When China Rules the World

Here the fortuitous or chance factor, while by no means the sole reason, played a critical role. Around 1800 the most heavily populated regions of the Old World, including China and Europe, were finding it increasingly difficult to sustain rising populations. The basic problem was that food, fibre, fuel and building supplies were all competing for what was becoming increasingly scarce land and forest. This was particularly serious in China because its heartland, which lay between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, had always supported a very large population as a result of its fertility; now, however, it became increasingly exhausted through overuse. [62] This, combined with the fact that new land brought under cultivation was not of a high quality, posed an increasingly acute problem. [63] For two crucial reasons, Europe – or rather specifically Britain – was able to break this crucial land constraint in a way that was to elude China. First, Britain discovered large quantities of accessible coal that helped to ease the growing shortage of wood and fuel the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, although China also had very considerable deposits of coal, they lay a long way from its main centres of population, the largest being in the north-west, far from the textile industries and canals of the lower Yangzi Valley. Second, much more importantly, the colonization of the New World, namely the Caribbean and North America, was to provide huge tracts of land, a massive and very cheap source of labour in the form of slaves, and an abundant flow of food and raw materials: the early growth of Manchester, for example, would have been impossible without cheap and plentiful supplies of cotton from the slave plantations. Raising enough sheep to replace the yarn made with Britain ’s New World cotton imports would have required huge quantities of land (almost 9 million acres in 1815 and over 23 million acres by 1830). Overall, it is estimated that the land required in order to grow the cotton, sugar and timber imported by Britain from the New World in 1830 would have been between 25 and 30 million acres – or more than Britain ’s total arable and pasture land combined. [64] The role played by colonization, in this context, is a reminder that European industrialization was far from an endogenous process. [65] The New World – together with the discovery of large quantities of coal in Britain – removed the growing pressure on land that was endangering Britain ’s economic development. China was to enjoy no such good fortune. The consequences were to be far-reaching: ‘England avoided becoming the Yangzi Delta,’ argues the historian Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘and the two came to look so different that it became hard to see how recently they had been quite similar.’ [66]