My sense of that comes from: (i) in growth numbers people usually cite, Europe’s growth was absurdly fast from 1000AD − 1700AD (though you may think those numbers are wrong enough to bring growth back to a normal level) (ii) it seems like Europe was technologically quite far ahead of other IR competitors.
I’m curious about your take. Is it that:
The world wasn’t yet historically exceptional by 1700, there have been other comparable periods of rapid progress. (What are the historical analogies and how analogous do you think they are? Is my impression of technological sophistication wrong?)
1700s Europe is quantitatively exceptional by virtue of being the furthest along example, but nevertheless there is a mystery to be explained about why it became even more exceptional rather than regressing to the mean (as historical exceptional-for-their-times civilizations had in the past). I don’t currently see a mystery about this (given the level of noise in Roodman’s model, which seems like it’s going to be in the same ballpark as other reasonable models), but it may be because I’m not informed enough about those historical analogies.
Actually the IR may have been inevitable in 1700s Europe but the exact pace seems contingent. (This doesn’t seem like a real tension with a continuous acceleration model.)
Actually the contingencies you have in mind were already driving the exceptional situation in 1700.
[Caveat to all of the below is that these are vague impressions, based on scattered reading. I invite anyone with proper economic history knowledge to please correct me.]
I’m reasonably sympathetic to the first possibility. I think it’s somewhat contentious whether Europe or China was more ‘developed’ in 1700. In either case, though, my impression is that the state of Europe in 1700 was non-unprecedented along a number of dimensions.
The error bars are still pretty large here, but it’s common to estimate that Europe’s population increased by something like 50% between 1500 and 1700. (There was also probably a surge between something like 1000AD and 1300AD, as Western Europe sort of picked itself back up from a state of collapse, although I think the actual numbers are super unclear. Then the 14th century has famine and the Black Death, which Europe again needs to recover from.)
Something like a 50% increase over a couple centuries definitely couldn’t have been normal, but it’s also not clearly unprecedented. It seems like population levels in particular regions tended to evolve through a series of surges and contractions. We don’t really know these numbers — although, I think, they’re at least inspired by historical records — but the McEvedy/Jones estimates show a 100% population increase in two centuries during the Song Dynasty (1000AD − 1200AD). We super don’t know most of these numbers, but it seems conceivable that other few-century efflorescences were associated with similar overall growth rates: for example, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Roman Republic/Empire during its rise, the Han dynasty, the Mediterranean in the middle of the first century BCE.
These numbers are also presumably sketchy, but England’s estimated GDP-per-capita in 1700AD was also roughly the same as China’s estimated GDP-per-capita in 1000AD (according to a chart in British Economic Growth, 1270-1870); England is also thought to have been richer than other European states, with the exception of the Netherlands.
My impression is that Northwestern Europe’s growth from 1500 to 1700 also wasn’t super innovation-driven: a lot of it was about stuff like expanded trade networks and better internal markets. The maritime technology that supported global trade was enabled by innovation, but (I think) the technology wasn’t obviously better than Chinese maritime technology in previous centuries. (E.g. Zheng He.) I think the technological progress that was happening at this point also wasn’t obviously more impressive than the sort of technological progress that happened in China in previous eras. Vaclav Smil (in Transforming the 20th Century) thinks the most technologically innovative time/place in history before 19th century Britain was early Han Dynasty China (roughly 200BC-1AD). The Song Dynasty (1000AD-1300AD) also often gets brought up. I don’t personally know a lot of details about the innovations produced during these periods, although I believe a number of them were basically early (and sometimes better) versions of later European innovations. One specific claim I’ve encountered is that the volume of iron/steel production was plausibly about the same in 1000AD Song China and in 1700AD Europe.
—
Here is one good/classic paper on previous economic efflorescences and their implications for our understanding of the Industrial Revolution. I also pulled out a few different long quotes, to make a 3 page summary version here.
