Industrious revolutions in early modern world history

KAORU SUGIHARA AND R. BIN WONG

Half a century ago the economic history of the early modern world was largely the history of Europeans' economic activities within Europe and their adventures into other world regions.

For early modern Europe, Jan de Vries has introduced the term “industri­ous revolution” to refer to the expansion of consumption despite an appar­ently constant real wage. In order for people in such circumstances to buy more goods they must choose to work longer hours, to be, in other words, more industrious. Their newly formed tastes for commercially produced goods lead them to sacrifice leisure for more work. De Vries sees these activities as basic preparation for the modern economy typically character­ized by the supply-side transformation of production possibilities ushered in by England's late eighteenth-century industrial revolution.¹ The term “indus­trious revolution” has a very different genealogy in East Asia where it was first used and which de Vries subsequently borrowed and deployed in a distinct manner. In Japan, beginning with Hayami Akira, a number of economic historians have focused on the skills and hard work of common Japanese, which were important both to Japanese commercial growth during the early modern era and to the subsequent path of industrialization taken by the Japanese a century or so after the English began their industrial trans- formation.^{[229] [230]} This Japanese industrious revolution considers the manner in which Japanese labor in agriculture and craft industry was organized in the early modern era and suggests that these characteristics influenced the subsequent development of skills by Japanese workers during industrializa- tion.^[231] For the European usage of the term, the industrious revolution is deemed a demand-driven set of changes in labor efforts tied to a consumer revolution.

One obvious area to turn to in order to look for both European and Japanese industrious revolutions is China.

Two kinds of comparison are crucial to our goal of identifying an industri­ous revolution common to both Europe and East Asia. First and most obviously we are interested in the similarities and differences we can identify between East Asia and Europe. But to be sure we have correctly identified these traits, we have to distinguish the constellation of similarities and differences between world regions from the range of similarities and differ­ences that we encounter within each world region. In other words, the traits of the European world region industrious revolution are not equally present through all of Europe or even all of what we conventionally label as Western Europe. Similarly, the traits highlighted in a Japanese industrious revolution are not equally present in all of Japan, let alone all of East Asia, despite our ability to find many traits of the Japanese industrious revolution in economic­ally dynamic parts of early modern China. When we consider differences thought to be significant to what accounts for different paths of economic change in Europe and East Asia, we also have to consider that these paths share certain features even when differences, such as those of economic institutions, could lead us to assume that different economic results neces­sarily follow. This will become readily apparent when we examine commercial expansion according to the principles of supply and demand and a division of labor that allows people to specialize and produce and exchange over larger spatial scales, a phenomenon labeled in some of the early modern economic history literature as Smithian growth, after Adam Smith and his arguments in The Wealth of Nations.

A world of economic crisis and political competition

Before the second half of the nineteenth century there were few places where urban populations engaged in industrial production came close to the numbers of people living in rural areas pursuing agricultural production as their main economic activity. Between 1500 and 1800 in most parts of the world some 80 to 90 percent of the population lived in agrarian settings and the material quality of their daily lives depended on the quality of each year's harvests. The frequency of climate-induced harvest troubles during the Little Ice Age that afflicted much of the world between the 1640s and 1690s exceeded the food supply insecurities before or after this half century of difficulties. Nature's havoc was signaled by portents of trouble connecting the natural and supernatural worlds of human imagination. Human actions themselves also contributed to the chronic insecurities of the age with the widespread use of violence as a means to compete for resources and territory in Europe and to challenge authorities to manage the social and natural worlds of East Asia more effectively.^[233]

Faced with difficult economic circumstances, common people actively expressed their displeasure over scarce food supplies, targeting both the merchants who exacerbated locally short supplies by buying for sale in other locales with yet higher prices and officials who failed to protect their subsistence. Worse yet, European governments continued to tax people and at times even raised additional taxes through the Little Ice Age to pay for the armies battling each other for territory. War making was the most violent form of inter-state competition for wealth and power that pitted European rulers against each other. Their competition extended to a mari­time competition for wealth. In the Americas, the Spanish mined silver that was a major source of their wealth and power, while the English and other Europeans sent greater numbers of white settlers to temperate climates of North America, and black slaves worked the lands in the hotter, more humid south of North America and in South America and the Caribbean. In Asia, European merchants organized by their governments to compete with each other and to supply their respective governments with revenue as they made their profits epitomized the intimate connection drawn between wealth and power by European rulers and their merchant elites. The political economy of mercantilism focused more on competition between European states both within Europe and in American and Asian world regions than it addressed issues of domestic welfare during the Little Ice Age.

