Debin Ma v. Kenneth Pomeranz: East Asia v. Europe
Debin Ma of the London School of Economics has spent time in the archives and has come to conclusions quite different from Pomeranz’s.
Ma’s recent papers (especially this one and this one) make archive-driven comparisons of European and East Asian living standards around the start of the industrial revolution. Both papers have coauthors, but I focus on Ma because he speaks and reads both Japanese and Chinese, something lamentably rare among economic historians at English-speaking universities.
One quote from the abstract of the first-linked paper:
Matching caloric and protein contents in our Japanese consumption baskets with those in European baskets, we compare Japanese and European urban real wages. Real wage rates in Kyoto and later Tokyo are about a third London wages but comparable to wages in major Southern and Central European cities for the 1700-1900 [period].
From the abstract of the second-linked paper:
In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe and far behind that of workers in the leading economies in northwestern Europe. Industrialization led to rising real wages in Europe and Japan. Real wages declined in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries….
A lot of Ma’s work is Japan v. China, not Asia v. Europe, so both lines of his agenda are likely of interest to GNXP readers. Given the overfishing in the pool of English-language economic history documents, Ma should be able to just throw his net overboard and pull in the big hauls for at least another decade.
Am I misunderstanding something? It sounds like both abstracts excerpts are making the same conclusion: that northwestern europe had higher wages than central/southern europe, which had similar wage levels to china and japan.
The only difference, it appears, is that incomes increased in Japan and decreased in China during the 17/1800s.
pwyll:
You’re exactly right: I’m just highlighting the different coverage of the two papers, in hopes of getting some folks to actually read the d**n things….
The physiological subsistence ought to have been much the same everywhere though. If cities had double or higher wages, in the malthusian era that would have to mean that they were usually destroying their recruited populations via infectious disease. The exception would be areas like Manchuria, where they did find significantly higher wages, and explained it by the land having been held at lower density of population, due to Manchu dynasty policies restricting Han colonization in that area. An accession of land seems to be the trigger for a move to sustained higher productivity, such as could spread out into the entire population, not just the wealthy, but disease-vulnerable, urban ones, of that era.
Before about 1900 the Japanese seem to have been generally poorly nourished, though I think that the diet was balanced — a degree of stunting, though without pervasive deficiency diseases. I read somewhere that as of 1965 or so the typical Japanese was a foot taller than his grandfather.
“major Southern and Central European…”; should one treat Protestant and Roman Catholic Europe as having been two different cultures?
Their conclusions are midway between Pomeranz and the old (Western) consensus: only London and Amsterdam were ahead.
“The silver wage in Milan or Leipzig was not appreciably higher than the wage in Beijing or Kyoto throughout the eighteenth century.”
“The classical economists and many modern scholars have claimed that European living standards exceeded those in Asia long before the Industrial Revolution.”
It’s too bad I can’t see the tables in the linked versions.
Note at the beginning they admit:
“One thing is clear about this debate, and that is the fragility of the evidence that has been brought to the issue.”
should one treat Protestant and Roman Catholic Europe as having been two different cultures?
if you ignore the confounds.