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Malthus and The Demographic Systems of Modern Europe and Imperial China: A Critique of Lee and Feng

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  • The University of New Brunswick, Saint John

Abstract

How manytimes do we not hear in academia that a new paradigm has emerged and for-mer certainties no longer hold sway? One of the editorial reviews of James Lee and WangFeng’s (2001) One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities,1700–2000 promises us that this book “presents evidence about historical and contempo-raryChinese population behaviour that overturns much of the received wisdom about thedifferences between China and the West first voiced byMalthus.” But I wonder if this is an-other instance in which what is described as “new” and “original” is reallya result of nothaving learned to appraise or understand the old.The essential thesis of this clearlywritten and well-organized book is that the “binarycontrast” Malthus drew between a “Western” demographic model characterized bylow fer-tilityand lowmortalityratesand aChinesemodeldominated byhigh fertilityand high mor-talityrates is not supported bythe available evidence on Chinese population behavior. ThisMalthusian interpretation, the authors contend, held dearlybya long line of historical de-mographers since Malthus’s time, has no basis in “Chinese realities” but is merelyanotherexpression of “the ethnocentric and teleologic traps so common to earlier social science”(146). Despite the authors’ keen grasp of “Chinese realities,” I think this assessment ofThomas Robert Malthus’s legacyis incorrect. The “binarycontrast” Lee and Feng attributeto Malthus is based on a loss of memoryof the historical and intellectual context to whichMalthus’s first essay ([1798] 1960) on population owes its origin.Reading Lee and Feng, one would think that Parson Malthus, the man whose theoryMarx called a “libel on the human race,” was a cheerful optimist firmlyconvinced that inmodern Western societies, reason had finallytriumphed over the unconscious exercise of
10.1177/0486613403257811REVIEWReview of Radical Political Economics / Fall 2003Duchesne / One Quarter of Humanity
Review Essay
Malthus and the Demographic
Systems of Modern Europe and
Imperial China: A Critique of
Lee and Feng
RICARDO DUCHESNE
Department of Social Science, University of New Brunswick, Canada
One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700–2000
James Lee and Wang Feng; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, xii + 248 pp.,
$52.50 (hardcover), $19.95 (paperback).
How many times do we not hear in academia that a new paradigm has emerged and for-
mer certainties no longer hold sway? One of the editorial reviews of James Lee and Wang
Feng’s (2001) One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities,
1700–2000 promises us that this book “presents evidence about historical and contempo-
rary Chinese population behaviour that overturns much of the received wisdom about the
differences betweenChinaand the West first voiced by Malthus.” But I wonder if this is an-
other instance in which what is described as “new” and “original” is really a result of not
having learned to appraise or understand the old.
The essential thesis of this clearly written and well-organized book is that the “binary
contrast” Malthus drew between a “Western” demographic model characterized by low fer
-
tility and low mortality rates and a Chinese model dominated by high fertility and high mor
-
tality rates is not supported by the available evidence on Chinese population behavior. This
Malthusian interpretation, the authors contend, held dearly by a long line of historical de
-
mographers since Malthus’s time, has no basis in “Chinese realities” but is merely another
expression of “the ethnocentric and teleologic traps so common to earlier social science”
(146). Despite the authors’ keen grasp of “Chinese realities,” I think this assessment of
Thomas Robert Malthus’s legacy is incorrect. The “binary contrast” Lee and Feng attribute
to Malthus is based on a loss of memory of the historical and intellectual context to which
Malthus’s first essay ([1798] 1960) on population owes its origin.
Reading Lee and Feng, one would think that Parson Malthus, the man whose theory
Marx called a “libel on the human race,” was a cheerful optimist firmly convinced that in
modern Western societies, reason had finally triumphed over the unconscious exercise of
534
Review of Radical Political Economics, Volume 35, No. 4, Fall 2003, 534-542
DOI: 10.1177/0486613403257811
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the sexual instinct in a demographic system characterized by premarital continence and late
marriage. It is not that Lee and Feng are unaware of the difference in emphasis between the
first essay, or the first edition of his Essay on the Principle on Population ([1798] 1960),
and the second and later editions (1803–1826) regarding the roles of positive and preven
-
tivechecks. They know this too well; in his second essay, Malthus did elaborate more on the
roleofthe preventive check and did appreciatemorethedistinctive role of delayed marriage
in modern Western Europe. But Malthus at no point abandoned the basic conclusion he
reached in his first essay that human progress was forever constrained because population,
“chiefly” among the “lowest orders of society,” always tended to increase faster than the
food supply.