In East Asia there was not any inter-state competition comparable to Europe's. Japan was unified in 1600 under the Tokugawa Shogunate; military conflicts were ended and the central government was not competing with other states to produce goods for sale abroad in order to amass more money. China was the size of Europe, but what in Europe were competitive political relations among states were in China relations among provinces framed by their common subordination to central authority. Central, provincial, and county levels of government all promoted principles of expanding agricul­tural and craft production. Sustaining domestic social order led the govern­ment to pursue a mix of policies to promote material prosperity, persuade people to follow common cultural practices, and register households in order to tax them and keep track of their activities. Issues of domestic order on an empire-wide scale in China were inter-state relations in Europe, relations marked by competition and conflict.

The general crisis set in motion by the Little Ice Age undermined the environmental basis of agriculture across Eurasia, which in turn fostered social unrest that was met in differing ways by governments. European political competition and its spread to other world regions created opportun­ities to generate wealth and power that did not place additional hardships on already hard-pressed subject populations. Chinese imperial commitments to social order meant more deliberate investments to respond to disasters, while the Japanese, for their part, were less affected by the climate changes. Given an environmentally driven crisis with major economic consequences and political impacts, the facts that people were working harder and relying more on markets were likely not very noteworthy to many people of the era, who for the most part were probably quite pleased to have survived the chal­lenges and dangers of the seventeenth century. As environmental conditions improved in the eighteenth century, the industrious revolution's demand­side features in Europe and supply-side features in East Asia became increas­ingly visible. We turn next to the demand side of economic changes and the expansion of commercial consumption.

Changing consumption: European transformations in East Asian perspectives

The concept of a European industrious revolution helps us conceive of how an expansion of commercial consumption could have taken place through a period of economic hardship, social turmoil, and political conflict, all of which were either set in motion or exacerbated by the environmental difficulties of the Little Ice Age. Despite the frequently harsh and often difficult circumstances of the early modern era, at least some people in both Europe and East Asia were able to satisfy their desires for an expanding set of commercial goods made possible by increased production reaching larger numbers of people engaged in market exchanges. The changing consump­tion patterns in Europe and in East Asia, especially China, suggest similarities that depend on parallel developments of commercial exchange and differ­ences that include how the circuits of exchange within East Asia and Europe became connected.

Within Europe, the expansion of early modern commerce was facilitated by changes in perceptions of economic activity. In contrast to medieval injunctions against avarice and excessive consumption, seventeenth- and especially eighteenth-century writers began to speak of consumption in more positive terms. Luxury was still frowned upon, but the aspiration to sustain a stable and healthy growth of consumption absent violent oscillations of dearth and excess is basic to Adam Smith's economic logic and moral vision in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, a text that complements the more famous arguments in The Wealth of Nations. Without being certain that similar sensibilities emerged elsewhere, it is easy to imagine that these changes in European attitudes enabled changes not possible in other world regions. To be sure, we would want to learn what kinds of arguments were made in favor of commerce in other world regions. We would need to parse the similarities and differences in such arguments since some may be context­specific; for instance, the great concern Europeans had about markets being a venue through which to channel man's passions and bellicose nature was prompted by the widespread negative impacts of war making on people's lives. Across China, a similarly sized space in which far more people lived, such concerns would have been far less likely, because there was a single government rather than a group of often hostile states.^[234]

Merchant-organized private commerce was several centuries old in some parts of the Chinese Empire when a sixteenth-century spread of merchant networks and increase in market towns across many parts of the empire created an economy that was simultaneously agrarian and commercial. Most production across the empire took place in rural settings and towns closely connected to their hinterlands economically, politically, and culturally. Government policies deliberately promoted commercial exchange in several ways.^[235] First, transit taxes were generally low; when some area experienced severe food shortages, these taxes were lifted in order to give merchants even greater incentive to ship in grain. Second, the government, especially in the eighteenth century, made multiple adjustments to commercial policies in order to promote effective complementary relations between merchants transporting goods and resident brokers to whom they sold their cargo. Third, and especially obvious in contrast to Europe, the imperial Chinese state promoted peace across an area the size of Europe where the pursuit of wealth and power included war making.

The realities of war in Europe did not mean, of course, that merchants were not socially seen in a positive light. Indeed, much has been made of the high esteem in which the bourgeoisie was held as key to the triumph of capitalism.^[236] Signs of cultural approval for merchants in Europe can be contrasted with the cultural stereotype of merchants being socially despised in East Asia because they did not directly create wealth like peasants or craftsmen, nor did they contribute to ruling society like the educated literati who became officials did. But beneath this veneer of social disapproval, merchants in both China and Japan proved able to fashion culturally credible arguments for their virtues grounded in Confucian understandings of the economic benefits of commerce.^[237] In China, the absence of corporate elite identities found in both Europe and Japan meant that the passage of mer­chant wealth into literati elite status faced fewer institutional barriers. The easier institutional integration of merchants into a broader elite defined by education and landholding meant that the cultural sensibilities of Chinese elites were more easily shared. Issues of taste and techniques for the acquir­ing, safe keeping and display of desirable cultural objects, including paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, and pottery, were settled by literati elites, some of whom published books designed to educate wealthy early modern Chinese merchants on the proper means of consumption.^[238]

