The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
Page 68
17. Fish, Rise of the Common Man, p. 118.
18. R. Cortes Conde, “The Growth of the Argentine Economy,” in Bethell, ed., Argentina Since Independence, p. 75.
19. Bethell, ed., Argentina, p. 55. One indicator of the difference between the American sense of identity and purpose as against the Argentine is that the United States conducted national censuses every decade from the founding of the republic, whereas Argentina did not do its first national census until 1869, the second in 1895—ibid., p. 54.
20. The primary source for these figures is Rock, Argentina 1516-1987, pp. 141-45, 164-67.
21. The figures come from Historical Statistics of the United States, Series A and C.
22. Ibid., series C 115-32.
23. Rock, Argentina, 1516-1987, p. 89.
24. Juan B. Justo, Internacionalismoy patria (Buenos Aires, 1933), cited in Cornblit, “European Immigrants,” p. 233.
25. Even the most efficient farmers working the most fertile soil found (find) their profits vanishing in the form of lower prices. The gains went (go) largely to the customers. Erik Reinert, “Symptoms and Causes of Poverty,” stresses the contrast between this “classical” pattern of distribution of gains from technological change, which he sees as especially typical of agriculture and distribution, and the “collusive” pattern of industries that are marked by barriers to entry and increasing returns to knowledge. He uses the term collusive because “the forces of the producing country (capital, labour, and government) in practice—although not as a conspiracy—‘collude’ to appropriate these gains” (p. 84).
26. Landes, Revolution in Time, p. 326.
27. Shumway, Invention of Argentina, p. 156, n. 3.
28. Rock, Argentina, 1516-1987, p. 233.
29. Cortes Conde, Corrientes immigratorias; Cornblit, “European Immigrants,” p. 230. In the early censuses, about a tenth of the so-called industrial establishments were what we would call services: shoe repair shops, photography studios, seamstresses’ shops, barber shops, and hairdressing parlors—all the necessary paraphernalia of urban life. The 1935 census dropped them from the industrial sector—Lewis, Crisis of Argentine Capitalism, p. 35.
30. Lewis, Crisis, ch. 6: “Labor.” The quotation that follows is from p. 103.
31. See ibid., p. 492.
32. Pedro de Azevedo, cited in Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, p. 41.
33. Batou, Cent ans,Cent ans, ch. 8: “L’essor economique du Paraguay.”
34. On this so-called revisionist school, see Pastore, “State-led Industrialisation,” who cites, among others, Whigham, “The Iron Works of Ybycui” a manuscript by Vera Blinn Reber, “Modernization from Within: Trade and Development in Paraguay, 1810-1870” (Shippensburg Univ., Carlisle, PA, 1990); and Batou, Cent ans, who sees this as one more example of a much wider pattern of European hostility to “Third World” (anachronism) initiatives. For a similar revisionist approach to Argentine history, Pastore cites Tulio Halperin Donghi, El revisionismo historico argentino (Buenos Aires, 1970).
35. Cf. Batou, Cent ans, p. 223, n. 13, who attributes this concept to Gramsci.
36. Batou, Cent ans, p. 232, citing A. Garcia Mellid, Proceso a los falsificadores de la historia del Paraguay (Buenos Aires, 1963).
37. Batou, Cent ans, p. 260. By comparison, Batou cites 8-10 percent for Argentina in 1865, 10-15 percent for Colombia before 1870, 18-20 percent for Mexico in 1873.
38. As part of this campaign, the rulers and merchant interests in Buenos Aires repeatedly closed the mouth of the Parana river and cut the “Guarani republic” off from the sea. See a table of these blockades in Batou, Cent ans, p. 241. By international law, which defines a blockade as an act of war, Argentina was at war with Paraguay from 1827 to 1852.
39. On these industries, most of them created in the 1850s under the rule of Carlos Antonio Lopez, see Batou, Cent ans, ch. 8; Pastore, “State-led Industrialisation” Whigham, “Iron Works of Ybycui.”
40. For a pro-Paraguayan point of view, see Batou, Cent ans, pp. 263-66.
41. See the table assembled by Batou, Cent ans, p. 249, which gives population as 750,000 in 1865, 230,000 in 1872. Not all scholars agree with these losses, which have long been accepted as gospel. Thus Reber, “The Demographics of Paraguay,” suggests that the dead in the Great War, rather than more than half the population and the great majority of males, may have been as few as 8.7 to 18.5 percent of the prewar population. Others find these revisionist estimates, which are “based on a nonlinear regression with very few degrees of freedom” (Pastore, “State-led industrialisation,” p. 296, n. 3), implausible.
