened up new
territories to the market and to new agricultural and production
techniques; European gunboats steaming upriver forced open China and
the interior of Africa and Brazil; further refinements in engines,
steel, and manufacturing processes brought cars, bulldozers,
elevators, machine guns, tanks, and eventually the full panoply of the
horrors and blessings of twentieth century military and civilian
technology. But without the ability to move beyond the constraints of
muscle, wind, and water power as primary motive force, none of this
would have been possible. Contemporaries had a better grip than many
modern scholars on the importance of the steam engine in transforming
their world: Matthew Boulton advertised his engines by saying “I
sell here, gentlemen, what all the world desires: power” (The
Economist 1999). In 1824, still early in industrialization, the French
scientist Sadi Carnot, who would be the first to lay out the laws of
thermodynamics, was moved to observe: “To take away
England's steam engines today would amount to robbing her of her
iron and coal, to drying up her sources of wealth, to ruining her
means of prosperity” (cited in Mokyr 1990:90).

This transformation in history was brought about by the most freakish
of accidents—the prevention in England of the global trend to
cultural conformity and religious orthodoxy as the basis for strong
and stable political structures; the rise in that space of both a
Newtonian culture and the dissenting but protected religious groups
who would take up the challenge of using a mechanistic view to create
new economic assets; and the occurrence in that same space of a
particular technical problem—the pumping of deep mines near
abundant coal supplies—that made feasible and desirable the
bringing of these particular resources to bear in such a way as to
create a breakthrough in energy conversion, something that in fact was
wholly new in the thousands and thousands of years of prior
civilization.

COUNTER-VIEWS

Let us quickly consider two arguments that seem to counter this odd
and quirky story, that seem to indicate that the rise of Europe and
industrial civilization would have come about regardless of small
details of political conflict in England. First, there is the argument
from conquest. It was not just English, but Europeans—first
Spanish and Portuguese, then English, French, and Germans (and in some
areas Russians)—who captured the rest of the world. From the New
World colonies of the sixteenth century and the Dutch conquest of the
East Indies, which predate industrialization, to the British raj in
India and French empires in West Africa and Southeast Asia, Europeans
as a whole have been defeating and elbowing aside other civilizations
for the last five hundred years. Second, there is the comparison case
of Japan. Japan responded so quickly to western influence that by 1905
it was defeating a European power in war (in the Russo-Japanese war),
building a modern industrial economy and military, and developing its
own colonies in Korea, Taiwan, and (later) Manchuria. Whatever
comparative advantages European civilization had over most others,
Japan apparently had something of the same; thus—as Eric Jones
(1988), David Landes (1998) and Alan Macfarlane (1997) explicitly
argue—even if Europeans had not developed an industrial society,
Japan, left alone, might well have done so.

Conquest, yes, but so what?

It is quite true that Europeans had a good run in geopolitical
expansion after 1500. But that indicates absolutely nothing about
either any general long-term advantages of European civilization, or
of general potential for industrialization. The reasons for
large-scale geopolitical conquests are many, and familiar from world
history. It has been a general pattern that smallish groups of
underdeveloped, barbarian peoples on the periphery of great and
populous civilizations can achieve stunning geopolitical victories
when the great civilizations are in decline. This does not mean that
the barbarians were in any way superior to the advanced civilizations
that they conquered, nor that they are destined for anything greater
than a few centuries in the sun before being overwhelmed by a new turn
of geopolitical events.

Let us start with the Huns; arbitrarily, as they are not the first
barbarians to sweep aside more civilized peoples, but one of the most
famous. They accomplished absolutely nothing except for conquest. What
about the crude Macedonians who not only swept over the more civilized
regions of classical Greece, but also defeated the civilizations of
Egypt and Persia? After a few centuries in which they seemed to rule
and transform the civilized world, their triumph was reduced to ashes
by the Romans and renewed Persian power. Of course, the Romans had
claims to be a superior civilization, with more advanced military
organization. But in the west, they were eventually overrun by the
Visigoths, Franks, and Vandals; in the East the Byzantines lost their
empire first to simple Arab tribesmen, and secondly to the Turks. If
we were simply to equate military conquest of vast lands and
civilizations with greatness, then the Mongols outshone all
civilizations and societies prior to the twentieth century; but I know
of few European scholars who would want to give the Mongols the prize
for “world's greatest and most advanced civilization”
simply because of their military conquests.