From household division records, we know that families in the wealthier parts of the empire or families who accumulated some measure of wealth from commerce had consumer durables in the form of furniture. Indeed, while their possessions differed somewhat from those in European probate inventories, it is possible and perhaps even likely that furniture was more common in Chinese property divisions than in European probate inventories.^[239] Certainly Chinese commentators began to recognize the importance of promoting consumer demand in order to give skilled artisans employment some two centuries before Mandeville’s better known eighteenth-century statements calling on all people to pursue their desire for goods as a way to create a greater common good.1^[240] While some other Chinese commentators continued to counsel frugality in order to assure reserves for years of hardship, the principle of consumer demand to keep artisans employed was also understood. The two principles addressed two features of the pre-industrial economy common to both East Asia and Europe, as well as the rest of the world. First, annual incomes fluctuated with the harvests as the supply of food drove economic activity more generally; the logic of frugality made sense globally given these conditions. Second, in societies with skilled artisans producing goods for the market, it was important that demand for such goods be kept up in order to keep the craft labor force employed. While the extent of market-based consumption in China and Europe is difficult to estimate, they may well have differed in ways that made European consumption appear relatively greater for two reasons. First, the relative importance of urban-based consumption was higher in Europe and urban consumption appears better documented. Second, early modern Europe’s consumer revolution depended upon the influx of new and exotic goods from overseas, which increases their visibility in the historical record.

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The literature on Europe’s consumer revolution focuses on urban con­sumers and most especially on the wealthier among them. Retail markets were concentrated in urban centers. In China, however, marketing networks extended well into the countryside so that agrarian households routinely purchased goods on the market. China likely had more people who con­sumed goods purchased on the market than did Europe, even if, as is also likely, more Chinese consumed a combination of goods they produced themselves and those they purchased commercially than was the case in Europe. A second reason for Europe’s consumer revolution being more visible concerns the geographic origins of new goods. The introduction of Chinese porcelains, silks, and teas, as well as Indian cotton textiles and spices, sugar, and coffee from other world regions, into Europe all depended on Europeans purchasing Asian goods and making claims on territories and people in the New World where coerced labor yielded products European consumers could afford more cheaply than if they had been produced with wage labor. A third reason is historiographical; we simply have more scholarship on early modern European consumption than we do on Chinese and Japanese consumption. For China, Zheng Yangwen has made clear the growing fascination with “yanghuo” (foreign goods) beginning by the late fifteenth century and continuing thereafter.¹³ Opium was the foreign good consumed increasingly by elites in the eighteenth century and by the 1820s and 1830s had spread to the common people, who provided the demand satisfied by British merchants importing Indian opium.1⁴

Replacing silver exports to China with Indian opium sales was one important change the British made around the turn of the nineteenth century regarding their trade with Asia. A second was finding a way to reduce their imports of Indian cotton textiles. They were spurred to develop the tech­nologies making it possible for them to substitute for the imported Indian cotton textiles with domestic production, the first stage of European indus­trialization. Within a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century context, inter­national trade relations and the European political economy making such relations possible were both crucial to enabling Europeans to enjoy a consumer revolution associated with the European industrious revolution. Chinese commercial consumption did not depend on European kinds of political economy. Both China and Europe developed new cultures of taste and fashion that were met by craftspeople able to create fine craft goods. Urban wealth in both societies made possible some of the most visible consumption, but Europeans more than Chinese depended upon extractive relations with people in other world regions to open their access to new goods.

Different kinds of political economy in East Asia and Europe provided contexts for the consumer revolutions found within each. But the expansion of consumption in Asia does not mean necessarily that there was a European- like industrious revolution in Asia, for the “industrious” nature of the consumption changes depended on people working harder in order to buy more goods on the market. Consumption may have increased because the incomes of certain strata of society increased. But increases in income were more important as a source of increased consumption in Asia since con­sumers there did not benefit as did European consumers from overseas extraction. Given the better than market terms from which Europeans benefited for some of their consumption, Chinese were therefore more likely to need to work harder to increase their commercial consumption than were Europeans. This situation makes it difficult to understand the plausibility of Europe experiencing an industrious revolution that was absent in East Asia. When we shift from issues of consumer demand to the nature of labor supplies, we discover how East Asia did indeed have an industrious revolution, even if it differed in important ways from that identified in Europe.