42. Batou, Cent ans, p. 267.
CHAPTER 21
1. From Welsh, A Borrowed Place, p. 16, who quotes without reference.
2. On the morning ceremonial, see Landes, Revolution in Time, pp. 51-52; also Huang, 1587, a Tear of No Significance.
3. Nathan Sivin speaks of “a large measure of social stability and cultural homogeneity that left traditional values and forms practically unchallenged as the creativity behind them was sapped by intellectual orthodoxies”—“Science and Medicine,” in Ropp, ed., Heritage of China, p. 166.
4. Letter to the French minister Colbert, undated but of 1675—Landes, Revolution in Time, p. 45.
5. On this story, see Cipolla, Clocks and Culture; also Landes, Revolution in Time, ch. 2.
6. Spence, Emperor of China, p. 74.
7. On all of this, the best source is still Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires, especially pp. 116-19. Cipolla is not a sinologist and had to rely exclusively on European sources, including the testimony of Christian missionaries and travelers; but his “global vision” gives him crucial insights that are missing in the specialist literature.
8. Mu, The Wilting of the Hundred Flowers (New York, 1963), pp. 76-77, cited in Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires, p. 120.
9. Taton, ed., General History, II, 592.
10. Ibid., 590.
11. Ibid., 589, n. 1.
12. This is one of the major contribution’s of Alain Peyrefitte’s book, L’empire immobile. Because he gained access to the Chinese archives, including papers read and annotated by the emperor, Peyrefitte can show the inner workings of bureaucratic equivocation.
13. Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires, p. 120 f.
14. Peyrefitte, L’empire immobile, p. 286. The Staunton quote is from the French edition of his travels: Voyage en Chine eten Tartarie (6 vols.; Paris, 1804), VI, 6. The Hue is from his Souvenirs d’un voyage, TV, 81. Eric Jones, “The Real Question,” pp. 12-13, dismisses such personal recollections of stasis as “snapshot impressions.” I think he is wrong. These witnesses do concur; they report a state of mind; and their testimonies do fit what we know about technological change in China. Jones recalls “similar” conservatism in England after the war (worker rejection of American technology), and England, he says, “soon adopted many American practices.” Bad example.
15. Fairbank and Reischauer, East Asia, p. 291, citing Oshima, Economic Growth, p. 34. Fairbank and Reischauer suggest that the reason for Chinese “stability” was “the very perfection that Chinese culture and social organization had achieved by the thirteenth century.” The contrast with Europe, roiling with imperfection, could not be sharper. Cf. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, pp. 172-73: “China is a star example of a successful civilization…. China reached the pinnacle of economic development possible under pre-industrial conditions and stopped: no forces pushing it in a different direction are in evidence….”
16. Cf. Jones, “The Real Question,” pp. 8-9, who is equally nonplussed by these a priori objections to this line of inquiry: “I cannot see why; [the sinologists] are not being blamed and the question does not seem tendentious with respect to a society that had achieved so much and then passed so many centuries without achieving it again.”
17. Taton, ed., General History, II, 590.
18. Cf. Goldstone, “Gender, Work, and Culture,” who argues that support for such constraints ca
me from the imperial government, which saw its primary function as “enforcing positional roles” (p. 25). China was very different in this regard from Europe or Japan.
19. Cited in Lippit, “Development of Underdevelopment,” pp. 266-67. I have amended the translation slightly, for purely stylistic reasons.
20. Sivin, “Science and Medicine,” p. 195.
21. From a publication of the Chinese Academy of Sciences addressed to teenage readers—ibid. Interestingly enough, this exhortation was omitted from the English translation, perhaps because the translators did not think the ideological agenda was or should be of concern to non-Chinese.
22. Nathan Sivin, as cited in Spence, Chinese Roundabout, p. 148. Spence is skeptical of the defensive arguments of the Needham school. On the other hand, he welcomes the prospect of further study of the lines of inquiry that they have opened up.
23. Sivin, “Science and Medicine,” p. 164. Cf. Needham, “Poverties and Triumphs,” in Crombie, ed., Scientific Change, p. 149: “Modern universal science, yes; Western science, no!”
24. Ibid., p. 196.
25. This policy of the helping hand is analogous to the efforts of some scholars—many fewer, to be sure—and so-called educators to promote or defend the new Afrocentric view of the rise of Western civilization. Cf. Bernal, Black Athena, and numerous reviews.