The triumphs of the West prior to industrialization turn out, on
closer inspection, to be made of similar material. The most stunning
conquests were those of the Aztecs and the Incas by Spain. But how was
this accomplished? Like the Mongols, the Spanish used horses to good
effect; like the Mongols, whose bows were superior, the Spanish also
had cutting weapons of steel that were superior to the bronze and
wooden weapons of the New World. But the three biggest keys to their
success were also familiar from world history—their opponents
were weak and divided, epidemic disease crushed the spirit and people
of their enemies, and the Spanish pursued and exploited these
advantages with unbelievable ruthlessness and brutality (Thompson
1999).

As already alluded to above, the Spanish were most fortunate to come
to the New World at a time of great opportunity. The classic Maya
civilization was long decayed, and central Mexico had been wracked by
a series of wars won by marauders from the North, the Aztecs. These
wars had left the Aztecs with many enemies, and their so-called
“empire” was not a centrally controlled realm but a
tributary system in which recently subdued tribes—anxious to
turn the tables—agreed to pay benefices to their recent
conquerors. These tribes were more than happy to help the Spanish in
destroying Aztec power. Similarly, when Pizarro came to Peru, although
the Incas did have a centralized empire with enormous resources, it
was in the midst of a ruinous succession struggle between one of the
deceased emperor's heirs and one of his leading generals. As one
of Pizarro's lieutenants observed, “If the land had not been
divided by the war between Washkar and ‘Ataw Wallpa we could not
have entered or conquered it” (cited in Patterson 1991).

The role of disease, and of other European flora and fauna besides
microbes, in aiding Europe's colonization of the New World is
well-documented (Crosby 1986). Disease not only wiped out the natives
en masse, it gave the Europeans an air of invincibility (why did they
not fall from the diseases that tore through the native populations?),
and carried off key leaders of the Native Americans at crucial
times. But when the tables were turned, Europeans did no better. The
supposedly “superior” European civilization was absolutely
helpless to penetrate into the African interior. Unable to establish
any more than small trading footholds along the coast, except in the
temperate far south of the Continent and the highlands of Kenya,
Europeans depended even for their vital slaves on Arab and African
slave traders who ranged into the interior, and on the African
kingdoms that sold slaves in exchange for
weapons. Africans—armed with the twin power of guns gained from
Europeans and diseases of the tropics—held off European conquest
until the very end of the nineteenth century, long after Asian and
Native American civilizations had fallen.

The Spanish also, it should not be forgotten, were no less ruthless
than the Mongols and the Turks. They made and broke solemn agreements
at whim, executed hostages whose safety they had sworn, and committed
ambushes and kidnappings after promising diplomatic immunity. Lack of
civilized behavior, not advanced civilization, was often the key to
Spanish victory. Of all the European colonial conquests, those of the
Spanish and Portuguese were among the most extensive and certainly the
longest living, lasting nearly three centuries. Yet did conquest
indicate superior civilization, or greater potential for economic and
technological development?

Despite (or perhaps because of?) their great conquests, Spain and
Portugal remained far behind, not in the vanguard, of European
economic development.

As to the British conquest of India, it was not greatly dissimilar to
that by Spain in the Americas. The empire of the Great Mughals was in
disarray, and the subcontinent was torn by divisions among competing
successors. The great Indian port of Surat in the Northwest fell into
decay as a consequence of civil war in Yemen in 1714 that disrupted
the coffee trade, which thereafter shifted to Java, and of the Maratha
revolt in 1723 against Mughal rule, as the Marathas preyed heavily on
Surat, turned the region into a battleground, and cut the Northwest
coast off from the interior which supplied its indigo and other
precious materials (Das Gupta 1994:II, 40-41) By default, Indian ocean
trade thus grew more dependent on the northeast entrepot of Bengal,
where the British had established their foothold. The collapse of the
Persian Safavid Empire in 1722, and the virtual collapse of Mughal
central authority in 1720, further left the Indian Ocean region
divided among weak and competing states (Richards 1993). The British
exploited these divisions with such skill that, by building alliances
and gaining the allegiance of various local powers, they—in the
common parlance—stumbled into possession of an Empire without
aiming at doing so. Elsewhere in Asia, the Europeans were stymied by
superior Asian power. In China, until the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s,
Europeans were confined to one port on the periphery of the Chinese
Empire, where they were tolerated mainly because they were willing to
throw all the silver in the world (literally) at Chinese merchants in
return for a small portion of China's tea and silks. In Japan,
until the forced opening by American vessels in 1866, the Japanese
excluded the Europeans almost entirely, eliminating contact with all
but the Dutch and limiting them to one small post in the hinterland.