Working harder in the early modern world: labor, markets, and consumption

Jan de Vries distinguishes the greater efforts European workers made com­pared with those made by either Chinese or Japanese in two ways. First, he notes Philip Huang's argument for Chinese farming households: that they had no choice but to self-exploit in order to avoid falling into more extreme poverty. Second, de Vries suggests that Japanese farming households working more was not a matter of choice since the Japanese lacked labor markets.¹⁵ Taken together, the two observations point to constraints rather than choices as determining the greater amounts of Chinese and Japanese peasant labor efforts. There are both empirical and conceptual issues at stake in these contrasts of how and why people became more industrious. The Chinese case of peasants being driven by Malthusian pressures creates a link between motivations and results - blindly driven by the needs of biological survival, poor peasants could hardly create a consumer revolution. If the premise of Malthusian pressures proves false, we need to consider further both the motivations for Chinese peasants working harder and the impact of their efforts on consumer demand. If the Japanese case of peasants con­demned to work within the family because their economy lacked labor markets is not true in either Japan or China, yet we still find peasants working within the household rather than entering the labor market, the

1 ⁵ J. de Vries, “Industrious Peasants in East and West: Markets, Technology and Family Structure in Japanese and Western European Agriculture,” Australian Economic History Review 51 (2011): 142. issue of labor choices in East Asia needs to be placed in the context of how labor is allocated within the household as a firm and on labor markets.

Huang's view of the early modern Chinese peasant household exploiting female labor engaged in textile production turns out to depend upon an arithmetic error that deflated female earnings to only 10 percent of what they in fact were in the example he presented.¹⁶ Other scholarship based on more data has compared the productivity of Jiangnan agrarian households with households in the Netherlands and England. Li and van Zanden find that Dutch GDP per capita was roughly twice the Chinese GDP per capita in an area roughly corresponding to modern Songjiang County in 1820. The difference was due to the even larger gap in productivity in the industrial and service sectors. In contrast, agricultural productivity was very similar.¹⁷ Bob Allen has compared Li's data with English data through a careful farm accounting model to conclude that labor productivity in the Yangzi Delta was some 90 percent of that in England in 1800.1⁸ Together these compari­sons of parts of Jiangnan with Europe's most economically advanced early modern economies suggest that agricultural productivity in Jiangnan was not the problem that Philip Huang posited in his dire involution scenario. If Jiangnan peasants were not driven by poverty far greater than that con­fronted by English and Dutch farmers, their working harder was likely fueled by a desire for additional commercial products.

The basic economic difference between Jiangnan and the English and Dutch cases resided in the European cases being high wage economies and Jiangnan, like the rest of China and Europe, being lower wage economies. For England, being a high wage economy provided the economic rationale to develop labor­saving machinery. Bob Allen has demonstrated how the development of tech­nological innovations in cotton textile production was pioneered in England because it was a high wage economy.¹⁹ Butjust being a high wage economy was not enough, as Jan Luiten van Zanden observes of the Netherlands:

The slow development of the economy in the period between 1800 and 1850 is seen as the continuation of the relative stagnation of national economy

1 ⁶ K. Pomeranz, “Facts are Stubborn Things: A Response to Philip Huang,” Journal of Asian Studies 62 (2003b): 167-81.

1 ⁷ B. Li and J. L. van Zanden, “Before the Great Divergence? Comparing the Yangzi Delta and the Netherlands at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 72 (2012): 956-89.

¹⁸ R. C. Allen, “Agricultural Productivity and Rural Incomes in England and the Yangzi Delta, C.1620-C.1820,” The Economic History Review 62 (2009): 525-50.

¹⁹ Allen, “Agricultural Productivity and Rural Incomes”: 525-50. during the eighteenth century. The factors which hindered industrialization, such as high wages in the coastal provinces, were closely linked to the socio­economic structure which emerged in the seventeenth century.^[241]

In early modern Europe, high wages were an indicator of successful com­mercial capitalism. In both the Dutch and English cases, early modern commercial capitalism involved a combination of domestic market develop­ment and the reaping of large profits from maritime exchanges on Asian markets. The British Industrial Revolution was, in part at least, a story of import substitution.^[242] But the Dutch did not make the same kind of move as the British. At a minimum, we can suggest that the kinds of changes leading to industrialization would emerge in a high wage economy, even as other contextual factors either improved or diminished the likelihood of this occurring. High wages affected commercial economies in seemingly opposite ways. On the one hand, high wages could stimulate labor-saving techno­logical changes; on the other hand, high wages could reduce the abilities of entrepreneurs to use technologies that could be used elsewhere with lower labor costs.