If one believed the numbers on wikipedia, it seems like Chinese growth was also accelerating a ton and it was not really far behind on the IR, such that I wouldn’t except to be able to easily eyeball the differences.
If you are trying to model things at the level that Roodman or I are, the difference between 1400 and 1600 just isn’t a big deal, the noise terms are on the order of 500 years at that point.
So maybe the interesting question is if and why scholars think that China wouldn’t have had an IR shortly after Europe (i.e. within a few centuries, a gap small enough that it feels like you’d have to have an incredibly precise model to be justifiably super surprised).
Maybe particularly relevant: is the claimed population growth from 1700-1800 just catch-up growth to Europe? (more than doubling in 100 years! And over the surrounding time period the observed growth seems very rapid even if there are moderate errors in the numbers) If it is, how does that work given claims that Europe wasn’t so far ahead by 1700? If it isn’t, then how does the that not very strongly suggest incredible acceleration in China, given that it had very recently had some of the fastest growth in history and is then experience even more unprecedented growth? Is it a sequence of measurement problems that just happen to suggest acceleration?
If one believed the numbers on wikipedia, it seems like Chinese growth was also accelerating a ton and it was not really far behind on the IR, such that I wouldn’t except to be able to easily eyeball the differences.
I believe the population surge is closely related to the European population surge: it’s largely attributed to the Colombian exchange + expanded markets/trade. One of the biggest things is that there’s an expansion in the land under cultivation, since potatoes and maize can be grown on marginal land that wouldn’t otherwise work well for rice or wheat, and (probably) a decline in living standards that’s offsetting the rise in population. From the book 1493 (ch. 5):
Neither rice nor wheat, China’s two most important staples, would grow in the shack people’s marginal land. The soil was too thin for wheat; on steep slopes, the irrigation for rice paddies requires building terraces, the sort of costly, hugely laborious capital improvement project unlikely to be undertaken by renters. Almost inevitably, they turned to American crops: maize, sweet potato, and tobacco. Maize (Zea mays) can thrive in amazingly bad land and grows quickly, maturing in less time than barley, wheat, and millet. Brought in from the Portuguese at Macao, it was known as “tribute wheat,” “wrapped grain,” and “jade rice.” Sweet potatoes will grow where even maize cannot, tolerating strongly acid soils with little organic matter and few nutrients....
In their quest for social stability, the Ming had prohibited people from leaving their home regions. Reversing course, the Qing actively promoted a westward movement. Much as the United States encouraged its citizens to move west in the nineteenth century and Brazil provided incentives to occupy the Amazon in the twentieth, China’s new Qing masters believed that filling up empty spaces was essential to the national destiny.… Lured by tax subsidies and cheap land, migrants from the east swarmed into the western hills.… They looked at the weathered, craggy landscape, so unwelcoming to rice—and they, too, planted American crops....
The amount of cropland soared, followed by the amount of food grown on that cropland, and then the population.
There’s obviously a major risk of hindsight bias here, but I think there’s almost a consensus among economic historians that China wasn’t on track toward an industrial revolution anytime soon. There aren’t really signs of innovation picking up during this period: “the prosperity engendered by quantitative growth in output masked the lack of significant innovation in productive technologies” (The Economic History of China, p. 336). Estimates seem to vary widely, and I don’t know what the error bars are here, but the favored estimates in TECHC (taken from a Chinese-language paper by Liu Ti) also show the industrial sector of the economy actually shrinking by half between 1600 and 1840 and real per-capita incomes shrinking by about a quarter.
It’s also a common view that China was entering a period of decline at the start of the nineteenth century (partly due to population pressure and ecological damage from land conversion). From the same book (p. 361):
[T]he economic growth of the nineteenth century could not be sustained indefinitely. There is considerable evidence that the Chinese economy had seriously begun to exhaust its productive capacities by 1800.
