Why did the industrial revolution take place in eighteenth-century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? In this convincing new account Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows that in Britain wages were high and capital and energy cheap in comparison to other countries in Europe and Asia. As a result, the breakthrough technologies of the industrial revolution - the steam engine, the cotton mill, and the substitution of coal for wood in metal production - were uniquely profitable to invent and use in Britain. The high wage economy of pre-industrial Britain also fostered industrial development since more people could afford schooling and apprenticeships. It was only when British engineers made these new technologies more cost-effective during the nineteenth century that the industrial revolution would spread around the world.

/pdf/the-british-industrial-revolution-in-global-perspective-40efi3wwm8.pdf

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

Using multiple data sources, we establish that China's income inequality since 2005 has reached very high levels, with the Gini coefficient in the range of 0.53–0.55. Analyzing comparable survey data collected in 2010 in China and the United States, we examine social determinants that help explain China’s high income inequality. Our results indicate that a substantial part of China’s high income inequality is due to regional disparities and the rural-urban gap. The contributions of these two structural forces are particularly strong in China, but they play a negligible role in generating the overall income inequality in the United States, where individual-level and family-level income determinants, such as family structure and race/ethnicity, play a much larger role.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/19/6928.full.pdf

Income inequality in today's China.

This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares them with leading cities in Europe, Japan, and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of living. In the eighteenth century, the real income of building workers in Asia was similar to that of workers in the backward parts of Europe but far behind that in the leading economies in north-western Europe. Real wages stagnated in China in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rose slowly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, with little cumulative change for 200 years. The income disparities of the early twentieth century were due to long-run stagnation in China combined with industrialization in Japan and Europe.

/pdf/wages-prices-and-living-standards-in-china-1738-1925-in-4bdolomdbk.pdf

Wages, prices, and living standards in China, 1738–1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan, and India

Education and poverty in rural China

The "Rise of the West" has been treated by economic historians as stemming from the onset of rapid economic growth, driven by technological advances. In contrast, all premodern and non-Western economies have been treated as showing only slow or no growth, interrupted by periodic crises. This is an error. Examined closely, many premodern and non-Western economies show spurts or efflorescences of economic growth, including sustained increases in both population and living standards, in urbanization, and in underlying technological change. Medieval Europe, Golden Age Holland, and Qing China, among other cases, show such remarkable efflorescences of impressive economic growth.Yet these did not lead to modern industrialized societies. The distinctive feature of Western economies since 1800 has not been growth per se, but growth based on a specific set of elements: engines to extract motive power from fossil fuels, to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated by historians; the application of empirical science to understanding both nature and practical problems of production; and the marriage of empirically oriented science to a national culture of educated craftsmen and entrepreneurs broadly educated in basic principles of mechanics and experimental approaches to knowledge. This combination developed from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries only in Britain, and was unlikely to have developed anywhere else in world history.

Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the "Rise of the West" and the Industrial Revolution

This pioneering study reconceptualizes the impact of social organizations, economic conditions, and human agency on human reproduction in preindustrial communities in Europe and Asia. Unlike previous studies, in which Asia is meeasured by European standards, Prudence and Pressure develops a Eurasian perspective. Drawing on rich new data and the tools of event-history analysis, the authors challenge the accepted Eurocentric Malthusian view that attributes "prudence" (smaller families due to late marriage) to the preindustrial West and "pressure" (high mortality due to overpopulation) to the East, showing instead important similarities between Europe and Asia in human motivation and population behavior. The authors analyze age, gender, family and household, kinship, social class and power, religion, culture, and economic resources in order to compare reproductive strategies and outcomes. They reveal underlying similarities between East and West in two major components of the reproductive regimemarriage and childbearingand offer evidence showing that preindustrial reproduction was motivated and governed by human agency at least as much as by human biology. Prudence and Pressure is part of a large-scale interdisciplinary effort to use new data and methods to re-examine the Malthusian paradigm of population growth. It represents a significant advance in the fields of historical demography, history, and sociology. Eurasian Population and Family History series

Prudence and Pressure: Reproduction and Human Agency in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900

CONTENTS Tables and Figures ix Preface xi INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE From Equality to Inequality 000 CHAPTER TWO Categorical Sources of Inequality 000 TRENDS AND PATTERNS CHAPTER THREE Prosperity and Inequality 000 CHAPTER FOUR Enlarging Inequality: Categories 000 EXPLANATIONS CHAPTER FIVE Maintaining Equality: Boundaries 000 CHAPTER SIX Varieties of Inequality 000 Appendix 000 Notes 000 References 000 Index 000

Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China

In this chapter we introduce a major new source for the demographic history of the Qing dynasty [of China]--the archives of the Office of the Imperial Lineage (zongren fu)--and present results from our preliminary analysis of portions of these data....In the first section we describe the contents and organization of the Imperial Lineage Office archives. We then outline the particular strengths of these data for demographic analysis and identify several important limitations. Finally we present our preliminary conclusions on the demography of the Qing imperial lineage including crude demographic rates as well as specific patterns of cohort and period child and adult mortality. (EXCERPT)

The last emperors: an introduction to the demography of the Qing (1644-1911) Imperial Lineage.

Asian Population History

This paper discusses male nuptiality and male fertility among the Qing nobility in China. It challenges the perceived link between marriage and fertility in historical China demonstrating that the acquisition of additional wives and concubines was not necessarily motivated by the desire for more children. The authors focus on the marital history of approximately 15000 marriages to male members of the main line of the Qing imperial lineage between 1600 and 1900. Overall findings show that among the Qing nobility 65% of first sons were born to first wives. Male polygynous fertility was barely greater than monogamous fertility. While polygyny did lengthen the span of male fertility it hardly increased the number of male children. Findings on male and female birth intervals show that polygyny arose from the desire to increase pleasure if not progeny. If fertility is used as an indication later marriages were hardly more sexually passionate than first marriages. While two-thirds of births born to first wives were early male births two-thirds of births born to later wives were male middle births and two-thirds of births born to concubines were male later births. Thus polygyny among the Qing nobility resembled a system of serial monogamy. By contrast modern monogamy virtually resembles a system of serial polygamy.

Male nuptiality and male fertility among the Qing nobility: polygyny or serial monogamy?

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