In sum, until well into the 1800s, the European conquests are not
greatly different than the other great barbarian conquests of history:
ruthless and mobile bands coming on great civilizations torn by
internal dissension and decay frequently emerge as conquerors. But
this does not imply their superiority or lasting advantage. The truth
of this should be clear simply by looking within Europe—the
greatest empire-builders of European civilization prior to
industrialization, namely Spain, the Austrian Habsburgs, and Russia,
were generally agreed by 1850 to be the most backward and weak
societies in Europe.

Was Japan on its way to indigenous industrialization?

Let us now turn to that remarkable nation which, alone of countries
outside of Europe, attained something like parity with European
economies by the early twentieth century. What are we to make of that
parity, and the early dominance of Japan over the other nations of
Asia. Did Japan share to some degree in the advantageous
“something” that favored Europe?

It has been argued by scholars of Japan and some comparativists that
Japan did indeed share something special with Europe (Bellah 1957;
Powelson 1994; Macfarlane 1997). The candidates for that
“something” include a feudal era that paved the way for
capitalism, a competitive but honorable warrior ethic that functioned
somewhat like the Protestant ethic in Max Weber's explanation of
western capitalism, and—in my own argument (Goldstone
1996)—a predisposition to use female labor outside the household
in a way that facilitated recruitment and staffing of early textile
factories. I agree that all of these elements contributed to Japanese
prosperity, and aided its rapid adoption of western technology and
economic organization; but that is not the same as saying that these
things would have fueled an industrial revolution.

It is interesting to note that seventeenth century Japan had much in
common with seventeenth century Britain—limited forest cover and
a fuel shortage arising by the 18th century; relatively strong if
somewhat decentralized government; and military and economic
competition with a vast continental power that was in many ways the
source of its own culture. Yet it is instructive to note that Japan
“solved” these problems in a manner almost exactly
opposite from Great Britain. Japan invested heavily in forestry
programs and conservation to resolve its fuel problems, instead of
seeking to import coal or other substitutes. While Britain adopted a
pluralist and representative government to resolve strong and
decentralized government, Japan used an extremely burdensome
semi-ransom form of governance, with the regional lords (daimyo)
forced to undertake extravagant regular visits to the Shogunal court
and leave family members at the court year-round as hostages. And
while Britain engaged in near-constant military struggles on the
continent, Japan isolated itself for nearly three centuries.

During those centuries of Tokugawa rule, Japan restricted
international trade with Europe (though much less so with other parts
of Asia), and most startling, completely discarded its technology for
the mass production and mass utilization of firearms, in which it
exceeded any European nation in quantity and quality by the late
sixteenth century. Japanese steel was superlative, but too expensive
for any general use; and like Europe, Japan largely imported its silk
and luxuries in return for bullion exports (silver and copper) to
China. A few Japanese studied “Dutch science,” as the
European natural history texts introduced by the Dutch colony in
Nagasaki were called, but there was nothing approaching the kind of
“Newtonian culture” of mechanistic views and insistence on
progress that spread among Britain's engineers, craftsmen,
teachers, and entrepreneurs. The conversion of heat energy to motion
energy—the key to an industrial revolution—remained as
obscure in Japan as in any part of the world save Britain until the
later nineteenth century.

What Japan's success does demonstrate is something that has been
shown in Korea and Taiwan as well—that a unified people under
firm government direction determined to import and implement Western
industrial technology can do so in about four decades. This is about
the time it has taken to transform South Korea from an African level
of agricultural poverty to one of the world's leading industrial
economies; similarly for Taiwan. Both have risen to this level from
minimal beginnings after the Korean War of the 1950s and the Chinese
Civil Wars of the 1940s.

In more recent years, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia have shown
similar progress and determination, although starting in the 1970s.

Let us more closely compare Japan and China in the mid-nineteenth
century. Both countries had regions in contact with the west, where
would-be reformers sought to learn from western technology (the
southeast coastal regions in China, the southwest coastal regions in
Japan). Both countries also suffered a crisis of governance, due in
part to weakness in the face of the western powers. But in China, the
Taiping rebellion was put down—in some measure due to support
for the imperial court from those western powers—while in Japan
the rebellion against the Shogun won the day. The result was that in
China, with the old imperial regime propped up for another half
century, it would be 1911 before China finally abandoned its
traditional social, political, and economic organization. In Japan,
however, the Meiji rebels overthrew the traditional social and
political order in 1868 and put Japan on the path of Westernizing
reform. Thus Japan had at least a 43 year lead on China in freeing
itself from traditional structures; just long enough for a determined
modernization drive to succeed and fully bypass the other nations of
Asia.

