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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Equivocate all you want, the weight of all these 'almost equal to' means clear superiority for european empires. In addition to the ability to project power on the other side of the world, which is still today used as a measure of power.

And still, early 18th century is way too conservative imo, the portuguese were projecting power and winning battles due to superior tech in the indian sea in the early 16th century.

That seems to me to be half a matter of exceptional European maritime competency and half exceptional European drive, both explainable by that Europe had been, for centuries, trying to get more direct access to Asian markets for luxuries, while the main Asian players were largely uninterested in actively seeking out Europe. There are cases, as you note, like some of the Portuguese conquests (e.g. Malacca), where there was an overwhelming difference in technology which lead to European victory (in Malacca, the lack of knowledge of gunpowder weapons). But even then it is only because the Portuguese had an incentive to conquer e.g. Malacca; notably, if the Ottomans or the Ming or the Delhi Sultanate or the Safavids had the will to send a thousand soldiers with gunpowder weapons to conquer Malacca, they would also have been able to do so (and out of these states, the Ming and Ottomans certainly had the shipbuilding technology, + I would be surprised if the Indians or the Iranians wouldn't have been able to muster up something). China had sporadic clashes with Europeans all the way up to the Opium Wars, and in general they didn't fare too badly - not because Chinese military technology was necessarily superior, but the Europeans were campaigning too far from home; the Ming freely admit in their annals that European shipbuilding and fortbuilding (and guns!) were superior, and had adopted innovations re: guns, and were starting to adopt e.g. the star fortress before collapsing. (In this I am thinking of Dutch Formosa and the various Qing-Russian border conflicts, though I think there are more.)

The main problem with this is that even with technological superiority, complete antagonism only really worked with limited conflict, often with smaller players, and doesn't really dovetail well with the idea that Europe was simply so strong that it could muscle its way everywhere through sheer civilisational superiority. I suggested the embarrassing episode of the BEIC squabbling with the Mughals, leading to an obvious Mughal victory without them even doing much, because despite European superiority in technology, it's just hard to wage war far away from home. (Same goes with e.g. the Anglo-Marathan War.) which makes it difficult to really dominate somewhere unless you're able to play local parties against one another (e.g. the British conquest of India), or you have such a overwhelming technological, socially or materially, that your opponents can't catch up (the Malaccan example above, Scramble for Africa, etc.). European domination of the world, or Asia in particular, would not have materialised with relatively slight advantages, far from home, against larger states, not until other circumstances changed (e.g. industrial revolution capitalising on the scientific revolution, fracturing of India, catastrophic Qing weakness starting in early 19C, etc.)

And this isn't even mentioning that relatively organised states could readily adapt to new changes. Consider Korea at the turn of the 16th century; it started out as a poorly militarised state when the Japanese, at the time likely fielding the largest army in the world, invaded in 1592; it came out of the war (+ Ming help) with one of, if not the, best-trained and armed musketeer forces in the world.

Really, 'pants on head' silly? Shouldn't you at least try to make a case for non-western superiority in the early 18th century, before you start throwing accusations of total silliness around?

But my point is that I don't need to prove non-Western superiority to make the case that the focus on Western abstract superiority tells us very little about how power actually flowed in Asia, at least until the industrial revolution!

Sounds interesting, I'd like to read the source.

An easy source for China for comparing is China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850, where the authors argue:

From an international perspective, Northern Song China was richer than Domesday Britain in 1090, but Britain had caught up with China by the fifteenth century. Although China had the highest standard of living in the world during the Northern Song dynasty, Italy had already forged ahead by 1300. At this point, however, and even until the eighteenth century, it is quite possible that a relatively rich Chinese region such as the Yangzi Delta was on par with the most developed parts of Europe. But Chinese GDP per capita declined sharply during the Qing dynasty, just when parts of northwest Europe made the transition to modern economic growth, so that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the gap between China and the most developed parts of Europe was too large to be bridged by any discussion of regional variation within China.

And suggest that:

The California School were therefore right to claim that, considering regional variation, historical differences in economic performance between China and Europe were much less than was once thought. However, the early claims of the California School went too far: China and Europe were already on different trajectories before the Industrial Revolution, as European economic historians have traditionally maintained. The Great Divergence began earlier than the nineteenth century.

If you're interested in a graphical view and explanation:

The Figure 8 in question below.

Li Bozhong and Jan Luiten van Zanden have produced a comparison of GDP per capita in the Yangzi Delta and the Netherlands in the early nineteenth century, finding per capita incomes in the Yangzi Delta to be 53.8 percent of the level in the Netherlands in the 1820s. This suggests a per capita GDP figure of $1,050 for the Lower Yangzi, in 1990 international dollars, or about 75 percent higher than in China as a whole. A high estimate for GDP per capita in the Yangzi Delta in earlier years would apply this ratio to our estimates of per capita GDP for China as a whole. This produces our Yangzi (H) series in Figure 8, which also plots the GDP per capita data for the richest part of Europe. The European frontier is based on Italy until the 1540s, followed by the Netherlands until the 1800s and then Great Britain. Although the Netherlands enjoyed a significant lead over the Yangzi Delta in the early seventeenth century, this should be understood as a very small region of Europe, with no other North Sea area economies enjoying a significant advantage over the Yangzi Delta. But once Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium had all forged ahead of the Yangzi Delta during the first half of the eighteenth century, this is too large an area to be ignored.

Figure 8 also includes an alternative low estimate of GDP per capita in the Yangzi Delta, shown by the dashed line Yangzi (L). This is derived by rebasing the Yangzi (H) series on an alternative mid-nineteenth century benchmark from Xu et al. Their figure for China’s GDP per capita in 1850 is obtained by accepting Maddison’s estimate for 1933 and projecting backwards using a different series. Instead of our figure of $600 in 1850, this yields an alternative estimate of $472, which is getting quite close to bare bones subsistence of $400, thus providing an effective lower bound. Note that even with this lower bound series, although western Europe appears to start forging ahead in the sixteenth century, GDP per capita in the Yangzi Delta remains 78 percent of the level of the leading European country as late as 1700, and the first half of the eighteenth century remains a critical juncture.

Edit: This is not even to go into different labour market pressures in Europe vs in China, which is another huge topic all on its own; Elvin's theory of the High Level Equilibrium Trap is one such theory for why such pressures (+ other factors) lead to China not maintaining a "civilisational lead", though I am not entirely convinced by it and tend to think it was much messier.

Regarding technology transfers re: gunpowder weapons, an interesting recent resource is The Gunpowder Age which argues for relative parity in gunpowder weaponry (at least with China) until mid-18C, though I would be surprised if this finding didn't replicate to some extent with other Asian states.

I am less sure about the Indian subcontinent, but I am led to understand that out of all the Mughal provinces, Bengal was very rich, producing something like half of the entire empire's wealth or something.

I was having a conversation about admitting you were wrong, and I remembered this comment. Just wanted to say it was an absolute top-notch comment that considerably mollified my view, I didn’t know urban china was so rich. I didn’t answer at the time because I was waffling between just thanking you and counterarguing by going through sources etc, and obviously I didn’t get round to either. Anyway, thank you.

Glad to be of service! If there are any questions I can try to answer to the best of my ability.

Is this your job or are you just wise?

Oh, I work as a doctor. History, especially the Great Divergence, is just a hobby thing I keep up with.

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