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required that all goods be transported in their ships, and forced European New World colonists to trade only with the mother country, even if smuggling made such a policy somewhat porous. Mercantilist ideas also led to policies that states should use their own raw materials to manufacture within their own borders anything that was imported, an action we saw the English take in the early 1700s to keep Indian cotton textiles out. Although mercantilist policies did indeed lead to the establishment of industries in European states, industrialization itself was not the object: keeping gold and silver from flowing out of the state and enriching others was. European states were obsessed with their silver stocks: ‘‘the more silver, the stronger the state’’ was how a German once put it.40

In these inter-European wars, the fates and fortunes of various states rose and fell. As we have already seen, by the end of the sixteenth century, Spain’s power had begun to wane, and Portugal proved to be too small to mount much of a challenge to the French (or Spanish) in Europe, or to the Dutch in Asian waters. The Dutch, being among the first Europeans to apply vast amounts of capital to their trading enterprises in both Asia and the Americas, saw their fortunes peak in the seventeenth century, just as the French and the British were gaining power. Ultimately, though, the Dutch did not have the manpower to build a standing army sufficiently large to counter the French, and they ultimately allied with the British to offset French power on the continent. By the eighteenth century, Britain and France had emerged from the seventeenth-century crisis as the two most powerful and competitive European states. (See map 3.1.)

The Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763 As the strongest and most successful European states, England and France competed not just in Europe but in the Americas and Asia as well. In the ‘‘long’’ eighteenth century from 1689 to 1815, Britain and France fought five wars, only one of which Britain did not initiate. Their engagement (with others) in the War of Spanish Succession was ended by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which established the principle of the ‘‘balance of power’’ in Europe, that is, that no country should be allowed to dominate the others. However, periodic wars between the British and French continued.

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But the most significant was the Seven Years’ War of 1756–1763, or what Americans call the French and Indian War and interpret in terms of its impact on the American War of Independence of 1776–1783 against Britain. To be sure, the spark that led to war between Britain and France came in the American colonies, and it was in fact the twenty-two-year-old George Washington who lit it.41 But it became a global engagement— perhaps the first real world war—with British and French troops fighting in the backwoods of the American colonies, in Canada, in Africa, in India, and in Europe. The outcome was disastrous for the French: they lost their colonial claims in both North America (the British got Canada) and in India, leading to greater British power and position in both parts of the world.42

By 1775, therefore, the processes of state building in Europe had led to the creation of a system defined by war, which favored a particular kind of state exemplified by the ones built in Britain and France. Balance of power among sovereign states, not a unified empire, had become the established principle, and Britain had emerged as the strongest European state. But that does not mean that it was the strongest or richest state in the world— far from it. To be sure, Mughal power in India was declining in the early 1700s, and as we will see in the next chapter, the British were able to begin building a colonial empire there. But the British were still too weak to be able to contest China’s definition of the rules of trade in Asia. When they tried, most famously in 1793 under Lord Macartney’s mission, the Chinese emperor sent them home with a stinging rebuke, and the British could do nothing about it. However, the British Isles were fortunate enough to be the location for the start of the Industrial Revolution, which

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was gaining steam even as Lord Macartney was sailing back to London. And when the British learned to apply the tools of the Industrial Revolution to war, the global balance of power between Britain and China tipped. That is the story of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences, 1750–1850

In 1750, nearly all of the world’s 750 million people, regardless of where they were or what political or economic system they had, lived and died within the biological old regime. The necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter, and fuel for heating and cooking—mostly came from the land, from what could be captured from annual energy flows from the sun to Earth.1 Industries too, such as textiles, leather, and construction, depended on products from agriculture or the forest. Even iron and steel making in the biological old regime, for instance, relied upon charcoal made from wood. The biological old regime thus set limits not just on the size of the human population but on the productivity of the economy as well.