Today, having cast aside its largely fruitless experiment with state
socialism, China is gaining fast on the world—by some measures
it has already surpassed Japan in total output to become the
world's second largest economy. While its per-capita income
remains far lower than Japan's, China is growing at a far faster
rate; indeed Japan's economic growth seems to have stalled for at
least the past decade. If there is any “inherent advantage of
Japanese civilization” in economic development, the last
decade—in which for the first time since the mid-nineteenth
century these two nations were on anything like a level playing
field—certainly does not indicate that it exists.

In short, if we examine closely why Japan (or for that matter Korea or
Taiwan or Botswana) has shown unusually rapid adoption and
implementation of western-style economic organization and technology,
we do not need to posit any special advantage of its culture or
civilization. Indeed, prior to 1868, Japan was an unusually closed and
conformist society, with sharp and manifest retrogression in its use
of weapons and no clear lead in any form of technology. Just as in
England, where a chance political sequence of events opened up space
for exceptional development, so too the victory of the Meiji rebels
opened up space for an early rejection of much of the traditional
social and political structure (although under the guise of preserving
imperial authority) and the implementation of western models. If we
simply imagine that the Western powers had decided—as they did
in China—that it would be much better to keep the traditional
government in power to bargain with, and thus propped up the Shogunal
regime for another fifty years, I suspect that any illusions about
Japan's “inherent superiority” would never have
arisen. Had the Taiping rebellion succeeded in overthrowing the
Manchus, and creating a new regime that was egalitarian, partly
Christianized, and open to western in-fluence and technology in the
1850s, China might never have lost its dominant position in Asia.

CONCLUSION

It will of course take continued detailed research into the economic,
political, and social organization of Asian, African, Latin American,
and European nations to confirm the story outlined above. But already,
the California school's documented findings regarding Chinese
family structure, the global trade in silver and manufactures, and the
standard of living in pre-industrial Asian countries, have overturned
many old “certainties” regarding the special or superior
conditions of Europe. These findings force us to face two very simple
principles —

(1) most conditions in Europe do not seem broadly different from those
in the advanced regions of Asia until relatively recently, c. 1800;
and (2) the later great divergence need not be rooted in great and
long-standing prior differences, but could well be the result of small
differences and chance events that created oddly exceptional political
and cultural conditions not in “Europe,” but in small
parts of Europe and—much later—in Japan.

This displacement of any long-standing European advantages in the
story of the “Rise of the West” may take away some
grandeur and continuity from world history. Just as Copernicus's
placement of the earth as just one of many planets circling the sun,
and Darwin's placement of humankind as just another emergent
species in the billions years of random evolution, assaulted
Europeans' sense of “special” or
“privileged” identity, so too the recasting of world
economic history by the California school removes the “special
and privileged” place of Europe among the world's
civilizations, and makes Europe's nineteenth century dominance the
result of a chance departure in a small region from the normal global
(including most of Europe!) pattern of using cultural orthodoxy and
political centralization to overcome the seventeenth century's
political and social upheavals. Painful as it was to accept the
Copernican and Darwinian shifts in perspective, they brought us closer
to the truth and empowered people to control their own fate. The truth
about European development may also be painful for many, but removing
the myth of “special or privileged” situation for European
culture or civilization will also bring us closer to the truth. And, I
hope, it may help empower the billions of non-Europeans throughout the
world who are working to industrialize and develop their societies.

Notes

*Although I do not cite particular passages in their works, I wish to
note my particular obligations to Daniel Chirot (1994), Randall
Collins (1986), S.N. Eisenstadt (1995, 1998), and Michael Mann
(1986). Their conversations, insights, and writings have provided a
continual stimulation and inspiration for my efforts. I also owe
thanks to Harriet Zurndorfer, Peer Vries, and Wim van den Doel, who
invited me to the University of Leiden for visits that greatly
stimulated my thinking on this topic; to Ralph Crozier, who encouraged
me to produce an earlier version of this paper for a meeting of the
World History Association in Vancouver, B.C. in June 1999; and to
Jonathan Turner, who urged me to prepare this version for
publication. Special thanks are due to the colleagues who joined me in
a conference at UC-Davis dealing with issues in modernization in
October 1999, and to UCD Deans Steve Sheffrin and Barbara Metcalf, and
the all-UC Group in Economic History, who helped fund the
conference. The American Sociological Association's grants for
Advancement of the Discipline also provided funds for the conference,
thanks to the outstanding efforts of my colleague John R. Hall; I
gratefully acknowledge their help and support. Finally, this paper
could not have been conceived or written without the outstanding
scholarship, and the willingness to share that scholarship, of my
friends and colleagues in what I have come to call “The
California School.”