Basically, I think the story is that: There was another 2-3 century “efflorescence” in China, but it wasn’t really associated with either technological innovation or an expansion of industry. The total population growth numbers were probably unusually big, relative to other efflorescences, but this doesn’t imply that this was an unusually innovative period; the unusual size of the surge may just reflect the fact that there was a black-swan-ish ecological event (the sudden transfer of several New World crops) around the start of the period. The growth surge was unsustainable, as all previous growth surges had been, and China was on track to fall back down to a lower level of development.
We will never know whether without the rise of the West, the Orient would have been able to replicate something similar, given enough time. It seems unlikely, but there is no way of knowing if they would have stumbled upon steam power or the germ theory of disease. It is true that the consensus of modern scholarship has remained of the opinion that by 1800 the bulk of output in Chinese industry employed a technology very little different from that under the Song (Richardson, 1999, pp. 54–55). At the level of the economy as a whole, this is an overstatement: Chinese agriculture adopted new crops such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, some of which were introduced by the intercontinental ecological arbitrage practiced by European explorers in the sixteenth century. Stagnation is therefore too strong a word, but comparing Chinese technological achievements not only with those of the West but also with its own successes during the Song clearly indicates a decelerating progress. Elvin (1996, p. 93), after studying the missed opportunities of hydraulic technology adoption in China, concludes that there were strong and perceived needs, and few constraints in adopting such techniques. And yet there was minimal advance. China’s technological somnolence was rudely interrupted by the exposure to Western technology in the nineteenth century.
(I don’t really buy an overall take like “It seems unlikely” but it doesn’t feel that mysterious to me where the difference in take comes from. From the super zoomed out perspective 1200 AD is just yesterday from 1700AD, it seems like random fluctuations over 500 years are super normal and so my money would still be on “in 500 years there’s a good chance that China would have again been innovating and growing rapidly, and if not then in another 500 years it’s reasonably likely...” It makes sense to describe that situation as “nowhere close to IR” though. And it does sound like the super fast growth is a blip.)
[Caveat to all of the below is that these are vague impressions, based on scattered reading. I invite anyone with proper economic history knowledge to please correct me.]
I’m reasonably sympathetic to the first possibility. I think it’s somewhat contentious whether Europe or China was more ‘developed’ in 1700. In either case, though, my impression is that the state of Europe in 1700 was non-unprecedented along a number of dimensions.
The error bars are still pretty large here, but it’s common to estimate that Europe’s population increased by something like 50% between 1500 and 1700. (There was also probably a surge between something like 1000AD and 1300AD, as Western Europe sort of picked itself back up from a state of collapse, although I think the actual numbers are super unclear. Then the 14th century has famine and the Black Death, which Europe again needs to recover from.)
Something like a 50% increase over a couple centuries definitely couldn’t have been normal, but it’s also not clearly unprecedented. It seems like population levels in particular regions tended to evolve through a series of surges and contractions. We don’t really know these numbers — although, I think, they’re at least inspired by historical records — but the McEvedy/Jones estimates show a 100% population increase in two centuries during the Song Dynasty (1000AD − 1200AD). We super don’t know most of these numbers, but it seems conceivable that other few-century efflorescences were associated with similar overall growth rates: for example, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Roman Republic/Empire during its rise, the Han dynasty, the Mediterranean in the middle of the first century BCE.
These numbers are also presumably sketchy, but England’s estimated GDP-per-capita in 1700AD was also roughly the same as China’s estimated GDP-per-capita in 1000AD (according to a chart in British Economic Growth, 1270-1870); England is also thought to have been richer than other European states, with the exception of the Netherlands.
My impression is that Northwestern Europe’s growth from 1500 to 1700 also wasn’t super innovation-driven: a lot of it was about stuff like expanded trade networks and better internal markets. The maritime technology that supported global trade was enabled by innovation, but (I think) the technology wasn’t obviously better than Chinese maritime technology in previous centuries. (E.g. Zheng He.) I think the technological progress that was happening at this point also wasn’t obviously more impressive than the sort of technological progress that happened in China in previous eras. Vaclav Smil (in Transforming the 20th Century) thinks the most technologically innovative time/place in history before 19th century Britain was early Han Dynasty China (roughly 200BC-1AD). The Song Dynasty (1000AD-1300AD) also often gets brought up. I don’t personally know a lot of details about the innovations produced during these periods, although I believe a number of them were basically early (and sometimes better) versions of later European innovations. One specific claim I’ve encountered is that the volume of iron/steel production was plausibly about the same in 1000AD Song China and in 1700AD Europe.