These limits would begin to be lifted over the century from 1750 to 1850, when some people increasingly used coal to produce heat and then captured that heat to fuel repetitive motion with steam-powered machines, doing work that previously had been done with muscle. The use of coal- fired steam to power machines was a major breakthrough, launching human society out of the biological old regime and into a new one no longer limited by annual solar energy flows. Coal is stored solar energy, laid down hundreds of millions of years ago. Its use in steam engines freed human society from the limits imposed by the biological old regime, enabling the productive powers and numbers of humans to grow exponentially. The replacement—with steam generated by burning coal—

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of wind, water, and animals for powering industrial machines constitutes the beginning of the Industrial Revolution2 and ranks with the much earlier agricultural revolution in importance for the course of history. The use of fossil fuels—first coal and then petroleum—not only transformed economies around the world but also added greenhouse gases to Earth’s atmosphere. How and why this major transformation happened, and what consequences it had, thus are vitally important matters in world history and will be the focus of this and the following two chapters.

To understand the Industrial Revolution, we will use once again the tool of conjuncture, that is, the coming together at a particular point in time of otherwise separate historical developments and processes. In the case of the Industrial Revolution, the conjuncture involves the playing out around the world of growth potential in the biological old regime, the extension of European state conflicts around the globe, the peculiar nature of New World colonies, and the chance location of, and challenges for operating, coal mines in England. In particular, I will consider the ways cotton textiles and the British need for coal contributed to the Industrial Revolution.

Cotton Textiles The Industrial Revolution is commonly thought to have begun in eighteenth-century England with the mechanization of the process for spinning and weaving cotton thread and cloth. The spinning jenny, the water frame, and the ‘‘mule’’ all have been taken as evidence of English inventiveness and hence contribute to a Eurocentric story line of the rise of the West. The problem is, while it is true that England was the first place to revolutionize cotton manufacture by using steam-powered machinery, how and why it happened can only be understood in a global context.3

In the late seventeenth century, the English developed a strong desire for the Indian cotton textiles commonly known as calicoes. As one man observed: ‘‘On a sudden we saw all our women, rich and poor, cloath’d in Callico, printed and painted; the gayer the better.’’ Another complained: ‘‘It crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers; curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes or Indian stuffs. In short, almost everything that used to be made of wool or silk, relating either to dress of the women or the furniture of our houses, was supplied by the Indian trade.’’4 These observations by contemporaries around 1700 raise some interesting questions: Why were the English importing so much Indian cotton? How did it get there? How did they then create and industrialize a cotton textile industry?

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The reason the English imported so much Indian cotton around 1700 is it was of high quality and lower price than England’s domestically produced textiles (in particular linen and wool). It felt good next to the skin, it was lightweight for summer wear, it could accept bright dyes for color, and most of all, it was less expensive than anything the English could manufacture themselves. Indeed, India around 1700 was the largest exporter of cotton textiles in the world and supplied textiles not just to meet English demand, but throughout the world as well. Southeast Asia, East and West Africa, the Middle East, and Europe were major export markets, in addition to the large domestic Indian market. No wonder that the demand for Indian cotton in the eighteenth century was ‘‘greater than all the weavers in the country can manufacture,’’ and that India accounted for fully one-quarter of the world manufacturing output in 1750.5

Like so many things desired by Europeans and supplied by Asians—at first luxury items for the elite such as silk or porcelain, but increasingly products like tea from China for a mass market6 —cotton textiles were produced well and cheaply in India. The British textile manufacturers focused on the ‘‘cheap’’ part and complained that with relatively higher wages, British manufacturers could not compete. India had a competitive advantage in the eighteenth century, being able to undersell in the world market virtually any other producer of textiles. Some thought the reason for cheap Indian textiles was a low living standard, or a large population earning depressed wages, but all of those have been shown to not be true: Indian textile workers in the eighteenth century had just as high a standard of living as British workers.7 So, if it was not a low standard of living that gave India its competitive advantage, what did?