CHAPTER 22
1. Cited in Wilkinson, Japan versus the West, p. 121. We have a similar disparagement of Japanese productivity by an Australian expert in 1915: “…to see your men at work made me feel that you are a very satisfied easy-going race who reckon time is no object. When I spoke to some managers they informed me that it was impossible to change the habits of national heritage,”—Jagdish Bhagwati, cited in Meier and Seers, eds., Pioneers in Development, p. 53.
2. Gaspare Gonsalves in 1585, cited in Fisher, “The Britain of the East?”, pp. 345-46, from Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, I, 696.
3. Hugh Murray, An Encyclopaedia of Geography (London, 1834), p. 1102, cited in Fisher, “The Britain of the East?”, p. 346.
4. Takekoshi, Economic Aspects, I, 291.
5. Cf. Wilkinson, Japan versus the West, p. 108, citing a report of 1812 by Sir Stamford Raffles, then governor of Java.
6. Oishi, “The Bakuhan System,” p. 28. These records are still carefully shelved in Japanese provincial archives and present an unrivaled and still largely unexplored source for demographic analysis, including family reconstitution.
7. Hane, Premodern Japan, pp. 142-43.
8. Sakaiya, What Is Japan?, pp. 128-29, says Japan had 100,000 guns in 1600, compared to some 10,000 in the French army, and that national output exceeded that of all of Europe. See also Samuels, “Rich Nation, Strong Army,” pp. 79-80.
9. Sawada Taira, cited Samuels, “Rich Nation, Strong Army,” p. 80 and p. 358, n. 6.
10. On Japanese timekeepers, see Robertson, Evolution of Clockwork, pp. 190-287; Mody, Japanese Clocks; Fernandez, “Precision Timekeepers of Tokugawa Japan.”
11. On the rice revenue system and some of its unanticipated consequences, see Keisuke, “The VOC and Japanese Rice.”
12. Sakudo, “Management Practices,” pp. 150-51, 154.
13. From a play of 1718 by Monzaemon Chikamatsu (1653-1724), cited in Yamamoto, “Capitalist Logic of the Samurai,” p. 2.
14. Hane, Premodern Japan, p. 150.
15. Cited in Yamamoto, “A Protestant Ethic,” p. 2.
16. On canals and reclamation, see Takekoshi, Economic Aspects, III, 409-16.
17. Hane, Premodern Japan, p. 194. See also Miyamoto, “Emergence of National Market,” p. 297, whose dating does not correspond to Hane’s. These figures imply that the Japanese were reclaiming and taking into cultivation less fertile soils, partly no doubt to cope with population growth, but also because the tax burden on these new lands was lower than on the old. On tax incentives and recruitment of cultivators—Takekoshi, Economic Aspects, III, 413-14.
18. Cited in Nakamura and Shimbo, “Why Was Economic Achievement…?”, p. 9.
19. Cf. Fisher, “Development of the London Food Market.”
20. Cf. Nakamura and Shimbo, “Why Was Economic Achievement…?”, p. 18.
21. See the valuable discussion by Satoru Nakamura, “The Development of Rural Industry,” in Nakane and Oishi, eds., Tokugawa Japan, pp. 81-90.
22. Ibid., p. 96. Cho, “The Evolution of Entrepreneurs,” p. 15, links the success of new, imported forms of industrial production to the prior existence of an indigenous support network. Without this, “the foreign companies must bring their subcontractors with them as suppliers of necessary parts.”
23. See Rozman, “Edo’s Importance.” On London’s comparable contribution to British development, see E. A. Wrigley, “A Simple Model.” One big difference, however. London, almost as large as Tokyo by the end of the eighteenth century, was the capital of a nation of around 9 million, about one third the population of Japan.
24. Nakamura and Shimbo, “Why Was Economic Achievement…?”, p. 7.
25. “The Japanese institutions may have had a comparable, if not a higher, degree of functional sophistication”—ibid., p. 14. Cf. Hauser, Economic Institutional Change.
26. I take much of this list from Nakamura and Shimbo, pp. 14—15.
27. Ibid., p. 19. Compare the readiness of British itinerant traders in the eighteenth century, and later on, of United States peddlers, to sell clocks and watches in rural areas on installment credit.