His first essay was written mainly as a response to William Godwin’s much discussed
book of the moment, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice, and Its Influ
-
ence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), in which the author confidently stated that
man was “perfectible” and “susceptible of perpetual improvement.” Malthus did not accept
this optimism about the future but feared instead that the population would always tend to
outrun the means of subsistence. The passion between the sexes was too strong to be fully
controlled and mastered by human reason. If reason had guided human behavior in family
planning, then excess population, poverty, diseases, and famine should not have dominated
the lives of so many people in the past. Malthus ([1798] 1960) argued,
Must it not be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind, that in
every ageand in everyState inwhichman has existed,or does nowexist,that theincrease of
population isnecessarily limitedby themeansof subsistence increase.That population does
invariably increase when themeansofsubsistenceincrease. And, that the superior power of
population isrepressed,andthe actual population keptequalto the means ofsubsistence,by
misery and vice. (52)
In the second edition of his essay, Malthus clearly described as “misery” all those posi
-
tive checks that were brought on by the laws of nature, that is, by diseases, famines, and epi
-
demics.He described as “vice” allthose positive checks brought on by our own actions, that
is, war, abortion, and infanticide. Lee and Feng are right that in the later editions of his es
-
say, Malthus “begins his analysis of English society with the assertion that ‘throughout all
ranks the preventive check to population prevails to a considerable degree’ ” (103). This as
-
sertion, however, does not warrant the claim that Malthus was the originator of a paradigm
that classified world societies “into two sorts”: modern Western and non-Western, accord
-
ing to which the former societies “were characterized by the preventive check” and the lat
-
ter “were dominated by the positive check” (15). It certainly does not support the extrava
-
gant claim that “in the West,” according to Malthus, “individual rationality had forged a
socio-economic demographic system that produced prosperity,” and that “Western afflu
-
ence was a product of delayed marriage, which in turn was a product of Western individual
-
ism and Western rationality” (15, 16).
The Malthus of the second essay was indeed more mature and judicious in the exposition
of his arguments and less preoccupied with “abstract truth” than with the “practical” impli
-
cations of his theory and whether it could promote “some good.” To this end, he
“endeavoured to soften,” as he put it in the preface, “some of the harshest conclusions of the
first Essay” and to investigate more carefully whether men were capable of restraining their
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numbers without increasing the death rate. This led him to pay more attention to the preven
-
tive check, that is to say, the voluntary limitation of births through late marriage and celi
-
bacy, and the respective role “this virtue” had played in past and present societies. What he
learned from the “histories of mankind” gave him some hope for optimism in the future, as
he noted an increase in the operation of the preventive check in the more advanced societies
of the world.
In comparing the state of society which has been considered in this second book with that
which formed the subject of the first, I think it appears that in modern Europe the positive
checks to population prevail less and the preventive checks more than in past times, and in
the more uncivilized parts of the world. (Malthus [1803] 1960: 338)
He saw Norway, Switzerland, England, and Scotland as the most advanced countries in
this respect and felt it would not be “unreasonable to conclude that it [the preventive check]
would make further advances” ([1803] 1960: 589). But this does not mean Malthus saw the
England of his day as a Godwinian earthly paradise where the light of reason had come to
prevail over the sexual instincts of the uneducated masses. Malthus still held to the opinion
that “the lowest orders of society,” particularly the working classesof the expanding manu-
facturing towns, were not rational enough to restrain their instincts. While he hoped that in
the future, increased education among the poor would cultivate rationality in planning mar-
riageand children, he had littleexpectation of immediate improvement. This hemakesclear
in a chapter with the title “Of the Only Effectual Mode of Improving the Condition of the
Poor” (bk. 4, chap. 3), in which he considers whether the laboring poor can restrain the im-
pulses of passion until they have the means to support a family: “few of my readers can be
less sanguine than I am in their expectations of any sudden and great change in the general
conduct of men on this subject” ([1803] 1960: 495).