The shift from commercial capitalism to industrial capitalism is also the moment when data for workers adding hours to their daily routine become available. It is difficult to find much evidence that European workers chose to work more during the early modern era before the onset of factory industry. The direct evidence for workers extending their work hours comes from Britain and from a longer working day coming as industrialization begins between 1760 and 1820. De Vries recognizes that increased work intensity could be attributed to the need that workers felt to work harder in order to fend off poverty, but counters that a main cause of eighteenth-century European economic growth was the increased amounts of market-oriented labor.^[243] The two assertions are not in fact necessarily incompatible. One of the results of England's early modern high wage economy beginning indus­trialization was that numerous craft workers who enjoyed high wages lost their employment - they were replaced by machines. As Bob Allen expressed the issue in a recent paper:

As industry was mechanized, there was technological unemployment and falling wages for those who remained in the handicraft sector. The “standard of living question” was the result of the liquidation of the traditional sectors that were responsible for the prosperity of the eighteenth century. The standard of living problem was big because these sectors were large.^[244]

Part of the visible concern over standards of living and the related phenom­enon of people working longer days during the era of initial industrialization therefore is related to the gap in wages for skilled craft workers and factory workers, even as these factory workers had wages higher than those in other countries. Ironically, we have better direct pre-factory evidence of Chinese and Japanese working harder than we have for European workers because in the East Asian cases the changes take place in rural households in which people are adding work through a diversification of activities requiring more labor. Examples from Jiangnan typically involve textile craft production. Women in some households begin to weave cotton cloth, often buying their thread at a local market and then weaving cloth to be sold on the market. Silk production involved even more opportunities for adding work hours to the household's labor efforts. Planting mulberry trees from which the leaves to feed silk worms were gathered made it possible for a single household to integrate the different steps of silk production from the creation of the thread to the weaving of the cloth. The silk worm excrement dropped into ponds in which fish were raised. This diversity of craft and crop activities added work hours for the purpose of producing goods for sale.^[245] The incomes gained from such activities made it possible for these same people to purchase goods as consumers. The case of cotton textile production is especially important because it became an increasingly common craft activity between the six­teenth and eighteenth centuries, not only in Jiangnan, but in other parts of China as well.

Only if East Asia had no labor markets whatsoever should we suspect that the absence of labor markets was a constraint on the efficient allocation of labor. As long as some labor markets existed, the issue is how labor was allocated within the firm and on the market, recognizing that the division between firm and market varies. In China there certainly were labor markets for male agricultural labor, both short-term and long-term.^[246] InJapan, as we discuss further below, some young women went into domestic service in other households. The fact that labor markets were not used more exten­sively suggests that there were other ways to combine factors of production efficiently. For China, in addition to a factor market for labor, there was one for agricultural land. Land could be bought and sold as well as rented in or out. If Chinese women produced cotton textiles at home rather than in some off-farm workshop, the absence of labor markets does not appear to be the likely reason. Chinese women were not condemned to remain in the family and thus suffer dramatically lower incomes than they would have achieved entering the labor market. The one carefully formulated and empirically rich comparison of female incomes from textile production in Britain and Jiangnan finds that the Chinese incomes are higher in the seventeenth century, but only two-thirds the level of British female incomes in the early nineteenth century. When the Jiangnan agrarian family's income is compared with a Midlands family where the man is in agriculture and the woman is employed in textiles, but they work separately, mediated by market relations, the difference in the family incomes is only 5 percent, not a level of difference to suggest that Chinese and British people chose to work harder for fundamentally different reasons or with significantly differ­ent results.^[247]

East Asians and Europeans appear to have worked harder for similar reasons in their early modern situations. In general, when given opportun­ities to work more, East Asian rural households did so. Increased commercial exchange with people working more hours is also more readily visible in Jiangnan than in England or the Netherlands. We can see how agrarian households in Jiangnan actually increased the amount of labor they per­formed. The European industrious revolution, by contrast, implies longer working hours from the combination of increased commercial consumption and largely flat real wages. We do not observe European workers directly working additional hours until the shift from craft production to factory production. The dynamics of the demand-side stimulus for the industrious revolution is more similar in Europe and East Asia than de Vries has suggested. One major difference is the political economy of European commercial capitalism that brought in new goods that were part of the consumer revolution at prices below those that would have obtained were these goods produced by wage labor. The absence of any similar change in East Asia meant they had to be more industrious to achieve the same increment in commercial consumption, so even if we suppose that they did not increase commercial consumption to quite the degree achieved by Europeans, they may have been at least as industrious. When we turn to supply-side differences in the characteristics of the labor that began to work harder, we observe a situation that supports the conclusion that an industri­ous revolution also took place in East Asia.

Industriousness and the typology of work in early modern East Asia and Europe

In order to discuss more carefully the notion of industriousness, we need to address the question of how work was perceived in the early modern world with reference to agricultural work, the mainstay of economic activities. It is crucial to do this, because we want to avoid projecting the perception of the industrial society back to this period and assessing the industriousness of pre-industrial work in that light. Focus on guilds and artisans is also problematic, as this considers only a minority of the population. Early modern notions of work in rural settings vary region by region, and we can only get a general idea through the reconstruction of perceptions taken from different regions. In this section we attempt to establish the general notions that would accommodate similarities and differences between East Asia and Europe.

