After Tamerlane Read Online Free Page B

The Ming decision reflected, perhaps, a deeper constraint. The Ming dynastic principle was the fierce rejection of the Inner Asian influence that the Mongol Yuan had wielded. It united China against the cultural outsiders. It asserted the exclusiveness of Chinese culture. A ‘Greater China’ of Han and non-Han peoples was incompatible with the Ming vision of the Confucian monarchy. The grand strategy of indefinite defence carried with it the logic of cultural closure. 48
    There was a further change, whose effects no contemporary observer could have fully grasped. The greatest puzzle in Chinese history is why the extraordinary dynamism that had created the largestand richest commercial economy in the world seemed to dribble away after 1400. China’s lead in technical ingenuity and in the social innovations required for a market economy was lost. It was not China that accelerated towards, and through, an industrial revolution, but the West. China’s economic trajectory has been furiously debated. But the hypothesis advanced by Mark Elvin more than thirty years ago has yet to be overturned. 49 Elvin stressed the advances achieved by China’s ‘medieval economic revolution’ in the Sung era, but insisted that when China emerged from the economic depression of the early Ming period (a product in part of the great pandemic) a form of technical stagnation had set in. More was produced, more land was cultivated, the population grew. But the impetus behind the technological and organizational innovations of the earlier period had vanished, and was not recovered. China grew quantitatively, not qualitatively. Part of the reason, Elvin argued, was the inward turn we have noticed already: the shrinking of China’s external contacts as the Ming abandoned the sea. There was an intellectual shift away from the systematic investigation of the natural world. And it was partly a matter of exhausting the reserves of fresh land, so that less and less was to spare for industrial crops (like cotton) after the needs of subsistence had been met. A subtler influence was also at work. China was a victim of its own success. The very efficiency of its pre-industrial economy discouraged any radical shift in production technique (even in the nineteenth century, the vast web of water routes made railways seem redundant). The local shortages, bottlenecks and blockages that might have driven it forward could be met from the resources of other regions, linked together in China’s vast interior market. Pre-industrial China had reached a ‘high-level equilibrium’, a plateau of economic success. Its misfortune was that there was no incentive to climb any higher: the high-level equilibrium had become a trap. 50
    We should not anticipate too much. It was to be more than three centuries before anyone noticed.

These conditions in the ‘Near East’ (the European name for a vast region that also included Iran) and East Asia were the clearest evidence that a global order under the management of the European great powers, and designed to serve their imperial interests, remained at best a work in progress. In the Outer World beyond Eurasia, the Europeans had partitioned with gusto. Here it had proved relatively easy to attach – by coercion or cooperation – less-developed economies to the commercial and industrial heartland of the North Atlantic basin. Here too they had imposed their rule and fashioned ‘neo-Europes’ in an astonishing burst of demographic imperialism. But in the ‘Old World’ of Eurasia it had proved much harder to absorb Asian states and cultures into a European ‘system’, or even to agree upon a colonial share-out. This was the vast uneasy borderland of Europe’s global colonialism. If the Europeans fell out among themselves, and their ‘world economy’ lost its magnetic power, they might face a rebellion against their worldwide pre-eminence. This test of