In presenting Malthus as the classic theorist of a Western demographic model, Lee and
Feng also forget that this model, the idea that a late and nonuniversal marriage pattern was
prevalent across modern northwestern Europe, was actually conceived in opposition to a
widely held Malthusian image of preindustrial populations breeding naturally beyond their
resources, only to be cut down by mortality crises. One cannot view the research on Euro
-
pean family systems carried out by John Hajnal (1965, 1982), Peter Laslett (1972), Wrigley
and Schofield (1981), and Alan Macfarlane (1978, 1986) as if they were in a direct line of
descent from Malthus. While we may pay more attention today to the Malthus of the second
essay, to the historical demographers who followed him, it seemed clear that preindustrial
Europe was dominated by a high-pressure system in which positive checks played the pri
-
mary role. It was this “Malthusianism,” represented in the works of M. M. Postan, Le Roy
Ladurie, and Carlo Cipolla, which in Robert Brenner’s ([1976] 1987) eyes had attained a
level of orthodoxy by the 1960s, that was discredited most fundamentally by the research
findings of the Cambridge group. One of the key works of this group was Wrigley and
Schofield’s masterpiece, The Population History of England, 1541–1871. Published in
1981, this 779-page book aimed to show that contrary to the generally held view, modern
England “did not conform to the high-pressure paradigm” but “experienced a fertility-
dominated low-pressure system” (451).
Now, Lee and Feng accept the research by the Cambridge group on the Western family.
It is the other side of Malthus, what he says about the non-Western family, that meets their
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disapproval and that they challenge empirically on the basis of new data and new methods
of demographic analysis. Malthus, they insist, was wrong to classify China as a society
dominated by the positive rather than the preventive check. While the Chinese pattern was
very different from, and far more complex than, the Western model, it was also character
-
ized by low fertility and moderate mortality. They clearly contrast their position with
Malthus as follows:
Whereas Malthus regarded famines as the major form of positive check in China, we high
-
light the role of deliberate mortality through sex-selective infanticide and neglect. Whereas
Malthus regarded marriage in China as universal and early, we show that although this pat
-
tern held for females, marriage was neither early nor universal for males. Whereas Malthus
emphasized only one form of deliberate preventive check, delayed marriage and premarital
sexual restraint, which he called “moral restraint,” we establish that in China sexual re
-
straint within marriage, which we call “marital restraint,” was also important. (12)
LeeandFeng areattheir best in the statistical demonstration of theseclaims.Yet,again,
I question whether they overturn any so-called “Malthusian myth” of Chinese demographic
processes. When they cite more than once Malthus’s observation that “famines were the
most powerful and frequent of all positive checks to the Chinese population” (7, 16), they
conveniently forget that this phrase is part of a longer sentence that reads as follows:
These unfavourable seasons do not appear to be unfrequent, and the famines which follow
them are perhaps the most powerful of all positive checks to the Chinese population;
though atsomeperiods the checks from warsandinternal commotions have not beenincon-
siderable. (Malthus [1803] 1960: 216)
Not only is the word “frequent” not in the sentence, but the word “perhaps” is included. Be-
sides, Malthus says little else about famines and instead focuses on the positive check to
population from the “very common” practice of infanticide. One is thus left wondering why
Lee and Feng write of their findings on Chinese (female) infanticide as if they were a chal
-
lenge to Malthus’s observations, aware as they are that, for Malthus, infanticide was “typi
-
cal of many non-Western and non-modern Western societies . . . particularly China” (42). Is
their criticism simply that infanticide “may have been more important in late imperial
China” than famines were? But how serious a challenge would this be when the more gen
-
eral and basic proposition of Malthus is that mortality crises, or the positive check, was
more important than the preventive check in China? The authors, after all, agree that infan
-
ticide, the rates of which could be “as many as half of all newborns” in some areas, is a
mortality check.
