GIT The Industrial Revolution Discussion

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C H A P T E R
F O U R
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
The Industrial Revolution and
Its Consequences, 1750–1850
In 1750, nearly all of the world’s 750 million people, regardless of where they
were or what political or economic system they had, lived and died within
the biological old regime. The necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter, and
fuel for heating and cooking—mostly came from the land, from what could
be captured from annual energy flows from the sun to Earth.1 Industries too,
such as textiles, leather, and construction, depended on products from agriculture or the forest. Even iron and steel making in the biological old regime,
for instance, relied upon charcoal made from wood. The biological old
regime thus set limits not just on the size of the human population but on
the productivity of the economy as well.
These limits would begin to be lifted over the century from 1750 to 1850,
when some people increasingly used coal to produce heat and then captured
that heat to fuel repetitive motion with steam-powered machines, doing
work that previously had been done with muscle. The use of coal-fired steam
to power machines was a major breakthrough, launching human society out
of the biological old regime and into a new one no longer limited by annual
solar energy flows. Coal is stored solar energy, laid down hundreds of millions
of years ago. Its use in steam engines freed human society from the limits
imposed by the biological old regime, enabling the productive powers and
numbers of humans to grow exponentially. The replacement—with steam
generated by burning coal—of wind, water, and animals for powering industrial machines constitutes the beginning of the Industrial Revolution2 and
ranks with the much earlier agricultural revolution in importance for the
course of history. The use of fossil fuels—first coal and then petroleum—not
97
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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98
Chapter Four
only transformed economies around the world but also added greenhouse
gases to Earth’s atmosphere. How and why this major transformation happened, and what consequences it had, thus are vitally important matters in
world history and will be the focus of this and the following two chapters.
To understand the Industrial Revolution, we will use once again the tool
of conjuncture, that is, the coming together at a particular point in time of
otherwise separate historical developments and processes. In the case of the
Industrial Revolution, the conjuncture involves the playing out around the
world of growth potential in the biological old regime, the extension of European state conflicts around the globe, the peculiar nature of New World colonies, and the chance location of, and challenges for operating, coal mines in
England. In particular, I will consider the ways cotton textiles and the British
need for coal contributed to the Industrial Revolution.
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
Cotton Textiles
The Industrial Revolution is commonly thought to have begun in
eighteenth-century England with the mechanization of the process for spinning and weaving cotton thread and cloth. The spinning jenny, the water
frame, and the ‘‘mule’’ all have been taken as evidence of English inventiveness and hence contribute to a Eurocentric story line of the rise of the West.
The problem is, while it is true that England was the first place to revolutionize cotton manufacture by using steam-powered machinery, how and why it
happened can only be understood in a global context.3
In the late seventeenth century, the English developed a strong desire for
the Indian cotton textiles commonly known as calicoes. As one man
observed: ‘‘On a sudden we saw all our women, rich and poor, cloath’d in
Callico, printed and painted; the gayer the better.’’ Another complained: ‘‘It
crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers; curtains, cushions,
chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes or Indian
stuffs. In short, almost everything that used to be made of wool or silk, relating either to dress of the women or the furniture of our houses, was supplied
by the Indian trade.’’4 These observations by contemporaries around 1700
raise some interesting questions: Why were the English importing so much
Indian cotton? How did it get there? How did they then create and industrialize a cotton textile industry?
The reason the English imported so much Indian cotton around 1700 is
it was of high quality and lower price than England’s domestically produced
textiles (in particular linen and wool). It felt good next to the skin, it was
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences, 1750–1850
99
lightweight for summer wear, it could accept bright dyes for color, and most
of all, it was less expensive than anything the English could manufacture
themselves. Indeed, India around 1700 was the largest exporter of cotton textiles in the world and supplied textiles not just to meet English demand, but
throughout the world as well. Southeast Asia, East and West Africa, the Middle East, and Europe were major export markets, in addition to the large
domestic Indian market. No wonder that the demand for Indian cotton in
the eighteenth century was ‘‘greater than all the weavers in the country can
manufacture,’’ and that India accounted for fully one-quarter of the world
manufacturing output in 1750.5
Like so many things desired by Europeans and supplied by Asians—at first
luxury items for the elite such as silk or porcelain, but increasingly products
like tea from China for a mass market6 —cotton textiles were produced well
and cheaply in India. The British textile manufacturers focused on the
‘‘cheap’’ part and complained that with relatively higher wages, British manufacturers could not compete. India had a competitive advantage in the eighteenth century, being able to undersell in the world market virtually any
other producer of textiles. Some thought the reason for cheap Indian textiles
was a low living standard, or a large population earning depressed wages, but
all of those have been shown to not be true: Indian textile workers in the
eighteenth century had just as high a standard of living as British workers.7
So, if it was not a low standard of living that gave India its competitive
advantage, what did?
