The Song Dynasty revolution: Doug Jones: A Cycle of Cathay https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/a-cycle-of-cathay-2/: 'Jacques Gernet: "The innovations which make their appearance in East Asia round about the year 1000… form such a coherent and extensive whole that we have to yield to the evidence: at this period, the Chinese world experienced a real transformation.… The analogies [with the European Renaissance] are numerous–the return to the classical tradition, the diffusion of knowledge, the upsurge of science and technology (printing, explosives, advance in seafaring techniques, the clock with escapement…), a new philosophy, and a new view of the world.… There is not a single sector of political, social or economic life in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries which does not show evidence of radical changes in comparison with earlier ages. It is not simply a matter of a change of scale (increase in population, general expansion of production, development of internal and external trade) but of a change of character. Political habits, society, the relations between town and country, and economic patterns are quite different from what they had been.… A new world had been born...
...Scholars contemplating the sweeping economic, social, and political transformation of China under the Song dynasty (960-1279) seem compelled to draw analogies with later dramatic occurrences in Europe–with the Renaissance (as in the quote above) or with the Economic Revolution in England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The changes are dramatic. Population roughly doubles, from about 50 million to about 100 million. Cities grow. Both internal and external trade boom. The division of labor advances, with different households and different parts of the country specializing in “goods such as rice, wheat, lighting oil, candles, dyes, oranges, litchi nuts, vegetables, sugar and sugarcane, lumber, cattle, fish, sheep, paper, lacquer, textiles and iron.” In a number of fields of technology–iron production, shipbuilding–China reaches heights which the West will not attain for many centuries. With changes in the economy come changes in the relation between society and state. Taxes come to be mostly collected in cash rather than kind, Eventually revenues from taxes on commerce, including excise taxes and state monopolies, will greatly exceed those from land tax. A Council of State will put constitutional checks on the power of the emperor. Yet Imperial China will ultimately follow a different, less dramatic developmental pathway than Europe. Some reasons why:
- The nomad brake....
- Rice economics....
- Rice psychology....
The history of the Song period poses in particularly clear form the “Needham puzzle” of why the Industrial Revolution did not originate in China. The answer, it seems, is complicated, combining (at least) political and social responses to external threat, the nature of agricultural economies, and more intangible (but still measurable) differences in cognitive style.
#noted #notebookecon135 #2019-10-28