Perhaps Lee and Feng’s real objection is to Malthus’s characterization of infanticide as
a “vice,” “voluntary only to a degree” (42). They would rather describe it as “deliberate
mortality,” “proactive mortality control”: as a “product of rational decision making,” based
on a clear calculation of the costs and benefits of raising children, “embedded in a peculiar
cultural attitude,” in which children during the first year were not seen as fully human (47,
61). Which would mean that Malthus was wrong in thinking that “rationality” in family
planning was a “uniquely modern Western ability” (4). This, however, is too narrow an un
-
derstanding of what Malthus ([1803] 1960) meant by “the subjection of the passion to the
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guidance of reason” (487). If he called the preventive check “moral” restraint and argued
that this check was “the only virtuous means of avoiding the vice and misery which result
from the principle of population” (489), it was because this check involved more than mere
calculation of self-interest. It required “a genuine and constant attachment” between the
sexes based on a deep concern for the future welfare and education of children. One hardly
need accept Malthus’s reactionary idea that the principal cause of workers’ poverty lay in
lack of self-control in the propagation of children to recognize that there is a fundamental
moral distinction between rational control of the rate of fertility and rational control of the
rate of female infanticide.
1
It appears that Malthus was also fundamentally correct in his observation that Chinese
marriage was universal and early. His only flaw was not calculating that, since infanticide
wasmainly against females, there was a shortage of women that “prevented many men from
ever marrying” (69). Still, as we learn from Lee and Feng, the proportion of married men in
China remained more or less the same as in Europe. Moreover, Chinese men did marry
much earlier at around age 21 as compared to around age 26 in the West (71).
The one thing Malthus got wrong about China, it seems, was his assumption that early
marriage in China resulted in higher marital fertility than in Europe. Lee and Feng collect
some revealing data showing that the average Chinese couple in modern China had “at least
two to three fewer births than a married couple in the West” (90). This lower birth rate
within marriage was achieved by starting childbearing later than in the West, by stopping
childbearing “far earlier,” and by waiting longer between births (88–90). But did Western
couples really have two to three more children than Chinesecouples did? Lee and Feng base
this claim on three studies: one by Chris Wilson (1984), which showed that the total marital
fertility rate (TMFR) for a dozen seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European popula-
tions, aged twenty to forty-nine, ranged from 6.6 to 10.8 offspring, with a mean of 8.5; an-
other study by Michael Flinn (1981), which showed that the TMFR in England in 1750 was
7.6, in Germany 8.1, in Scandinavia 8.3, and in France 9; and a third study by E. A. Wrigley
and others (1997), which showed that the TMFR for English couples between 1600 and
1824, aged twenty to forty-nine, was 7.4 offspring (8, 161).
By contrast, in China, Lee and Feng tell us that, on average, “women married by age 20
rarely had more than 6 children if they remained married until age 50” (86). Well, there are
someserious problems with these numbers. First, since the average age atmarriage of Euro
-
pean women was far higher than China’s, it would have been more realistic for Lee and
Feng to offer data for European women married at ages beginning later than twenty. Con
-
sider, for example, that in England between 1610 and 1760, women tended to marry at
twenty-five to twenty-six years of age (Livi-Bacci 2000: 103), whereas in pre-1950s China,
they tended to marry at sixteen to nineteen years (Lee and Feng 2001: 66–67). Thus, we find
in another study by Massimo Livi-Bacci (2000) that in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen
-
turies, given an age at marriage of twenty, English women bore on average 7.3 children, but
given an age at marriage of twenty-five, they bore only 5.3 children (Livi-Bacci 2000:
110–11). The same reductions in TMFR are observable in other European countries once
538 Review of Radical Political Economics / Fall 2003
1. Infanticide, let us be clear, was forced on poor parents by their inability to feed all their children, particu
-
larly when living conditions were deteriorating. It was also forced on Chinese women,as we will see following,
by their inability to practice birth control through late marriage. Thanks to Robert Brenner for clarifying this
point.
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we look at women who married beginning at age twenty-five rather than twenty: in Ger
-
many, for example, the average number of offspring drops from 8.7 (at twenty years of age)
to 6.4 (at twenty-five years), in Sweden it drops from 7.7 to 5.4, and in France it drops from
8.4 to 6.1. What about the TMFR of the majority of Chinese women who married before age
twenty?