In a word: agriculture. Indian agriculture was so productive that the amount of food produced, and hence its cost, was significantly lower than in Europe. In the preindustrial age, when working families spent 60–80 percent of their earnings on food, the cost of food was the primary determinant of their real wages (i.e., how much a pound, a dollar, a real, or a pagoda could buy). In India (and China and Japan as well), the amount of grain harvested from a given amount of seed was in the ratio of 20:1 (e.g., twenty bushels of rice harvested for every one planted), whereas in England it was at best 8:1. Asian agriculture thus was more than twice as efficient as British (and by extension European) agriculture, and food—the major component in the cost of living—cost less in Asia. Thus although nominal wages may have been lower in India, the purchasing power—the real wage—was higher in India.

In the biological old regime, productive agriculture was Asia’s competitive advantage, even in industry. The causal chain went like this:

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high per-acre yields V low-priced food V relatively low wages V comparative advantage. In England, the causal chain was like this: low per-acre yields V high-priced food V relatively high wages V comparative disadvantage. The question then becomes, how did the British begin to reverse this comparative disadvantage?

In part, as we saw in the previous chapter, they did it by raising tariffs on imports to Britain of Indian textiles, and the outright banning of the importation of some kinds of Indian cotton goods—that is, mercantilist protectionism. Had the British not done that in the early eighteenth century, there is little reason to believe they would have made much progress in competing against Indian producers and establishing much of a cotton textile industry in the first place.8 But also, the British had colonies in the Americas and acquired their ‘‘jewel’’ in India. Both became intimately connected with the story of the rise of a cotton textile industry in Britain.

India Indeed, where England had very little by way of overseas empire in 1650, it soon began putting one together, preying on Portuguese and Spanish possessions in the East and West Indies (i.e., India and the Caribbean), competing with the Dutch in both regions of the world, and battling France in the eighteenth century. Curiously, though, the agents for this extension of European interstate conflict around the world were not at first the governments of European states but private trading companies, the first being the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, East India Company), the English East India Company (EIC), and the Compagnie française des Indes occidentales (French West India Company).

Although each was formed at different times and had slightly different organization, all were private companies chartered by their governments and given monopoly rights to trade with Asia, all in keeping with mercantilist ideas. They also differed from mere trading expeditions in that they were formed with a permanent capital and stock that could be traded —to that extent, the East India companies are the forerunners of the modern corporation, and their success at organizing trade and raising profits meant that the corporation would play an increasingly important role in European industrialization. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their purpose was to reap profits from trade with Asia.

The Dutch VOC, though, seeing itself as an extension of Protestant Dutch interests and hence deeply hostile to the Catholic powers of Spain and Portugal, saw trade and war as intimately connected. In a terse 1614 letter to his directors, the Dutch VOC governor-general observed: ‘‘You

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gentlemen ought to know from experience that trade in Asia should be conducted and maintained under the protection and with the aid of your own weapons, and . . . [s]o trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.’’9 The Dutch then effectively pursued this strategy throughout the seventeenth century, taking Melaka from the Portuguese, seizing Java and making it into a sugar-producing colony, and trying to establish a colony on the Chinese island of Taiwan.

The English EIC, by contrast, was more interested in trade and the profits of trade than in war, at least at first. In the century after its founding in 1600, the directors insisted that ‘‘our business is trade, not war.’’10 To avoid conflicts, the English EIC concentrated trade in India, where Indian states were weak and European competitors few, especially in Bengal and Madras. But by the late seventeenth century, that began to change as the French established forts nearby. And when the British and French warred in Europe, their forces (however small) clashed in India, with the French usually getting the upper hand because they began enhancing their war- making capability by enlisting Indians as regulars, known as Sepoys, into their army. In the 1750s the British EIC followed suit, and by the eve of the Seven Years’ War, each had nearly ten thousand men in arms—mostly Indians—on the Indian coast.

