The deep causes of the Great Divergence: or why China fell behind

In the last post, I suggested that Kenneth Chase's explanation of why China invented, but did not pursue the development of gunpowder and guns to its ultimate consequences, could be seen as the very deep cause of the so-called Big Divergence, i.e. of the rise to dominance by Western Europe. Chase explains the lack of interest in the development of firearms in China as the result of geographical conditions and how they affected warfare. He argues that two types of warfare developed after the invention of firearms.

"Where there were technologically advanced agrarianate societies that were not threatened by steppe or desert nomads, we find the combination of firearms and pikemen, with an emphasis upon infantry (western Europe, Japan). Where there were technologically advanced agrarianate societies that were threatened by steppe or desert nomads, we find the combination of firearms and wagons, with an emphasis upon cavalry (eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, north China)."

From a geographical point of view Chase divides Eurasia in three regions. The Arid Zone, which includes those areas that supported pastoral nomads, the Inner Zone including the areas that were directly threatened by pastoral nomads, principally eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, and China, and the Outer Zone that was not directly threatened by pastoral nomads, principally Western Europe and Japan, as shown in his map below.

In a sense, this is a more sophisticated geographical argument than the one put forward by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel, since it is capable of explaining why Western Europe and not China (or India, or the Ottomans) dominated the world, while Diamond (in a book that uses old political economy arguments, in particular the notion of surplus, something typical of many historians as argued here before) can only explain why Europeans conquered the people outside Eurasia (that had less luck in the choice of animals and plants to domesticate, and less chance to spread them in an East-West axis with similar climate) really. Note that Cipolla long ago had noted that the main advantage of Westerners when they arrived in the East (Vasco da Gama in 1498) was basically military.

The only thing missing in most of these non-economists discussions of the causes of Western European dominance is the role of demand expansion in technological progress and economic growth in general. But many historians do have an implicit demand-led growth or Keynesian story too, I should add. By the way, on the Keynesian view of many historians it might be worthwhile reading the last section of Garegnani and Palumbo's entry on the Elgar Companion to Classical Economics available here.

PS: This also suggests that on some level, particularly military and naval technology, the West was already ahead of the Oriental Empires considerably before Pomeranz and the revisionists time frame (i.e. around 1800).  However, the argument does not hinge on Eurocentric views about the superiority of culture, as in many neo-Weberian arguments (e.g. David Landes).

The Fiscal-Military State and Western Hegemony

An often neglected, at least in economics, argument for the rise of the West (leaving the debate of when the Big Divergence took place, if around 1800 or before, for another post), is its fiscal advantage when compared to the Oriental Empires (Mughal, Ottoman, Safavid and Qing). Patrick O'Brien, the prominent author of the idea of Western fiscal exceptionalism, suggests that the smaller and more urbanized polities of the West found it easier to tax their populations than the Eastern empires with more extensive territories, larger populations and less urbanized economies, even if the latter were in many respects more advanced than the former. The figure below shows that to some extent the Dutch dominance, and then the English ascension, go hand in hand with and increase of tax revenue as a share of GDP.

The figure shows only the Ottoman empire, at the bottom of the graph, as a comparison to the Western economies, but it gives a sense of the stark differences after the mid-17th century. In a sense, O'Brien's argument can be seen as a variation of Charles Tilly's famous argument that "War made the State, and the State made war." Inter-State wars gave a military edge to Europe, which was solidified in the higher revenues which led to larger and more organized navies in particular. In this respect, the work by Jan Glete on the effects of a permanent navy on State formation deserves also careful reading.

However, the reasons for the militaristic nature of the Western economies is not well developed in the Fiscal-Military State literature. Kenneth Chase's book on the history of firearms provides an interesting answer.

He argues that early firearms were not very effective when used against cavalry because of their overall lack of mobility, poor rates of fire, and limited accuracy. As a result, their effectiveness was restricted to infantry and siege warfare, and were not used in regions threatened by nomads (which include all the Oriental Empires), in which cavalry warfare was dominant. That is why the Chinese invented guns, but failed to keep up with Western developments. The same could be said about sailing techniques, and the combination of guns and sails, to use the terms of Cipolla's classic book.