Kenneth Pomeranz

Beyond the East-West binary: Resituating development paths in the eighteenth-century world

Debate can advance scholarly discussion, and I am grateful to JAS for the chance to do so here. As much as possible, I would like to move forward by introducing additional arguments and evidence. However, some recapitulation of the book under discussion is inevitable, as is some review of debates related to Philip Huangs book on a related topic. Some return to previously plowed ground is further necessitated by the nature of his review. First, he has fundamentally misunderstood what my book claims, as well as the support for some of those claims. I will not correct all of these errors here, but I will need to go over some of the major examples. Second, a central contention of his review is that his 1990 book, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 remains the best framework for understanding the deltas economy over that entire period. Huang is; of course, entitled to that view: but in reasserting that books thesis he ignores rather than responds to the critiques ofthat book (see Wong 1990; Myers 1991; Wong 1992). He also ignores plentiful new research on both Asia and Europe that suggests there were more paths to modernity than we once realized, most of them perfectly viable in spite of relying on more labor-intensive kinds of production than Englands (especially in agriculture) during their early phases.

Social History and World History: From Daily Life to Patterns of Change

This article asks how questions from social history can be more closely integrated into world history and vice versa. It highlights cases in which this has already happened and suggests avenues for further development. It divides social history into three different types: history of daily life, history of social organization, and history of social movements and deliberate attempts to induce social change, whether from the top down or from the bottom up. The last kind of social history is particularly difficult to frame as world history, partly because we lack terms for collective agents that are agreed to be useful across cultural lines. But developing such a vocabulary remains necessary. The last section of the article examines how social histories of empire offer some approaches that are promising for this purpose.

Human Rights and Revolutions

Introduction: Human Rights and Revolutions Part I: Two Opening Perspectives Chapter 1: The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights Chapter 2: The Chinese Revolution and Contemporary Paradoxes Part II: The English, American, and Russian Revolutions Chapter 3: Tradition, Human Rights, and the English Revolution Chapter 4: Natural Rights in the American Revolution: The American Amalgam Chapter 5: A European Experience: Human Rights and Citizenship in Revolutionary Russia Part III: Asian and African Case Studies Chapter 6: An Enlightenment of Outcasts: Some Vietnamese Stories Chapter 7: India, Human Rights, and Asian Values Chapter 8: What Absence Is Made Of: Human Rights in Africa Part IV: A Human Rights Revolution? Chapter 9: (Homo)sexuality, Human Rights, and Revolution in Latin America Chapter 10: Ethics and the Rearmament of Imperialism: The French Case Chapter 11: The Strange Career of Radical Islam Part V: A Concluding Perspective Chapter 12: Human Rights and Empires Embrace: A Latin American Counterpoint

Empire & ‘civilizing’ missions, past & present

Daedalus Spring 2005 Imperialism’ is a frustratingly vague term, but a useful one–and not only for outside observers and protesting subjects.1 Historically, rulers have often sought to make their empires visible as such by following regional–and in recent centuries, global–standards for acting imperially. Even the past century, in which empires often shunned that designation, is only a partial exception. Imperialism is also topical. While some compare the contemporary United States to imperial Rome, more analysts see it as the latest of a series of militarymercantile hegemons that set the rules for their eras’ global political economies. Depending on where they locate the start of the world economy, some stretch that series back many centuries, while most identify only an Anglo-American succession spanning two centuries of liberal industrial capitalism. Others mark out the last two hundred years for a different, though complementary, reason: as an era in which Western empires, influenced by the Enlightenment, cast themselves as agents of progress. In this essay I will also emphasize the self-assigned ‘civilizing’ mission of modern empires, but will argue that the twohundred-year, Atlantic-centered framework is both too narrow and too broad. On the one hand, civilizing empires have emerged outside the Enlightenment West; an East/West dichotomy often proves less useful than one between contiguous and overseas empires. On the other hand, since the 1970s the American government’s approach to ‘development’ and ‘nation building’–the twentieth-century version of ‘civilizing’–has broken with basic ideas about how empire could confer bene1⁄2ts on subject peoples that had evolved over the previous two centuries. This makes today’s American empire different both in word and deed.

Land markets in late imperial and republican China

China has had very active markets for both the sale and the rental of land since Song times (960–1279), if not longer. By the sixteenth century, most of the institutional arrangements that would characterize these markets until 1949 were in place. These institutions differed sharply from those of emerging land markets in early modern Western Europe: in particular, government played a lesser role in adjudicating disputes over land contracts, and customary arrangements included features that (a) gave some sellers of land claims on purchasers that could last for many years and (b) gave some tenants, especially in South and East China, very strong usufruct rights, which themselves became a form of tradable property. However, despite these and other differences from Western models, Chinese land markets were quite efficient, and provided the incentives needed for a very productive agriculture; secure tenants, for instance, responded to their strong position by behaving like owners and investing heavily in improving the land.