—
Here is one good/classic paper on previous economic efflorescences and their implications for our understanding of the Industrial Revolution. I also pulled out a few different long quotes, to make a 3 page summary version here.
If one believed the numbers on wikipedia, it seems like Chinese growth was also accelerating a ton and it was not really far behind on the IR, such that I wouldn’t except to be able to easily eyeball the differences.
If you are trying to model things at the level that Roodman or I are, the difference between 1400 and 1600 just isn’t a big deal, the noise terms are on the order of 500 years at that point.
So maybe the interesting question is if and why scholars think that China wouldn’t have had an IR shortly after Europe (i.e. within a few centuries, a gap small enough that it feels like you’d have to have an incredibly precise model to be justifiably super surprised).
Maybe particularly relevant: is the claimed population growth from 1700-1800 just catch-up growth to Europe? (more than doubling in 100 years! And over the surrounding time period the observed growth seems very rapid even if there are moderate errors in the numbers) If it is, how does that work given claims that Europe wasn’t so far ahead by 1700? If it isn’t, then how does the that not very strongly suggest incredible acceleration in China, given that it had very recently had some of the fastest growth in history and is then experience even more unprecedented growth? Is it a sequence of measurement problems that just happen to suggest acceleration?
I believe the population surge is closely related to the European population surge: it’s largely attributed to the Colombian exchange + expanded markets/trade. One of the biggest things is that there’s an expansion in the land under cultivation, since potatoes and maize can be grown on marginal land that wouldn’t otherwise work well for rice or wheat, and (probably) a decline in living standards that’s offsetting the rise in population. From the book 1493 (ch. 5):
There’s obviously a major risk of hindsight bias here, but I think there’s almost a consensus among economic historians that China wasn’t on track toward an industrial revolution anytime soon. There aren’t really signs of innovation picking up during this period: “the prosperity engendered by quantitative growth in output masked the lack of significant innovation in productive technologies” (The Economic History of China, p. 336). Estimates seem to vary widely, and I don’t know what the error bars are here, but the favored estimates in TECHC (taken from a Chinese-language paper by Liu Ti) also show the industrial sector of the economy actually shrinking by half between 1600 and 1840 and real per-capita incomes shrinking by about a quarter.
It’s also a common view that China was entering a period of decline at the start of the nineteenth century (partly due to population pressure and ecological damage from land conversion). From the same book (p. 361):
Basically, I think the story is that: There was another 2-3 century “efflorescence” in China, but it wasn’t really associated with either technological innovation or an expansion of industry. The total population growth numbers were probably unusually big, relative to other efflorescences, but this doesn’t imply that this was an unusually innovative period; the unusual size of the surge may just reflect the fact that there was a black-swan-ish ecological event (the sudden transfer of several New World crops) around the start of the period. The growth surge was unsustainable, as all previous growth surges had been, and China was on track to fall back down to a lower level of development.
EDIT: One more quote, from A Culture of Growth (p. 317; emph. mine):
Thanks, super helpful.
(I don’t really buy an overall take like “It seems unlikely” but it doesn’t feel that mysterious to me where the difference in take comes from. From the super zoomed out perspective 1200 AD is just yesterday from 1700AD, it seems like random fluctuations over 500 years are super normal and so my money would still be on “in 500 years there’s a good chance that China would have again been innovating and growing rapidly, and if not then in another 500 years it’s reasonably likely...” It makes sense to describe that situation as “nowhere close to IR” though. And it does sound like the super fast growth is a blip.)