In the meantime, the political and military power of the great Mughal empire had seriously declined. At its height it was capable of mobilizing perhaps a million troops; after the death of its last great leader, Aurangzeb, in 1707, the empire declined as regional political and military leaders asserted their independence from the Mughals. One of those leaders, the nawab of Bengal, took control of the British trading port at Kolkata (Calcutta) and demanded increased payments from the EIC for the privilege of trading there.

The British resisted, sent a force of some two thousand men under the leadership of Robert Clive and, together with other Indian forces opposed to Bengal, defeated the nawab’s French-assisted forces at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. They captured and executed the nawab, got a more pliable replacement, and by 1765 received the right to collect tax revenue—a huge sum—from Bengal. In the meantime, of course, the Seven Years’ War had begun, and British and French forces had at it up and down the Indian coast, with the British winning a decisive victory over the French at Pondicherry in 1760. This was the start of the British empire in India, and over the next fifty years the extent of British control widened, with the entire subcontinent becoming a formal colony in 1857. (See map 3.1.)

The Seven Years’ War—or more precisely, the British victory in the Americas and in India—is important to the story of how Britain became a

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cotton-textile-producing, rather than -importing, country. Recall that the British government had banned the importation of Indian textiles in 1707 for the purpose of allowing its domestic cotton industry to get going, which it did, in the area around the town of Lancaster. But because of technical difficulties in copying Indian dyeing techniques and because of its higher wages/higher prices, Lancashire (the region around Lancaster) produced mostly for the British home market, still being bested in the world market by Indian textiles traded by the EIC. For the British cotton textile industry to grow, it therefore needed export markets. And there was a growing market in the New World because of its peculiar institutions of slavery, plantations, and mercantilist trade restrictions.

The New World as a Peculiar Periphery European New World agriculture from the beginning was export oriented. Throughout the Caribbean and South America, mostly all sugar, tobacco, and cotton was produced on plantations that used African slaves because of labor shortages caused by the Great Dying and the unwillingness of Europeans to migrate to the New World. Unlike peasants in India and China or serfs in eastern Europe, African slaves in America did not grow much of their own food. Food, especially fish and grain, had to be imported, mostly from the North American colonies. Slaves also had to be clothed, creating a demand for cheap cotton textiles. Additional quantities of Indian textiles were traded in West Africa for slaves who were then sold in the Caribbean. New World products—sugar, tobacco, raw cotton—were taken back to England.11

At each point in the triangular Atlantic trade, the English made profits and by colonial legislation tried to ensure that the New World would remain producers of raw materials only and consumers of the industrial products of Britain. Smuggling or trading with the enemy, whether Dutch or French, was pervasive, but by the early eighteenth century, ‘‘colonial trade conformed in almost every particular to the navigation system . . . [and] smuggled goods accounted for a tiny fraction of all quantities handled.’’ Of course, the colonists in both the Caribbean and North America were Englishmen, and they too looked for ways to profit from a system that denied other nationals, especially the Dutch or the French, from getting a piece of Britain’s colonial trade.12

This triangular trade and in particular the linkage between the slave trade and textiles fueled the growth of British shipping and established Lancashire as a center of cotton textile manufacture. Raw cotton was imported mostly from the Levant in the Ottoman empire and the British colonies in the Caribbean, and by the 1780s it was spun into thread in

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newfangled ‘‘factories’’ using water power and employing hundreds of workers in one place. As the Lancashire manufacturers became more proficient and the prices of their textiles declined, they even exported them to Africa, especially whenever Indian textiles were expensive. The real boom to British cotton textile production came after American independence in 1793 when Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin made it possible to use short-staple and much cheaper American cotton. With another series of innovations derived from the application of steam power, as we will see shortly, mechanizing both spinning and weaving over the years from 1815 to 1840, the productivity of the Lancashire textile factories surged again, resulting in ever lower prices and the ability to outcompete Indian textiles in the world market. Indian textile producers had created a worldwide market for cotton textiles—the British then captured it.13