In a word: agriculture. Indian agriculture was so productive that the
amount of food produced, and hence its cost, was significantly lower than in
Europe. In the preindustrial age, when working families spent 60–80 percent
of their earnings on food, the cost of food was the primary determinant of
their real wages (i.e., how much a pound, a dollar, a real, or a pagoda could
buy). In India (and China and Japan as well), the amount of grain harvested
from a given amount of seed was in the ratio of 20:1 (e.g., twenty bushels of
rice harvested for every one planted), whereas in England it was at best 8:1.
Asian agriculture thus was more than twice as efficient as British (and by
extension European) agriculture, and food—the major component in the
cost of living—cost less in Asia. Thus although nominal wages may have
been lower in India, the purchasing power—the real wage—was higher in
India.
In the biological old regime, productive agriculture was Asia’s competitive
advantage, even in industry. The causal chain went like this: high per-acre
yields V low-priced food V relatively low wages V comparative advantage.
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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Chapter Four
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In England, the causal chain was like this: low per-acre yields V high-priced
food V relatively high wages V comparative disadvantage. The question
then becomes, how did the British begin to reverse this comparative disadvantage?
In part, as we saw in the previous chapter, they did it by raising tariffs on
imports to Britain of Indian textiles, and the outright banning of the importation of some kinds of Indian cotton goods—that is, mercantilist protectionism. Had the British not done that in the early eighteenth century, there
is little reason to believe they would have made much progress in competing
against Indian producers and establishing much of a cotton textile industry
in the first place.8 But also, the British had colonies in the Americas and
acquired their ‘‘jewel’’ in India. Both became intimately connected with the
story of the rise of a cotton textile industry in Britain.
India
Indeed, where England had very little by way of overseas empire in 1650, it
soon began putting one together, preying on Portuguese and Spanish possessions in the East and West Indies (i.e., India and the Caribbean), competing
with the Dutch in both regions of the world, and battling France in the eighteenth century. Curiously, though, the agents for this extension of European
interstate conflict around the world were not at first the governments of
European states but private trading companies, the first being the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, East India Company), the
English East India Company (EIC), and the Compagnie franc?aise des Indes
occidentales (French West India Company).
Although each was formed at different times and had slightly different
organization, all were private companies chartered by their governments and
given monopoly rights to trade with Asia, all in keeping with mercantilist
ideas. They also differed from mere trading expeditions in that they were
formed with a permanent capital and stock that could be traded—to that
extent, the East India companies are the forerunners of the modern corporation, and their success at organizing trade and raising profits meant that the
corporation would play an increasingly important role in European industrialization. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their purpose was
to reap profits from trade with Asia.
The Dutch VOC, though, seeing itself as an extension of Protestant
Dutch interests and hence deeply hostile to the Catholic powers of Spain
and Portugal, saw trade and war as intimately connected. In a terse 1614
letter to his directors, the Dutch VOC governor-general observed: ‘‘You
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences, 1750–1850
101
gentlemen ought to know from experience that trade in Asia should be conducted and maintained under the protection and with the aid of your own
weapons, and . . . [s]o trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.’’9 The Dutch then effectively pursued this strategy throughout the
seventeenth century, taking Melaka from the Portuguese, seizing Java and
making it into a sugar-producing colony, and trying to establish a colony on
the Chinese island of Taiwan.
