The Industrial Revolution in China

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There was no indigenous Industrial Revolution in China in the 19th century like that of Europe. Numerous factors have been suggested, including ecology, government, and culture.

[edit] Was China Unique?

Some historians such as David Landes and Max Webber credit the different belief systems in China and Europe with dictating where the revolution occurred. The religion and beliefs of Europe were largely products of Judaeo-Christianity, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Conversely, Chinese society was founded on men like Confucius, Mencius, Han Feizi (Legalism), Lao Tzu (Taoism), and Buddha (Buddhism). The key difference between these belief systems was that those from Europe focused on the individual, while Chinese beliefs centered around relationships between people. The family unit was more important than the individual for the large majority of Chinese history, and this may have played a role in why the Industrial Revolution took much longer to occur in China. There was the additional difference as to whether people looked backwards to a reputedly glorious past for answers to their questions or looked hopefully to the future. Furthermore, Western European peoples had experienced the Renaissance and Reformation; other parts of the world had not had a similar intellectual breakout, a condition that holds true even into the 21st century.

[edit] The California school

By contrast, there is a historical school which Jack Goldstone has dubbed the "California school" which argues that China was not essentially different from Europe, and that many of the assertions that it was are based on bad historical evidence.

Benjamin Elman argues that China was in a high level equilibrium trap in which the non-industrial methods were efficient enough to prevent use of industrial methods with high costs of capital. Kenneth Pomeranz, in the Great Divergence, argues that Europe and China were remarkably similar in 1700, and that the crucial differences which created the Industrial Revolution in Europe were sources of coal near manufacturing centres, and raw materials such as food and wood from the New World, which allowed Europe to expand economically in a way that China could not.^[1]

However, modern estimates of per capita income in Western Europe in the late 18th century are of roughly 1,500 dollars in purchasing power parity (and Britain had a per capita income of nearly 2,000 dollars [1]) whereas China, by comparison, had only 450 dollars. Also, the average interest rate was about 5% in Britain and over 30% in China, which illustrates how capital was much more abundant in Britain; capital that was available for investment.^{[verification needed]}

One trend in current historical narratives is to eschew grand metanarratives in favor of smaller narratives. This trend has had the impact of viewing China and Europe not as isolated large systems, but at emphasizing the role of regional economics.

This has implications for framing the question of industrial development, because it isolates the industrial revolution to one economy, the Midlands of England.