When that happened, the British became advocates of ‘‘free trade’’ and abandoned both mercantilist theory and practice and tariffs on imports. Indeed, ‘‘free trade’’ became the ideological mantra of imperial Britain at the height of its global power in the nineteenth century. Mercantilism, at least as it applied in the Atlantic world, had been dead since the victory of the Americans in their War of Independence from Britain. To the British, their former American subjects and colonists became ‘‘foreigners, subject to all the provisions of the Navigation Laws,’’14 which restricted the importation of raw cotton, potentially strangling the British textile industry and giving rise to calls for ‘‘free trade.’’ Free trade with the new United States after 1783 showed the fallacy of the argument that British manufactures could grow only with a monopoly on colonial markets, and the American South with its cotton plantations worked by African slaves and their descendants became the major supplier of raw cotton to the mills of Lancashire.

Although this story of the rise to global competitiveness of the British cotton textile industry sounds Eurocentric, it really is not, for British success was contingent upon a number of worldwide developments that were not of their own making. In the first place, the British were at a competitive disadvantage to Indian producers and would have remained so except for several coincidences. The Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 brought to power a government willing to use state power to protect its domestic manufacturers; and the New World developed as a peculiar periphery that, by the accident of the Great Dying and colonial legislation, provided a market for British manufactured goods. In the second place, the British were fortunate to develop a usable coal-fueled steam engine, which further revolutionized cotton textile production, making it even more

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productive and its products so cheap that the British could undersell Indian textiles not just in Africa but, interestingly, in India as well. For that part of the story, we now look at the innovations in coal and steam engines.

New Sources of Energy and Power Until about 1830, the story of cotton textiles for the most part remains one that unfolds within the biological old regime; that is, everything about it depended on the annual flows of solar energy and their capture by humans.15 To be sure, the early British ‘‘factories’’ had begun to use water power, but there was a limit to how much that could increase cotton textile production. Indeed, there is every reason to think that cotton textile production would have reached serious limits within the biological old regime, leading not to an industrial revolution but to an economic dead end, had it not been for coal, the steam engine, and iron and steel production, which truly launched the Industrial Revolution and allowed Britain to break out of the constraints imposed by the biological old regime. To see how and why, we need to take a closer look at what was happening to the most advanced biological old regime economies, starting with China and then looking at England. What we will see is that all old regime economies were beginning to push up against serious ecological constraints that would have stopped all of them from developing an industrial revolution. Except for a few chance occurrences and a vast global conjuncture, we all now might still be living in the biological old regime.

China Two favored explanations of the Industrial Revolution in Europe have focused on population dynamics and the growth of free markets. By various techniques and practices, mostly late marriage, European families were able to keep their sizes smaller than ‘‘naturally’’ possible. Smaller family size meant a smaller population overall, leaving greater surpluses in the hands of families to invest in improving agricultural and industrial productivity. Fewer people working harder to make their investable surpluses grow—an ‘‘industrious revolution,’’ it is said—grew inexorably into the Industrial Revolution.16

The market-driven story line of industrialization suggests that the establishment and growth of markets for commodities, land, labor, and capital in Europe enabled European producers to be much more efficient and hence to accumulate sufficient capital to invest in improving agricultural and industrial productivity. Also necessary for the success of

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markets was a state that protected (or at least respected) private property rights. This combination likewise, according to the Eurocentric version of the origins of the modern world, grew more or less naturally into the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, the population- and market-driven story lines of industrialization are not incompatible, and many historians have melded them together in explaining why Europeans were uniquely capable of launching an industrial revolution. As proof, they often point to China as a counterexample. China, it is alleged, had ‘‘a preindustrial demographic regime,’’ in which nothing was done to keep birthrates down. Hence, population surged, eating up any surplus above subsistence and rendering the investments necessary for an industrial revolution impossible.17 Similarly, it is alleged, China was ‘‘despotic’’: it had a state that meddled in private affairs, property rights were not respected, and markets could not operate efficiently. Hence, it is concluded, there was no possibility for an industrial revolution.