It is easier to compare regional experiences of modern, industrial notions of work than pre-industrial ones, because there have been much greater technological and institutional interactions, indeed a degree of convergence, between world regions in the modern era. But we should not assume that the European lead in the history of the industrial revolu­tion implies that earlier regional notions of work did or should have converged. It is much more likely that each world region took on the challenge of industrialization differently, by utilizing specific attributes, industriousness for example, engrained in predominantly agrarian settings. As there were regional varieties of Smithian growth, so there were also variations in notions and qualities of work in East Asia and Europe. The most obvious literature that addressed this issue is the work of Thomas C. Smith on Japan,^[248] which was inspired by a provocative work of E. P. Thompson on England.^[249] While Thompson depicted artisanal workers' resistance to the introduction of machinery and the factory system in late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century England, and described the nature of common customs and prevailing work habits that induced it, Smith noted that there was no such resistance in Meiji Japan, and discussed how differently industrial workers emerged there.

Smith's Japanese peasant farmer managed his time as carefully as any English factory worker did, but in a very different manner. The whole process was based on the dawn to dusk pattern of agricultural time. Temple bells rang in accordance with ecological time, rather than mechanical clock time. The intensity of work was not measured according to physical strength and punctuality necessary to carry out manual labor within the machine- dominated factory environment or the modern transport system operated by the timetable. The quality of work was related more to an ability to adjust to weather patterns, respond to ecological disasters (water shortages or insect attacks), and cooperate with others to address these problems. Useful and reliable knowledge, and general and inter-personal skills, were central to the execution of good or careful work.

The peasant farmer typically managed a plot of land, either of his own or as a tenant; in Japan, as well as China, the number of agricultural laborers was negligible. This meant that almost all farmers had a degree of managerial experience, such as securing seeds for the next season, determining the timing of transplanting, and organizing harvest labor by collaborating with villagers. A major element of this managerial task was to absorb and allocate family labor. The household unit was normally multi-occupational, centering on rice farming, but including the production of other commercial crops and proto-industrial work. To cite Smith on a relatively commercialized village in SouthwesternJapan around 1840:

Every able-bodied person works at salt making and other employments insofar as farming permits... In time free from farming, men make rope and rush mats and other articles by hand; and women work in the salt fields from the third to the eighth month and during the rest of the year devote themselves exclusively to weaving cotton cloth,... (quoted in Smith, 1988: 83).

The unit could also include sending daughters to a nearby village for domestic work, confirming the existence of a labor market and the choices the household had to make regarding market trends (e.g. price of rice, salt or cotton cloth, and wages) and economic geography (e.g. distance, availability of transport, risks), as well as ecological and micro-managerial knowledge.

The perception of work was crucially related to the perception of liveli­hood, as the household as a unit of production was simultaneously a unit of reproduction. Changes in the composition of the availability of family labor as a result of a marriage or the birth of a child were to be predicted and responded to carefully, and the allocation of labor was to be planned accordingly well ahead of time. This involved an assessment of the burden of domestic work (cooking, washing, and cleaning) and the need for care (for children and the old), in addition to the organization of the “productive” part of the workload. Similar concerns in China were framed by the same cultural stress upon filial piety and loyalty in a Neo-Confucian vocabulary; in practical terms this led to notions of duty, discipline, and commitment to developing a labor-intensive technology as labor was allocated according to needs deter­mined by the family life cycle. Labor-intensive technology and labor­absorbing institutions were developed in China by the seventeenth century, and they in fact influenced the development of the Japanese path, in spite of the fact that the family system was very different in the two countries. Although the scarcity of land was perhaps not as acute in China as in Japan, small land holdings centered on rice farming remained a lasting feature of the East Asian path.

China and Japan did differ in the size of their market economies. The Lower Yangzi delta, with a population size similar to Japan's, was part of a larger international division of labor in Asia. Water buffalo were imported from Southeast Asia for agricultural work, while bean cake was imported from north China to enrich the soil: rice and commercial crops such as sugar and proto-industrial goods such as cotton and silk textiles were exchanged with less developed parts of the empire, so that the Lower Yangzi delta was much more a center of the early modern East Asian regional economy than Japan ever was. The result was the growth of an internationally dynamic commercial exchange with diverse consumption patterns, active land and land lease markets, and migration to and from other parts of the empire. In these respects the Chinese case should be recognized as the typical East Asian pattern in which early modern notions of work came to be cultivated. On the other hand, there are good reasons why the perception of work in Tokugawa Japan is particularly worthy of note, and indeed was picked up for a contrast with the West in the literature. One feature that did not exist in China to the same extent as in Japan was a stable social environment in which to concen­trate on a small but gradual rise in land productivity. The highly regulatory state offered peace and stability for more than two centuries, with relatively limited impact from abroad (threats of epidemics and foreign invasion were extremely limited). For example, the prospect of buying a silk kimono for a dowry gave a good incentive for cultivating the sense of industriousness within the family. Under such circumstances it was easier in Japan than in China to focus on labor absorption and raise the quality of labor, instead of pursuing the gains from trade and economies of scale. Yet markets certainly mattered in Japan. Osamu Saito suggests that not only the commodity market but both labor and land markets were at work in Tokugawa Japan to a degree significant enough to qualify for Smithian growth.^[250] Market forces were crucial for the cultivation of early modern notions of industrious­ness in Japan. In particular, the growth of rural industries in the second half of the eighteenth century not only undermined the industries in urban areas and nearby districts where wages rose, but also contributed to the growth of the population, female employment, and the correction of the biased sex ratio (partly arising from the practice of female infanticide). In this respect the Japanese case is similar to China's, and differs in character from Western Europe where the dichotomy between cities and countryside played an important role in the context of proto-industrialization.

