Statistical Bases for a Chronology of Economic Divergence Between Imperial China and Western Europe, 1638–1839

This chapter evaluates the data used, defined and disputed by scholars engaged in providing a statistically based chronology for divergence in order to “test” the key revisionist proposition, namely, that for centuries before the Industrial Revolution, the standards of productivity and welfare afforded by the economies of China and Western Europe for their populations were surprisingly similar. If this extensively and intensely disputed “fact” turns out to be plausible, then claims for the superiority of Europe’s historical trajectories for the evolution of more effective states, economic institutions, cultural beliefs and systems for the accumulation of useful knowledge would be undermined. Predictably western economic historians have subjected this core thesis of the California School to the tests that their discipline recommends to measure rates and levels of welfare provided by national economies for their populations. They claim to have “demonstrated” that per capita outputs, heights and incomes from real wages were measurable, discernible and different long before the late eighteenth century. Under close scrutiny the volume and quality of historical data available (particularly for Imperial China) is (for conceptual as well as factual reasons) not fit for the purpose of providing a statistically based chronology for divergence. The numbers in print even when they look congruent with qualitative historical evidence have remained (over a protracted period of dispute) conceptually ambiguous, statistically invalid and unacceptable as historical evidence for the plausible conjectures required to simultaneously measure changes over time for Imperial China and for contemporaneous comparisons with Western European economies. For both sides of the debate the laudable endeavours to quantify the quantifiable can be represented as a misplaced paradigm for historical research because it depends on more plausible bodies of data to trace, track and explain divergence over time.