There is only one thing wrong with these assumptions about what ‘‘went wrong’’ in China: they are wrong. As I will show below, Chinese families in fact had numerous ways—albeit different from Europeans—of limiting their size and hence keeping the overall Chinese population above subsistence levels. Also, Chinese markets of all kinds not merely existed, but arguably functioned better and more efficiently than those in Europe. If both of those are true for China, then their value as ‘‘explanations’’ for why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe is questionable. To see why, we must take a closer look at China.

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, agriculture in China (as well as in India and numerous other parts of Asia) was highly productive, harvesting twenty bushels of rice for every one sown. Rice has the unique capability of gaining nutrients not directly from the soil, but from the water (and so it is grown in ‘‘paddies’’), eliminating the need for the land to lie fallow, as was the custom in Europe, to regain its fertility. Additionally, Chinese farmers had learned how to prepare the soil, to irrigate, to fertilize, and to control insect pests in order to maximize the harvest yield. Moreover, farmers in the southern half of China could get two or sometimes three harvests per year from the same plot of land, drawing the amazement of early-eighteenth-century European travelers to China. ‘‘By what art can the earth produce subsistence for such numbers [of people]?’’ asked the Frenchman Pierre Poivre in the 1720s.

Do the Chinese possess any secret arts of multiplying grain and provisions necessary for the nourishment of mankind? To solve my

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doubts I traversed the fields, I introduced myself among the laborers, who are in general easy, polite, and knowledgeable of the world. I examine, and pursue them through all their operations, and observe that their secret consists simply in manuring the fields judiciously, ploughing them to a considerable depth, sowing them in the proper season, turning to advantage every inch of ground which can produce the most considerable crop, and preferring to every other species of culture that of grain, as by far the most important.18

Such an impressively productive agriculture certainly allowed the Chinese population to grow, from 140 million in 1650, to 225 million in 1750, and then to 380–400 million by 1850. Numbers like these also convinced European observers, in particular Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, whose ideas about markets and population have so shaped Eurocentric views of the modern world, that the Chinese just could not control their population growth. Malthus believed that populations like the Chinese who could not control their growth would overshoot the capability of the land to support their numbers until ‘‘negative’’ population checks, such as famines or wars, reduced the population size. Malthus also believed that Europeans avoided those fates by having ‘‘preventative’’ checks on population growth.

Where Malthus certainly was right about Europeans, he was wrong about the Chinese. The fact is, they could—and did—control their family size, although in ways quite different from the Europeans. Although almost all Chinese women married and married early, Chinese families developed many methods for controlling the number of children. Abstention from having sexual relations, especially early in the marriage, was a preferred mechanism and was enforced by married couples living with their parents. Infanticide, especially of daughters, was another means to limit family size, leading as well to a gender-unbalanced population of more men than women, and hence of forced celibacy for many poorer men. As James Lee and Wang Feng summarize the Chinese demographic system:

In contrast to the European system, in which marriage was the only volitional check on population growth, the Chinese demographic system had multiple conscious checks, and was therefore far more complex and calculating than Malthus or his successors thought. As a result . . . population never pushed the economy to subsistence levels.19

Nevertheless, because of the productivity of agriculture and the ability of the Chinese economy to produce more than enough food for its

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population, the population did in fact grow, and as mentioned above, it grew rapidly from 1750 to 1850.20 In the densely populated core areas of the Pearl River delta in south China, along the southeast coast, and in the Yangzi River delta, populations did reach the size where people started migrating out into less-populated areas. Sometimes these regions had exceptionally fertile soil that could be brought into production by clearing the land, as in Hunan up the Yangzi River from Shanghai, or in the West River valley in Guangxi province, or sometimes the land that was brought into production was more marginal and less fertile, as in the Jiangxi highlands on the southern bank of the Yangzi River.21