In the East Asian case, household labor allocation and coordination became an integral part of industriousness, as a result of great diffusion of the (predominantly cotton) textile industry, involving a very large amount of female labor.^[251] Proto-industrialization under the East Asian peasant economy offered a much richer ground for the absorption and coordination of family labor across the population, at a low cost with a possibility of the improve­ment of the quality of labor, than did its European counterpart. Thus, industriousness prevailed among the majority of the population in China, but with greater emphasis on the exploitation of market opportunities, compared with Japan. The combination of labor absorption and market

incentives constituted a driving force behind working harder. This took place in agrarian settings fundamentally different from those found in Europe. While in East Asia the basic pattern of agricultural development was towards labor-intensive technology such as double cropping, in Europe it was towards mixed farming, a combination of crop production and cattle raising. Mixed farming is inherently more capital-intensive and land-using (its usage was extensive rather than intensive) than the typical East Asian rice farming. Thus, the basis for institutional development was different. From the per­spective of the East Asian path, the European path was biased towards the capital-intensive method of production. Workers competed with animals for resources (mainly but not exclusively land resources), and were sometimes evicted, if the landlord or the capitalist manager wished to pursue a more efficient method of agriculture, and capital became more important than labor for this reason. This could happen either because pasture became economically or ecologically more important in the rotation, or because cultivation units were consolidated and tenant farmers were replaced by agricultural laborers. This hardly encouraged long-term planning and the search for a small but steady increase of land productivity on the part of the peasant farmer.

In Europe generally, there was a trend of capital accumulation, as the development of the capital market lowered interest rates, and facilitated investment in the manufacturing and service sectors as well as in infrastruc­ture and war efforts. Frequent wars destabilized the countryside, which gave the urban manufacturing sector a chance to develop capital- and skill­intensive industries.³¹ Meanwhile, wages in certain cities went up relative to capital, as the integration of the labor market took longer. Real wages in English and Dutch cities were significantly higher than those in other parts of Western Europe. As already noted, this, coupled with cheap energy supply, encouraged the development of labor-saving technology. It also put pressure on rural proto-industry, which had to compete with urban, skill-intensive industries.

In England, Allen argued, labor-intensive technology developed in small farms was important in the seventeenth century, while consolidation of land became more prominent in the eighteenth.³² Enclosure certainly helped

³¹ J.-L. Rosenthal and R. B. Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

³² R. C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850 (Oxford University Press, 1992). release land and labor from the peasant pattern of production, even if this was exaggerated in the earlier literature. The rise in land and labor product­ivity after 1750 (partly as a result of parliamentary enclosure) was accompan­ied by structural changes, including the emergence of agricultural laborers as a major section of the rural population in England.^[252] For industry, new machinery operated by unskilled workers competed with artisanal produc­tion. The fate of the proletariat and that of artisans were both consequences of capitalism, which divided technical, managerial, and coordination skills into different classes of people.

A different sequence emerged in East Asia. With less of a capital market and the agrarian economy's greater capacity to absorb labor, a more labor­intensive path of development occurred in East Asia compared with Europe. At the same time, the nature of industriousness of European peasant farmers was different from that in East Asia. Their macro-political conditions were less stable than those of their Japanese and probably Chinese counterparts. They were more mobile, as there were widespread practices of seasonal migration across Europe,^[253] and were more able to engage in long-distance and regional trade, as region-wide urbanization was more rapid and regional specialization between agricultural and proto-industrial areas was more marked. This is different from the effects of efficient land and lease markets in China, since it was capital (cattle) and labor, not land and labor, which were being compared in the production bundle. In East Asia, the use of labor against land scarcity remained the main organizing principle of all factors of production.