The English EIC, by contrast, was more interested in trade and the profits
of trade than in war, at least at first. In the century after its founding in 1600,
the directors insisted that ‘‘our business is trade, not war.’’10 To avoid conflicts, the English EIC concentrated trade in India, where Indian states were
weak and European competitors few, especially in Bengal and Madras. But
by the late seventeenth century, that began to change as the French established forts nearby. And when the British and French warred in Europe, their
forces (however small) clashed in India, with the French usually getting the
upper hand because they began enhancing their war-making capability by
enlisting Indians as regulars, known as Sepoys, into their army. In the 1750s
the British EIC followed suit, and by the eve of the Seven Years’ War, each
had nearly ten thousand men in arms—mostly Indians—on the Indian coast.
In the meantime, the political and military power of the great Mughal
empire had seriously declined. At its height it was capable of mobilizing perhaps a million troops; after the death of its last great leader, Aurangzeb, in
1707, the empire declined as regional political and military leaders asserted
their independence from the Mughals. One of those leaders, the nawab of
Bengal, took control of the British trading port at Kolkata (Calcutta) and
demanded increased payments from the EIC for the privilege of trading there.
The British resisted, sent a force of some two thousand men under the
leadership of Robert Clive and, together with other Indian forces opposed to
Bengal, defeated the nawab’s French-assisted forces at the Battle of Plassey
in 1757. They captured and executed the nawab, got a more pliable replacement, and by 1765 received the right to collect tax revenue—a huge sum—
from Bengal. In the meantime, of course, the Seven Years’ War had begun,
and British and French forces had at it up and down the Indian coast, with
the British winning a decisive victory over the French at Pondicherry in
1760. This was the start of the British empire in India, and over the next
fifty years the extent of British control widened, with the entire subcontinent becoming a formal colony in 1857. (See map 3.1.)
The Seven Years’ War—or more precisely, the British victory in the
Americas and in India—is important to the story of how Britain became a
cotton-textile-producing, rather than -importing, country. Recall that the
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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Chapter Four
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British government had banned the importation of Indian textiles in 1707
for the purpose of allowing its domestic cotton industry to get going, which
it did, in the area around the town of Lancaster. But because of technical
difficulties in copying Indian dyeing techniques and because of its higher
wages/higher prices, Lancashire (the region around Lancaster) produced
mostly for the British home market, still being bested in the world market by
Indian textiles traded by the EIC. For the British cotton textile industry to
grow, it therefore needed export markets. And there was a growing market
in the New World because of its peculiar institutions of slavery, plantations,
and mercantilist trade restrictions.
The New World as a Peculiar Periphery
European New World agriculture from the beginning was export oriented.
Throughout the Caribbean and South America, mostly all sugar, tobacco,
and cotton was produced on plantations that used African slaves because of
labor shortages caused by the Great Dying and the unwillingness of Europeans to migrate to the New World. Unlike peasants in India and China or
serfs in eastern Europe, African slaves in America did not grow much of their
own food. Food, especially fish and grain, had to be imported, mostly from
the North American colonies. Slaves also had to be clothed, creating a
demand for cheap cotton textiles. Additional quantities of Indian textiles
were traded in West Africa for slaves who were then sold in the Caribbean.
