Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Dynamics of Political and Economic Change
R. Bin Wong
(Departments of History and Economics, University of California, Irvine)
By comparing property rights, markets and political economies in late imperial China and early modern Europe, this paper suggests a set of functional similarities that explain some parallel dynamics of economic expansion before the Industrial Revolution and identifies the differences
that distinct kinds of political economy made to economic change. Parts of China and Europe had well developed private property rights and associated factor markets. Many places in eighteenth-century China may well have had more developed factor markets, at least for land, than many parts of Europe; in any case, there were no dramatic differences in factor markets likely to explain later divergences. Similarly, the expansion of commodity production according to Smithian dynamics of division of labor takes place in parts of China and parts of Europe; while the roles of
government in defending commercial property rights may well have differed, the differences can be exaggerated.
There were differences in the political economies of agrarian empire and commercial capitalism that explain different political logics of economic expansion to new lands with consequent differences for economic growth, but the significance of these differences would have been very modest without the technological ruptures making possible the Industrial Revolution. While it remains quite difficult to create persuasive explanations for the concentration of inventions and innovations that accompanied the shift to mineral sources of energy, it doesn't seem analytically useful to argue that commercial capitalism caused them since the chains of causality become too long and indirect. Once new economic possibilities were created however the
political economy of capitalism, now industrial and not merely commercial, was well suited to exploit them. The nature of our comparisons then changes because the possibilities of economic growth are radically transformed and the difficulties of spreading these possibilities are exacerbated by the political economy of imperialism. Sorting out the multiple possibilities for connections as well as comparisons suggests that there are path-dependent economic changes that are marked by moments of contingency and constraint.
The paper concludes with very brief comments on other Asian and Islamic cases in order to highlight the analytical implications of the main comparisons in a broader theoretical manner. As an exercise in comparative history, the paper aims to suggest how social theory might be broadened and invigorated by taking account systematically of non-European cases of historical change.