In summary, different perceptions of work existed in Japan, China, and Europe, as a result of different path dependencies of environment, technol­ogy, and institutions, but all regions contained elements of the growth of industriousness as a result of greater labor absorption. Some were easier to transfer to the factory floor than others. In East Asia peasants were not used to the idea of separation of management and labor, nor did they understand that labor can be treated as unskilled with no expectation of managerial skills. This discouraged labor market integration. In Japan, labor manage­ment in textile factories accommodated peasant-worker expectations and utilized their sense of duty, discipline, and commitment on the factory floor.^[254] In England, as well as Europe more generally, displaced labor constituted a large part of the workforce, and laborers were deprived of their participation in managerial aspects of work. In spite of these variations in motivation, intensity, and reinforcing institutions, in all cases early modern perceptions of work were shifting towards industriousness. It was eventually brought onto the factory floor, and influenced the process of industrializa­tion. Industriousness was at once an important part of the “initial conditions” of, and a major constraint to, an industrial revolution.

A common framework for European and East Asian industrious revolutions: paths from industrious to industrial revolutions

In classical political economy, the relationship between food and population (Malthus) or between land and labor (Ricardo) prevailed. In 1969, John Hicks characterized the industrial revolution by differentiating fixed capital (machinery) from circulating capital (raw materials and labor) and by arguing for the vital importance of the former.^[255] In fact these characterizations fit East Asian history much better than they do European history.

In Europe, much of the problem this relationship had caused, whether it was recognized as a population question or a resource question, was solved through institutional development, which enabled the growth of the market, deployment of capital, and development of technology. A combination of (ι) inter-state competition with its overseas expansion and long-distance trade; (2) the growth of capital-intensive methods of production (mixed farming and urban, skill-intensive industries) and international capital market institutions; and eventually (3) the use of coal and the vast resources of North America helped ease the pressure on land.^[256] The technological breakthrough of the industrial revolution was a result of full deployments of war making, external expansion, and associated market forces.

None of these occurred in Japan. The pressure on land was responded to by the explicit denial of war making and the seclusion policy, and by the development of labor-intensive technology and labor-absorbing institutions. In China, there was more room for exploiting the scale of the market and ecological and cultural diversities than in Japan, but the government attempted to sustain an agrarian empire by avoiding inter-provincial conflicts and by holding a very large population in the countryside. Thus, in East Asia the classical political economy's concern for the land-labor ratio underpinned institutional development, even though the patterns of state formation in China and Japan were quite different from each other.

We suggest that the typology of Smithian growth and industriousness should begin with East Asia, not just because it had a larger population than Europe, but because the East Asian case points to the most fundamental issue of economic development, the relationship between resources and popula­tion, more clearly. It was technological and institutional adaptations to factor endowment constraints, rather than market forces per se, which made the economy sustainable and underpinned Smithian growth. The East Asian path, especially the Chinese path, took the most “natural” course of eco­nomic development, in the sense that market forces were more or less left to work, rather than were worked by the state, and also because the regional economy depended less on resources outside of the region. We agree with Jan de Vries on the central importance of the household as an agent of change. But the range of functions the East Asian household took on included the careful and economical use of natural and human resources and thus was much broader than Gary Becker and de Vries have con- sidered.³8 The East Asian reply to the issue of how to feed an ever larger population with the expectation of a slow but steady rise in the standard of living was not a full entry into the market by losing some of these functions engrained in the household, but the development of a “peasant path” of pursuing the rise of land productivity through a combination of commercial­ization and proto-industrial bi-employment.

From this perspective, we wish to distance ourselves from some of the prevailing assumptions behind the literature, especially European literature. First, Smithian growth is not about any market growth, but about local and regional market growth in particular. Likewise, industriousness is not about any hard-working spirit, but about the absorption of labor with a sense of duty, discipline, and commitment. We argue that the industrious revolution

³⁸ G. S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis: With Special Reference to Education, 3rd edn. (University of Chicago Press, 1993); de Vries, The Industrious Revolution.

occurred both in East Asia and Europe, with or without long-distance trade and changes in tastes induced by it. Europe's industrious revolution is simply more visible because of the consumption possibilities created by maritime expansion.

Second, institutions that are conducive to the growth of industriousness are not necessarily formal institutions, but also include informal institutions that help to recruit and incentivize labor. Market institutions are powerful agents for creating and training labor, but they work with non-market insti­tutions in absorbing and incentivizing it. Coercion tends to discourage incentives to work, but concerns for the welfare of the family could work, both positively and as a constraint, on individual aspirations. The peasant household economy used these ambivalent tendencies, and became the main actor in the growth of the market with labor absorption in the core region of China in the eighteenth century. The degree of formalization of market institutions is not a good indicator for defining the extent of an industrious revolution.

Third, the industrial revolution altered the modern world, not because the emergence of an industrial workforce in England was repeated in most other countries, but because different regions provided a variety of institutional mechanisms for creating a modern workforce. In this chapter we argue for the relevance of the industrious revolution to this transformation with reference to East Asia and Europe. Study of other world regions would help deepen our understanding of how the early modern world prepared for the global diffusion of industrialization and modern economic growth.

FURTHER READING

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