Once we take into consideration the nonuniversal marriage system of Western Europe
(less than 90 percent of women married) and the universal marriage pattern of China (“by
age20-24 most Chinese females werealready married”), weshould not be surprised that, by
Lee and Feng’s own admission, the total fertility rate (TFR) of Europe, which measures the
number of children per both married and unmarried women, was actually lower than
China’s(65, 84). Unfortunately, we are not told how much lowerit was. But one of the stud
-
ies they use, cited above, makes the very point that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
England, the TFR was actually 4.38, a figure substantially lower than the TMFR (7.4)
(Wrigley et al. 1997: 355).
Before I congratulate Malthus, a historical demographer of the nineteenth century, for
maintaining his intellectual vitality in the face of Lee and Feng’s “new data and new meth
-
ods,” let us grant these scholars another say and examine in greater detail their critique of
Malthus’s observation that nineteenth-century China was an overpopulated society “in
which productive capacity had reached its limits” (40) and in which population increases
were controlled largely by mortality crises. First, there is nothing paradigmatic in Lee and
Feng’s statistical demonstration that despite sustained population growth in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, China experienced a sustained decline in mortality rates and a sus-
tained increase in life expectancy beginning in the twentieth century. Malthusians have
long recognized that Malthus, to use the words of the orthodox Le Roy Ladurie, was “born
too late.” Fruitful as his ideas may have been in explaining preindustrial population pat-
terns, every demographer recognizes that just as Malthus was making his projections about
arithmetic increments of food supplies being outstripped by geometric population growth,
in the essay’s first edition, Western Europe was beginning to experience a new demo
-
graphic system lacking any traces of the positive-check cycle. Even Wrigley (1983), one of
the sources Lee and Feng cite as having drawn a clear contrast between Europe’s and
China’s fertility regime, wrote that “it was Malthus’s fate to frame an analysis of the rela
-
tionship between population, economy and society during the last generation to which it
was applicable” (112). That China, too, witnessed a decline in positive checks in the twenti
-
eth century, thanks to the use of modern medicine, scientific agriculture, and contracep
-
tives, does not invalidate Malthus’s ([1803] 1960) intuition that by the 1800s, preindustrial
China may have been overpopulated and “its soil cultivated nearly to the utmost” (453).
This intuition has been supported and elaborated in numerous publications by many
prominent sinologists, including Ho Ping-ti (1959, 1975), Dwight Perkins (1969), Kang
Chao (1986), Mark Elvin (1973, 1984, 1988), Francesca Bray (1984), and Philip Huang
(1990). Lee and Feng mention but hardly engage with these rival sources (19). The data
they collect relate largely to Chinese population processes in the twentieth century. One rel
-
evant argument they cite in response to the view that there were fewer and fewer ways dur
-
ing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to increase agricultural productivity within
China’s shrinking farms is Li Bozhong’s (1998) estimation that “annual net production per
worker” increased by 52 percent from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in the
Lower Yangzi (31, 38). But this argument, which they do not elaborate on, is soon qualified
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by Lee and Feng’s recognition that agricultural growth in this period, including the twenti
-
eth century, was “accompanied by a parallel process of labor intensification,” by increases
in the number of workdays per year and hours per day. They even concede to Huang, in a
footnote, that “output per workday [labor productivity] may not have increased” (175), al
-
though they add against Huang that as a result of “substantial” increases in the number of
workdays, “annual output and annual income also increased” (175), But this, of course, is
precisely what Huang means by “involutionary growth”: that total output of market produc
-
tion was expanding in the Lower Yangzi, but at the cost of more workdays per year and
more hours per day, in the context of diminishing marginal returns per workday (Huang
1990: 11–15).
