This seems to be an interesting review (appeared in the
Post)
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Art...ws/landes.html
it's a "must read", here are a couple of points the reviewer makes:
Quote:
I am not sure about this part of his argument. It always seemed to me that what a pre-industrial society's standard of living was depended much more on at what level of material want culture had set its Malthusian thermostat at which the population no longer grew. I have always been impressed by accounts of high population densities in at least some "tropical" civilizations: if they were so poor because the climate made hard work so difficult, why the (relatively) dense populations?
It seems to me that the argument that industrial civilization was inherently unlikely to arise in the tropics hinges on an--implicit--argument that some features of tropical climates kept the Malthusian thermostat set at a low standard of living, and that this low median standard of living retarded development. But it is not clear to me how this is supposed to have worked. I find the argument of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel more persuasive as an explanation of why Eurasian grasslands and neighboring forests have been the core of world civilization since the Neolithic Revolution.
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Quote:
By contrast, I find Landes's account of why Europe--rather than India, Islam, or China--to be very well laid out, and very convincing. But I find it incomplete. I agree that it looks as if Chinese civilization had a clear half-millennium as the world's leader in technological innovation from 500 to 1000. Thereafter innovation in China appears to flag. Little seems to be done in developing further the high technologies like textiles, communication, precision metalworking (clockmaking) that provided the technological base on which the Industrial Revolution rested.
It is far from clear to me why this was so: Chinese civilization in the millennium before the Ming dynasty appears to have been the most intellectually confident and technologically progressive on the globe. As Joel Mokyr pointed out in his Lever of Riches, any explanation--whether based on hydraulic oriental despotism or static Confucian culture--that attributes inertia to China's culture falls flat because it does not account for the dynamic of economic growth and technological progress under the Tang, Sung, and Yuan.
Moreover, simple appeals to an inward turn supported by confident cultural arrogance under the Ming and Ch'ing that led to stagnation leave me puzzled. Between 1400 and 1800 we think that the population of China grew from 80 million to 300 million. That doesn't suggest an economy of malnourished peasants at the edge of biological subsistence. That doesn't suggest a civilization in which nothing new can be attempted. It suggests a civilization in which colonization of internal frontiers and improvements in agricultural technology are avidly pursued, and in which living standards are a considerable margin above socio-cultural subsistance to support the strong growth in populations.
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let me know when you finish the book, I'll try to get a copy (after this week, finals are a few days away).
maybe a mod can move this portion of the discussion into politics and we can continue it.