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Full Description
Large-scale comparative economic history of westernmost and easternmost Eurasia can be beneficial for the understanding of global history. This book provides a description of material life in North-western Europe and East Asia, for the period from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, with a focus on developments in Great Britain and the Dutch Republic on the one hand and China and Japan on the other hand. With maps, tables, graphs and figures as a prominent and integral part of the book, it provides information, in an accessible format, on the main characteristics of the economic landscape of this period. It demonstrates the constraints to which all pre-industrial economies were subjected because of their dependence on organic natural resources but also the different ways in which the societies discussed dealt with those constraints. To provide a better understanding of this economy of limited possibilities, the final chapter of the book is devoted to the emergence of modern economic growth in Western Europe.
Contents
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION
I GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHY
Sizes
Physical geographies
Weather and climate
The tyranny of distance
The variability and unpredictability of life in the pre-industrial world
Population and population density
Life expectancy, health and disease
Violence
II ENERGY
Human labour power
The labour power of animals
Firewood
Peat
Coal
Gunpowder
Watermills
Windmills
Water and wind and their role in transport
III RESOURCES
Land use
Animals
Manure and night soil
Wood
Metals: iron and bullion
Frontiers and ghost acreages
IV AGRICULTURE
Agricultural labour force, the share of agriculture in GDP and urbanisation
The importance of food in budgets
Agricultural productivity
Agricultural systems: the example of China's rice economy
Agricultural systems: the example of Great Britain's wheat economy
What about Japan?
V EXCHANGES
Migration
Intercontinental migration
Slave trades and other involuntary migration
The demographic impact of European overseas migration
Chinese and Japanese overseas migration
The Columbian Exchange
Flows and stocks of bullion
Monetary systems
Technology and relative scarcities
Intercontinental commodity trade
A modern world-system?
A sinocentric alternative to Eurocentrism?
Intercontinental trade as an almost exclusively European affair
VI STAGNATION AND GROWTH
The tension between population and resources
Positive checks
Preventive checks: The European marriage pattern and East-Asian alternatives
Sustainability in Tokugawa Japan
A world without growth?
Efflorescences
Modern economic growth before the Industrial Revolution? The case of Song China, 976-127
Modern economic growth before the Industrial Revolution? The case of the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age
Sprouts of pre-modern growth?
VII SOURCES OF GROWTH? CHANGES IN PRODUCTION AND TRANSPORT
Increased production and productivity in agriculture
Industrious revolutions
Increased investment and micro-innovations
Improved human capital
A better measure of reality
Improved transport
Transport over land
Transport over water
Shipping on open seas
VIII SOURCES OF GROWTH? MARKETS AND STATES
Specialisation and market extension
Global market integration
A rise of capitalism?
A decline of the commons?
A decline of the guilds?
A rise of free labour?
Capitalists, capitalism, and the state
State formation, state capacity and empire
State formation and state capacity
Military strength
Empire building, and imperial disintegration
IX THE GREAT DIVERGENCE
The emergence of a new economic regime
New energy and new technology
Railroads and steam shipping
The wider impact of the new economic regime
Great Divergence and fossil-fuel ghost acreage
Exchanges
Migration during the great diverging
Great Divergence, trade ghost acreage, and Great Specialisation
Regional differences, change and continuity
Investment and Great Divergence
Did the Dutch Republic, Qing China or Tokugawa Japan have sufficient financial resources to industrialise?
FINAL COMMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