1. That their ships did not ply the harbors of Europe could not be
said of another major Asian power: the Ottoman Empire. New research
has shown that Ottoman Turkish merchants established important trading
headquarters and frequently sent their ships to Venice in the
sixteenth century, as well as to maritime ports as far away as Java
(Kafadar 1994).

2. While the British fleets sent to China in the opium wars had many
conventional men-of-war, it was the steam ships that were decisive:
“The Opium War of 1839-42 marked an important historical moment
… of innovation in Western military technology and tactics. The
emergence of the steam-driven vessel as a considerable force in naval
battles was perhaps the most important of these. … [The British
ship] Nemesis was an uncoppered paddle-wheel iron ship … drawing
only five feet, the ship could operate in shallow coastal waters in
virtually any wind or tidal condition. In the Canton …
campaigns, the Nemesis roamed the shallows firing grapeshot, heavy
shells, and explosive rockets, grappling and towing junks, ferrying
troops, and towing the sailing vessels on calm days. In the Shanghai
campaign, the ship towed the men-of-war with their heavy guns into
firing range on the city and served as a transport that could unload
the British directly onto the docks. Well before the war's end,
new steamers of similar design were being sent to China's
waters” (Spence 1990: 158).

The victory of British steam-power came none too soon, for the Chinese
quickly copied other armaments. As the British proceeded with their
campaign in 1842, they found that the Chinese had begun to cast new
brass guns and build new men-of-war based on British designs, with up
to thirty guns. “In Shanghai, they seized sixteen new,
beautifully made eighteen-pound ship's guns, perfect in detail
down to the sights cast on the barrels and the pierced vents for
flintlocks. All were mounted on sturdy wooden trucks with iron
axles. At least some people in China had clearly found the barbarian
challenge to be a stimulus as well as an outrage” (Spence
1990:158).

3. In fact, a Dutch colonial administrator, J. C. Van Leur wrote a
treatise challenging the accepted view of early European domination of
Indian Ocean trade as early as 1934. However, his work was not
published until 1955, and even then was widely dismissed as mistaken
(BlussÅ¥ and Gaastra 1998).

4. As late as the 1770s, many Europeans believed that the quality and
cost of Indian cotton could never be matched by European producers
(Chaudhuri 1990:297).

5. As just one example, in 1718 Mulla Abdul Ghafur, the richest
merchant in the trading center of Surat on Mughal India's
northwest coast, died and left an estate valued at over ten million
Dutch guilders (8.5 million rupees). At that time, the wealthiest
Dutch merchants in Holland typically left estates ranging from 450,000
guilders for rich burgers to a “breathtaking” one million
guilders for the most outstandingly wealthy rentiers; even the latter
had barely ten percent of Ghafur's fortune (Das Gupta 1994: XII,
111; de Vries and van der Woulde 1997:88).

6. The importance of Newton's grand synthesis and its cultural
impact is readily seen when noting that Europeans were far from the
first society to contemplate a solar-centric universe.

The famous 11th century Islamic astronomer Abu ibn Ahmad Al-Biruni
published numerous works arguing that the earth rotated on its axis
and revolved around the sun. But as with Galileo's teaching in
Catholic Italy, these ideas of themselves did not overthrow Ptolemaic
cosmology.

References

Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World
System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press.

Blaut, James. 1993. The Colonizer's Model of the World:
Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York and
London: Guilford Press.

BlussÅ¥, Leonard and Femme Gaastra, eds. 1998. On the Eighteenth
Century as a Category of Asian History: Van Leur in
Retrospect. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate.

Brook, Timothy. 1998. “Capitalism and the Writing of Modern
History in China.” Pp. 110—157 in China and Capitalism:
Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge, edited by Timothy Brook,
and Gregory Blue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Chao, Kang. 1977. The Development of Cotton Textile Production
in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chaudhuri, K.N. 1990. Asia Before Europe: Economy and
Civilization in the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to
1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.