Orthopraxy, Orthodoxy, and the Goddess(es) of Taishan

This article examines James Watson’s influential work on orthopraxy and cultural unification in late imperial China through a study of the cult of the goddess of Taishan. In this case the state (a crucial promoter of standardization for Watson) was internally divided, local elites took a hard line against popular practices, and ritual became increasingly disunified across classes, regions, and genders. Eventually, popular lore about the goddess changed to reflect an awareness of elite rejection and to celebrate the goddess’s ability to pursue her own goals despite often hostile male authorities. What “cultural unity” one can find here is paradoxical and based not on rituals but beliefs: a shared sense that Taishan was sacred territory worth contesting, popular awareness that elites did not welcome their claims on it, and other signs that groups marked their disagreements with each other, rather than either ignoring differences of ideas or disguising them behind shared ritual.

Contemporary Development and Economic History: How do we Know what Matters?

ABSTRACT “Development” involves increases in human and physical capital, plus institutional changes, that are characteristic of whole societies, not just particular sectors. Such changes are not necessarily well-reflected in GDP figures at the time that these changes are occurring – even assuming that we can measure GDP in historical societies with sufficient accuracy. Consequently, types of largely narrative long-run history focused on one or a few case studies are a vital supplement to more econometric and formally-modeled studies. They are particularly useful as correctives to historical work that aims at finding a single variable or event separating cases of developmental “success” and “failure.” However, the claims that emerge from such case studies are quite hard to verify. The article uses examples drawn from East Asia at certain moments a possible example of “failure,” but more recently assumed to be an example of “success” – to both identify historical findings that might have implications for contemporary development choices and to explore why such inferences are necessarily very fragile.

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

Why did modern economic growth start in the West, and not elsewhere? What was it about England that made it home to industrialization? Questions such as these, which surround the origins of industrial capitalism, occupied a central place in the sociological studies of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Even today, these very questions continue to haunt social scientists, albeit in different ways. As Pomeranz explains, older literatures – from the 19th-century classics of social theory to the modernization theory of the 1950s and 1960s – linked Europe’s economic breakthrough to the fact that it embodied within its borders ‘some unique homegrown ingredient of industrial success’ (p. 3). In these earlier studies, the East is depicted as the polar opposite of Europe, and in many ways as inferior to it. Such arguments come in different versions. Some stress demographic variables such as birth rates and life expectancy (indicators of human capital) as an explanation of Europe’s success; others argue that it was the structure of its institutions (i.e. markets for goods and for factors of production) that gave Europe advantage. Yet others find it in the cultural realm – in the ‘rational’ ideas, beliefs and attitudes about capital accumulation, growth or consumption that Europe diverged from the rest of the Old World in the 19th century. In most cases, these studies carry out a fair amount of backward-looking history writing, portraying industrialization as the ‘natural’ working out of various processes at work in pre1800 Europe. Writing history with a backward gaze is a risky business, however. In turning

Decolonization and its legacy

Technological change accelerated with the Industrial Revolution and extended to all processes on all continents from smelting and mining to power production, to transportation, agriculture, and housing, and to communications. This chapter focuses on the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet Union because these nations have been the major engines of technological change since the 1750s for economic reasons; political reasons; military concerns; and the competition between these states for resources and power. A crucial aspect of the Industrial Revolution, tied to the others, was the rise of steam power. Historians have had their differences over the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution, particularly its impacts upon living standards. Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations have begun to tame the Mekong River delta with scores of hydroelectricity projects that raise questions of post-colonial oustees and environmental degradation. After 1750 a revolution in transportation changed the face of human interaction, commerce, military thinking, diet, leisure, and much else.

The Middle East in world history since 1750

Population change can be interpreted as the result of the continuous confrontation and adaptation between the forces of constraint and the forces of choice. Forces of choice are the ability to modulate and control behaviors that have demographic consequences, such as entering into a reproductive union; having children; protecting and enhancing health with adequate nutrition, housing, and clothing; moving and migrating from one place to another. Modern demography has been characterized by an acceleration with a variety of geographical patterns, and this variety increases the smaller the scale of analysis. This chapter outlines the nature of the demographic systems prevailing in different parts of the world in the eighteenth century. It presents the factors that determine a change or a transformation of a demographic system, therefore affecting population development. To define demographic transition as the process that has reduced mortality and fertility from the high pre-nineteenth-century levels to the low ones that prevail nowadays in Europe, America, and East Asia.