Wherever new land was being brought into agricultural production, especially by 1800 when it was land that was not as fertile or productive as land in the densely populated core regions, that was an indication that the limits of growth within the biological old regime were being reached. That does not mean that a Malthusian disaster was imminent—the Chinese were in fact very much in control of their reproductive capabilities—but that good agricultural land was becoming in short supply. The reason for this is that the four necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter, and fuel—all came from the land and hence were in competition. Clearing land for food decreased the amount of wood available for fuel, either to cook and heat homes or to make charcoal for industrial purposes. Switching land from cotton to rice production also put pressure on the supply of the raw material for clothing, while doing the opposite would decrease the amount of food available. There just was not much room for maneuvering when the limits of the biological old regime were being reached, as they were in China in the late eighteenth century,22 and, as we will see, in Britain too.

It was not just that meeting the needs for sustained population growth meant increasing pressure on the land and decreases in other things at the expense of food, but that to keep food production increasing while at the same time keeping supplies available for clothing, shelter, and fuel meant that greater and greater amounts of labor and capital had to be expended in agriculture just to keep pace. For instance, clearing land was expensive and so too was building irrigation works or terracing fields from hills, all of which improved the output of Chinese agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Allocating more labor also could increase output, and Chinese farming families did that too: planting rice in nurseries and then transplanting it to the fields or picking insects off rice plants by hand, for instance, also increased agricultural yields and sustained a growing population. So too did capturing and recycling nitrogen from human and animal waste; Asian farmers were biological-old-regime champions in maintaining or even increasing the fertility of their fields.

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Markets Another way the Chinese economy improved both overall production levels and productivity was by the use of markets, especially for agricultural commodities. It used to be thought that markets were first and most highly developed in Europe (reading backward from the Industrial Revolution to find reasons why it happened there first). But in the past thirty years, historians of China have shown how fully developed and efficient markets were in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China.23 Peasant farmers in the Pearl River and Yangzi River deltas, for instance, came to specialize in sericulture (that is, the whole process of producing silk), raising silkworms and growing the mulberry trees with which to feed the silkworms, boiling the cocoons to obtain the silk threads, then spinning, weaving, and dyeing the silk. Other areas might specialize in cotton, sugarcane, or other nonfood agricultural crops.

Such specialization meant that those peasant producers had to obtain their food from other sources, usually places upriver that came to specialize in rice and could easily export it on boats to the more densely populated core regions. Massive investments in canals by both private parties and the state vastly extended and improved the Chinese inland water transportation system, linking China from Tianjin in the north to Guangzhou in the south by water. Efficient water transportation facilitated the movement of grain throughout the Chinese empire and the growth of markets and provided the material foundations for maintaining some of the world’s largest cities.

Initially, the Chinese state intervened in the food markets quite regularly to ensure that peasant producers and urban consumers alike would be ensured adequate food supplies,24 but by the mid-eighteenth century the Chinese state was increasingly willing to allow markets and merchants to handle the movement of grain across huge distances—up to a thousand miles—from where it was produced to where it was consumed. Measures of the efficiency of these markets show that they were more efficient than contemporary markets in France, England, or the United States.25 Additionally, Chinese markets for land, labor, and capital all functioned well and in some ways more efficiently than comparable markets in European countries.26

In short, eighteenth-century China looked as ‘‘developed’’ as any other developed part of the world, whether measured by levels of agricultural productivity, sophistication of manufactures and markets, or levels of consumption. Chinese families regulated their size and were responsive to changing economic opportunities, limiting their size when those opportunities diminished in order to maintain consumption above

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subsistence levels; specialization of function gave rise to markets and a highly commercialized economy; and an extensive water-based transportation system allowed the efficient movement of goods and people throughout the empire.