Lee and Feng may counter that the dramatic rise in population that China experienced
from 160 million in 1700 to 350 million in 1800 to 500 million in 1900 does not sit well
with Malthus’s observations. Here I would only ask readers to pay close attention to Lee
and Feng’s own valuable observation that population growth in late imperial China “was
tied to a sharp increase in geographic mobility” (118) and that “most population growth
during the last two to three centuries has occurred in China’s frontier provinces” (116). Mo
-
tivated by new economic possibilities in the newly colonized areas, millions upon millions
of migrants from the densely populated and ecologically depleted regions of northern China
and the Yangzi provinces moved to new settlements in Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou in
the west and southwest and Manchuria in the northeast. As a result,
from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, while the regional proportion of na-
tional population shrank in the Lower Yangzi, from 28 percent to 17 percent, the regional
proportions tripledfrom6 to 15percent in thesouthwest, quadrupled from 3 to12 percent in
the Upper Yangzi [Sichuan], and swelled by almost an order of magnitude, from less than 1
percent to 9 percent, in the northeast. (117)
Overpopulation in North China and the Yangzi delta, long the centers of gravity of the
Chinese economy, was no doubt a driving force behind these mass migrations. The idyllic
picture Lee and Feng present of nineteenth-century China as a land of low fertility, moder
-
ate mortality, and no famines does not hold for these regions. Just look at the Shandong re
-
gion of North China: during the 268 years of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), droughts oc
-
curred in 233 years, floods in 245, overflows of the Yellow River in 127, and tidal
inundations in 45 (Gottschang and Lary 2000: 2). After years of successive drought be
-
tween 1876 and 1879, the governor of the province of Shanxi, located to the west of
Shangdong, reported in 1879 that some 60 to 70 percent of the population was suffering
from typhoid fever (Wong 1997). More recently, it has been estimated that 9 to 13 million
people were victims of famine during this period in the north and northwest (Gernet [1972]
1990: 615). Similarly, in the Taihu basin in the Yangzi delta, according to Huang, there was
a long-term increase in the incidence and frequency of waterlogging and drought; thus,
whereas in the period between 900 and 1400, waterlogging occurred once in 3.8 years and
drought once in 7.7, in the period between 1400 and 1900, it occurred once in 1.9 years and
once in 2.9 years (Gernet [1972] 1990: 33–34). All in all, from the first half of the nine
-
teenth century, after all the best lands in north China and the Yangzi delta had been culti
-
vated and the starving poor were forced to cut forests on mountainous lands to grow new
crops(which worsened the erosion of the soil and the silting of rivers), floods, droughts, and
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famines multiplied. By the 1850s, this demographic pressure on land was so serious that
even the colonial border regions “were becoming saturated” (Mann and Kuhn 1978). As
competition for the choicest lands intensified, conflicts between ethnic groups became
common. The stage was set for the Taiping, Nian, and Muslim rebellions in which tens of
millions died.
Socialists who believe that the humane response to poverty isto aid children who are al
-
ready born have every reason to oppose Malthus’s heartless argument that governments
should formally disclaim the right of the poor to public assistance to discourage early mar
-
riage and future increases in the birth rate(Meek 1971). But this does not mean that his the
-
ory of population (and let us not forget the late Malthus was an advocate of universal educa
-
tion for children) deserves to be ignored or misread. We certainly found little in Lee and
Feng’s “new paradigm” about China’sdemographic system that “overturns” Malthus’s past
work.
2
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Duchesne / One Quarter of Humanity 541
2. One should be aware, however,that Lee and Feng’s argument is part of a wider scholarly effort seeking to
demonstrate that China’seconomy in theeighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries was notasdifferent fromEu
-
rope’s as the conventional wisdom would have it. This effort—led by Bin Wong (1997), A. G. Frank (1998),
JackGoldstone (2002),andKenneth Pomeranz (2002)—hasbeen thesubject of anextended debate inThe Jour
-
nal of AsianStudies (Spring2002),which mightbe of interest to readersof Review of Radical Political Econom
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ics as it contains a long Marxist critique of Pomeranz’s Great Divergence by Robert Brenner and Christopher
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Article
T. R. Malthus was deeply interested in how his principle of population operated in societies distant to, and different from, his own. In this respect, China served as an intriguing case, already famous in his own time for its large and dense population and the central regulation of a closed economy. Malthus drew on both centuries-old Jesuit material and recent accounts from the Macartney embassy to the Qianlong emperor to assess its past and present food–land–population dynamics. This article explores Malthus's interest in China in the context of British public and private commercial interest in opening its trade, not least interest from his own East India Company. Historiographically, Malthus's China has been critiqued as an early rendition of orientalist demographic transition, posing a dichotomy of East/West fertility and mortality change. In disagreement with this interpretation, this article argues Malthus's key distinction was not East/West but Old World/New World.
