I think Tye is quite wrong about 18th C. England. He should look at 
Peter Mathias's history of the brewing industry. More generally -- and 
more interestingly -- I wonder what he, Lipsey and other SHOE 
participants think of Acemoglu and Robinson (2012)? They claim to have 
generalised this entire debate, and to have replaced or subsumed all 
previous explanations of why some nations 'succeed' and others 'fail'.

Anthony Waterman


On 12/10/2012 4:57 AM, Rob Tye wrote:
> Prof Lipsey
>
> That European prosperity and technology rapidly outpaced China after about
> 1800 is surely correct.  But I am delighted to see you take a stand against
> ‘Chinese mentality’ type explanations of that matter.   As historians we
> will inevitably tend to reverse engineer our evidence, but to do so merely
> by invoking mentality seems to just too associated with intellectual
> slovenliness, and worse.
>
> If I understand your position correctly, then you associate factory
> production rather closely with modern Europe in general and Fordism in
> particular.  This I do not accept.  Wang Anshih did not get five billion
> coins a year made in kitchen ovens, nor were the 90 million bricks in the
> Jetavana stupa made in anyone’s back yard.  Factory production within a
> Fordist economic environment however is perhaps more of a modern European
> phenomenon – but surely we must then ask what the roots of that Fordist
> economic environment were?  It is at this point I think we find an important
> influence that China had on Europe.
>
> Berkeley (The Querist) is surely correct to point to high Chinese
> productivity in 1737 – I do not think it excessively sarcastic to suggest
> that the only thing England was mass producing at that time was stately
> homes.  And the obvious key fundamental element in Berkeley’s proto-Fordism,
> got from a Chinese model, is the realisation that you have to bite the
> bullet and actually pay your workers, rather than truck them.
>
> In 1682 William Petty thought 12 copper coins per household was an adequate
> money supply for the English working classes.  When Wang Anshih took power
> in China around 1060, there were already maybe six thousand copper coins per
> household in circulation, but he saw this a greatly inadequate and increased
> production by at least an extra 100 coins per household per annum.
>
> One final point – coinage does not seem to be on your list of General
> Purpose Technologies.  Am curious to understand why it was excluded, if so.
>
> Regards
>
> Rob Tye, York UK
>
>