Yet China’s highly developed market economy did not lead to an industrial breakthrough. Instead, by the nineteenth century, there were plenty of indicators that China was pushing up against ecological constraints imposed by the biological old regime. In several areas, fuel became in short supply in the early 1800s, with peasant families turning to rice straw and chaff for heating and cooking rather than wood. Moreover, some market exchanges between densely populated core regions and developing peripheral areas also served to slow Chinese economic growth.

One of the advantages of markets and a good transportation network is that they allow some areas to specialize in what their natural resources make most profitable and to exchange that produce with others, enabling both to be more productive and allowing everyone’s income to rise. At least that is the theory, and to a point that is the way markets functioned in China. However, the exchanges began to break down regarding the trade of raw cotton from cotton-producing regions in return for manufactured goods, cotton textiles in particular, from the highly developed core regions in the lower Yangzi and Pearl River deltas.

Throughout China, rural families were free to decide what and how much to grow and how to allocate family labor on the farm. To this extent, they differed markedly from African slaves in the New World or serfs in eastern Europe, both of whom had their freedom curtailed and production decisions made by their owners or overseers. Thus those Chinese peasants who migrated to more peripheral areas, like their counterparts in the more developed cores, were free to make their own decisions. Increasingly, what they decided was that it was in their interest to spin and weave their own cotton textiles for their own use and for local exchange, rather than concentrating on rice or raw cotton and importing the finished goods. In effect, large parts of rural China underwent a process of ‘‘import substitution,’’ producing their own textiles. Not only did they reduce the amount of raw cotton sold to the textile-producing centers, but they also increased the area given over to cotton and hence decreased the amount of rice they were willing to export as well.27

The freedom of Chinese peasant families thus may have spurred what might be called ‘‘self-sufficient proto-industrialization’’ in peripheral areas, but that acted as a constraint on the growth of an industrial cotton textile industry in China’s core regions. Contributing to the willingness of Chinese peasant families in peripheral areas to spin and weave their own

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textiles may have been the long-standing norm that ‘‘men plow, women weave.’’ It was not just that ‘‘women weave,’’ but that they weave in the household. Chinese families thus placed a high value on mothers and daughters staying at home to do the weaving, rather than leaving home to work in a factory, as English and Japanese girls did.28 Paradoxically, the freedom of peasant farmers throughout China’s core and peripheral regions, when compared with the limited freedoms of slaves and serfs in the European system, constrained China’s ability to continue developing a textile industry in its most highly developed core regions.

In summary, China had a highly developed market economy within the constraints of the biological old regime. Nonetheless, that regime placed ecological limits upon growth, and the freedom of Chinese peasants coupled with practices governing the sexual division of labor, all combined, meant that China was bumping up against the limits of growth by the mid-1800s. Food, clothing, shelter, and fuel competed for land, and to get more from the land, the Chinese lavished increasing amounts of labor on agriculture. The dynamics of specialization, increased market exchanges, and improved transportation in the context of the biological old regime and the particularities of China’s situation were pushing it toward an increasingly labor-intensive agriculture and the depletion of land resources, rather than toward an industrial revolution. As fuel supplies from wood declined, the Chinese turned again, where they could, to coal. Coal was available and used in North China, parts of Central China, and in South China too, where it was used in the iron foundries of Foshan town near the major city of Guangzhou. Nevertheless, this availability of coal in China did not lead to an industrial revolution there, or elsewhere in Eurasia for that matter. Particular circumstances came together in one place, England, that did create the conditions for the leap into the fossil-fueled industrial age that became the modern world.

Exhausting the Earth29 Indeed, over the period from 1400 to 1800, the dynamics of the biological old regime, especially in those areas most densely populated and even with the institutions of private property, markets, and effective states, were leading not to a breakthrough to a ‘‘modern world’’ of fossil-fuel energy and electrified industry and homes, but to an increasingly intensive using up of resources. In part, this outcome was driven by a significant worldwide population increase, rising from 380 to 950 million people, most of that coming in the century following the depths of the seventeenth- century global crisis, which drove the removal of forests for more farmland (and food for people).30 Interestingly, climatologists now think

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