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In Portugal’ 19th Century, Malthus’s work gets reactions that range from acceptation with reserves to radical refutation, amidst some misunderstandings. Both the themes of overproduction and overpopulation are subject of comment. While very frequent by late 19th century, there’s no record of clearcut populationist bias among the authors in consideration. Beyond the importance of the themes of colonization and emigration, it’s worthy noting the close articulation of the refutations of Malthus with the pointing out of economic backwardness and excessive inequalities, as well as the emergence, by the end of this period, of Neo-Malthusian theses.
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For a long time, scholars have tried to explain why Europe alone of the great civilizations of the world achieved a profound transformation in output and productivity in the nineteenth century. Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence is a recent, highly praised intervention in this debate. He argues that, as late as 1800, Chinese living standards and productivity levels were comparable to European ones. What allowed England to industrialize first were plentiful supplies of coal and vast land-saving resources in the New World. But Pomeranz’s claims lack empirical credibility. Over the period 1700–1850, most of Western Europe was on a trajectory away from the Malthusian limitations of the old regime as a result of sustained improvements in both land and labor productivity. The ecological benefits provided to England by American imports were not significant compared to the actual and potential expansion of intra-European trade. China was unable to attain any industrial breakthrough despite enjoying a much greater “ecological windfall” from the acquisition of new territories in central and southwestern Asia after 1500.
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Between the 1890s and the Second World War, twenty-five million people traveled from the densely populated North China provinces of Shandong and Hebei to seek employment in the growing economy of China's three northeastern provinces, the area known as Manchuria. This was the greatest population movement in modern Chinese history and ranks among the largest migrations in the world. Swallows and Settlers is the first comprehensive study of that migration. Drawing methods from their respective fields of economics and history, the coauthors focus on both the broad quantitative outlines of the movement and on the decisions and experiences of individual migrants and their families. In readable narrative prose, the book lays out the historical relationship between North China and the Northeast (Manchuria) and concludes with an examination of ongoing population movement between these regions since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.
Chapter
This is an extremely important collection of essays in historical social structure. The volume represents the first attempt to examine in historical and comparative terms the general belief that in the past all families were larger than they are today; that the nuclear family of man, wife and children living alone is particularly characteristic of the present time and came into being with the arrival of industry.
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Few historical issues have occasioned such discussion since at least the time of Marx as the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. The Brenner Debate, which reprints from Past and Present various article in 1976, is a scholarly presentation of a variety of points of view, covering a very wide range in time, place and type of approach. Weighty theoretical responses to Brenner's first formulation followed from the late Sir Michael Postan, John Hatcher, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Guy Bois; more particular contributions came from Patricia Croot, David Parker, Arnost Klìma and Heide Wunder on England, France, Bohemia and Germany; and reflective pieces from R. H. Hilton and the late J. P. Cooper. Completing the volume, and giving it an overall coherence, are Brenner's own comprehensive response to those who had taken part in the debate, and also R. H. Hilton's introduction that aims to bring together the major themes in the collection of essays. The debate has already aroused widespread interest among historians and scholars in allied fields as well as among ordinary readers, and may reasonably be regarded as one of the most important historical debates of prevailing years.
Book
English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 is the most important single contribution to English historical demography since Wrigley and Schofield's Population History of England. It represents the culmination of work carried out at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure over the past quarter-century. This work demonstrates the value of the technique of family reconstitution as a means of obtaining accurate and detailed information about fertility, morality, and nuptiality in the past. Indeed, more is now known about many aspects of English demography in the parish register period than about the post-1837 period when the Registrar-General collected and published information. Using data from 26 parishes, the authors show clearly that their results are representative not only of the demographic situation of the parishes from which the data were drawn, but also of the country as a whole. Some very surprising features of the behaviour of past populations are brought to light for the first time.