Environments and Natural Resources

Two theses are elaborated in this chapter. They will be analysed in greater detail in Chapters 4 , 5 and 6 . Imperial China’s long-established position as the world’s most successful organic economy was based upon the advantages of ecological diversity. Divergence relative to Europe began to occur and persist largely because these advantages diminished over time. Environmental historians (Elvin, Marks, Pomeranz and others) correctly insist that foundational geographical facts and China’s long history of extensive development to its production possibility boundaries should continue to be accorded greater weight and significance than Eurocentred criticisms of the Empire’s state, culture and institutions have recognized. Environmental, political and geopolitical parameters established conditions within which cycles of demographic recovery and economic growth operated to sustain high standards of living for the Empire’s population until latent Malthusian forces, combined with environmental degradation and a major political conjuncture disturbed a benign physiocratic equilibrium. Meanwhile seaborne trade with the Baltic and Russia provided the backward but converging economies of Western Europe with supplies of grain, fish, timber, iron, pitch, tar, flax, hemp and other organic inputs needed for early transitions to industrial market economies. Europe also possessed and before China began to exploit the fuel and energy embodied in massive reserves of cheap transportable coal. Finally, Europeans discovered and gradually derived truly enormous economic benefits from the fertile land, timber, fuel, arboreal products, minerals and bullion available for exploitation in the Americas. The “bounty” was, moreover, realized by rising flows of migrants to the new world of Europe’s young healthy skilled but underemployed adults and more significantly, by the forcible transportation of millions of African slaves to the Americas to labour on plantations and in mines located in inhospitable climates for white emigrants. These two theses support the view that the late Ming and Qing China lacked access to anything comparable to the volume of resources that (fortuitously) became available to early modern Western Europe. The Manchu regime took over an empire at a time in its history when the economy became confronted by an intensification of demographic pressures as well as new and potentially more serious challenges to internal order and external security.