28. For the complete list of goods, see Crawcour, “Tokugawa Heritage,” p. 41.
29. Keene, Japanese Discovery of Europe, p. 25.
30. Cited ibid., p. 25.
31. On this persecution, see Takekoshi, Economic Aspects, III, 233-35.
32. See Keene, Japanese Discovery, pp. 21-22, on the dissection of “Old Mother Green Tea.”
33. Cited ibid., pp. 26-27’.
34. Totman, Early Modern Japan, p. 519.
35. Craig, Chsh in the Meiji Restoration, p. 71.
36. Tsuru Shigeto, “Development of Capitalism and Business Cycles in Japan” (MS, Harvard University), cited in Brown, “Okubo Toshimichi,” p. 186.
CHAPTER 23
1. On these and other episodes of these years of reciprocal trial and measure, see Miyoshi, As We Saw Them, ch. 4: “Lives.”
2. Brown, “Okubo Toshimichi,” p. 190.
3. On all this, see Shimada, “Social Time and Modernity in Japan.”
4. Brown, “Okubo Toshimichi,” p. 191, n. 27. Okubo’s enemies used his house to hurt him. They even sent photographs of a new public building to Satsuma and said that this was Okubo’s accursed mansion; and it is said that this photo convinced Saigo to break with Okubo and his circle.
5. Minami, Economic Development, p. 99.
6. Cf. Samuels, Business of the Japanese State, ch. 3, especially the illustrations, pp. 76-79.
7. Hirschmeier, Origins of Entrepreneurship, p. 99; Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcasts, p. 173; Ohkawa and Kohama, Lectures on Developing Economies, p. 35.
8. Minami, Power Revolution, ch. vi.
9. Landes, “What Do Bosses Really Do?”, p. 593.
10. Fukui, “Japanese State,” p. 205.
11. Ibid., p. 204: by the opening of the new century, almost all children were enrolled, but no more than three quarters attended class regularly.
12. Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcasts, pp. 177-78.
13. Ibid., p. 182.
14. The above is based on Thomas Smith, “The Right to Benevolence: Dignity and Japanese Workers, 1890-1920,” in Smith, Native Sources, pp. 236-70.
CHAPTER 24
1. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, p. 71.
2. Cited ibid., p. 73.
3. This vivid formulation is by Eric Jones, European Miracle, p. 194. Jones’s ch. 9, “Islam and the Ottoman Empire,” is probably the best and most compact discussion of these matters.
4. Ibid., p. 194.
5. Cf. Lewis, Muslim Discovery of Europe, pp. 190-91.
6. Cf. Jones, European Miracle, p. 185, citing Braudel, La Mediterranee.
7. Lewis, Muslim Discovery, p. 161.
8. Jones, European Miracle, p. 177; Lewis, Muslim Discovery, p. 199.
9. Lewis, Muslim Discovery, pp. 195-96.
10. Jones, European Miracle, p. 185.
11. On Jumel, see Batou, Cent ans de resistance, p. 96. Like many of his kind, he was drawn to Egypt by financial incentives; and sent on his way by matters of the heart (“une deception sentimentalc”).
12. Issawi, “Economic Development,” p. 362, gives the figures as “over 200,000 qantars” and 345,000 qantars respectively. But he says, p. 518, that the definidon of the qantar changed in 1835, and I have converted to kilograms accordingly.
13. Levy-Leboyer, Les banques europeennes, p. 189.
14. The most convenient discussion in English is to be found in Batou, “Muhammad-’Ali’s Egypt.” Batou feels that the Egyptian industrial project has been underestimated and unrecognized. Also that its demise was the work of European adversaries, particularly the British.
15. Batou, “Muhammad-’Ali’s Egypt,” p. 185, Table 1.
16. Saint-John, Egypt,p. 412.
17. Ibid., p. 417.
18. Issawi, “Economic Development,” p. 363.
19. Friedman, “Egypt Runs for the Train.”
20. Mohammed Mannei, merchant banker in the Persian Gulf, as cited by Jonathan Raban, Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth, p. 63.
21. On the distinction between resource exhaustion and cartel market constraints, see Dasgupta, “Natural Resources,” p. 112.
22. On ransom money to extremists, see Goodwin, Price of Honor, pp. 15-17.
23. Cf. Friedman, “Egypt Runs for the Train.”
24. Keddie, in Keddie and Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History, p. 5.
25. On this new, scandalous literature, available in Muslim countries only as samizdat, see Amy Dockser Morris, “These Potboilers Stir Widespread Interest in ‘Islamic Affairs,’” Wall St. J., 22 December 1995, p. 1.