New World products—sugar, tobacco, raw cotton—were taken back to
England.11
At each point in the triangular Atlantic trade, the English made profits
and by colonial legislation tried to ensure that the New World would remain
producers of raw materials only and consumers of the industrial products of
Britain. Smuggling or trading with the enemy, whether Dutch or French, was
pervasive, but by the early eighteenth century, ‘‘colonial trade conformed in
almost every particular to the navigation system . . . [and] smuggled goods
accounted for a tiny fraction of all quantities handled.’’ Of course, the colonists in both the Caribbean and North America were Englishmen, and they
too looked for ways to profit from a system that denied other nationals, especially the Dutch or the French, from getting a piece of Britain’s colonial
trade.12
This triangular trade and in particular the linkage between the slave trade
and textiles fueled the growth of British shipping and established Lancashire
as a center of cotton textile manufacture. Raw cotton was imported mostly
from the Levant in the Ottoman empire and the British colonies in the
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences, 1750–1850
103
Caribbean, and by the 1780s it was spun into thread in newfangled ‘‘factories’’ using water power and employing hundreds of workers in one place. As
the Lancashire manufacturers became more proficient and the prices of their
textiles declined, they even exported them to Africa, especially whenever
Indian textiles were expensive. The real boom to British cotton textile production came after American independence in 1793 when Eli Whitney’s
invention of the cotton gin made it possible to use short-staple and much
cheaper American cotton. With another series of innovations derived from
the application of steam power, as we will see shortly, mechanizing both
spinning and weaving over the years from 1815 to 1840, the productivity of
the Lancashire textile factories surged again, resulting in ever lower prices
and the ability to outcompete Indian textiles in the world market. Indian
textile producers had created a worldwide market for cotton textiles—the
British then captured it.13
When that happened, the British became advocates of ‘‘free trade’’ and
abandoned both mercantilist theory and practice and tariffs on imports.
Indeed, ‘‘free trade’’ became the ideological mantra of imperial Britain at the
height of its global power in the nineteenth century. Mercantilism, at least
as it applied in the Atlantic world, had been dead since the victory of the
Americans in their War of Independence from Britain. To the British, their
former American subjects and colonists became ‘‘foreigners, subject to all the
provisions of the Navigation Laws,’’14 which restricted the importation of raw
cotton, potentially strangling the British textile industry and giving rise to
calls for ‘‘free trade.’’ Free trade with the new United States after 1783
showed the fallacy of the argument that British manufactures could grow
only with a monopoly on colonial markets, and the American South with
its cotton plantations worked by African slaves and their descendants
became the major supplier of raw cotton to the mills of Lancashire.
Although this story of the rise to global competitiveness of the British
cotton textile industry sounds Eurocentric, it really is not, for British success
was contingent upon a number of worldwide developments that were not of
their own making. In the first place, the British were at a competitive disadvantage to Indian producers and would have remained so except for several
coincidences. The Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 brought to power a
government willing to use state power to protect its domestic manufacturers;
and the New World developed as a peculiar periphery that, by the accident
of the Great Dying and colonial legislation, provided a market for British
manufactured goods. In the second place, the British were fortunate to
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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Chapter Four
develop a usable coal-fueled steam engine, which further revolutionized cotton textile production, making it even more productive and its products so
cheap that the British could undersell Indian textiles not just in Africa but,
interestingly, in India as well. For that part of the story, we now look at the
innovations in coal and steam engines.
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
New Sources of Energy and Power
Until about 1830, the story of cotton textiles for the most part remains one
that unfolds within the biological old regime; that is, everything about it
depended on the annual flows of solar energy and their capture by humans.15
To be sure, the early British ‘‘factories’’ had begun to use water power, but
there was a limit to how much that could increase cotton textile production.
Indeed, there is every reason to think that cotton textile production would
have reached serious limits within the biological old regime, leading not to
an industrial revolution but to an economic dead end, had it not been for
coal, the steam engine, and iron and steel production, which truly launched
the Industrial Revolution and allowed Britain to break out of the constraints
imposed by the biological old regime. To see how and why, we need to take
a closer look at what was happening to the most advanced biological old
regime economies, starting with China and then looking at England. What
we will see is that all old regime economies were beginning to push up
against serious ecological constraints that would have stopped all of them
from developing an industrial revolution. Except for a few chance occurrences and a vast global conjuncture, we all now might still be living in the
biological old regime.
China
Two favored explanations of the Industrial Revolution in Europe have focused
on population dynamics and the growth of free markets. By various techniques and practices, mostly late marriage, European families were able to
keep their sizes smaller than ‘‘naturally’’ possible. Smaller family size meant
a smaller population overall, leaving greater surpluses in the hands of families
to invest in improving agricultural and industrial productivity. Fewer people
working harder to make their investable surpluses grow—an ‘‘industrious revolution,’’ it is said—grew inexorably into the Industrial Revolution.16
The market-driven story line of industrialization suggests that the establishment and growth of markets for commodities, land, labor, and capital in
Europe enabled European producers to be much more efficient and hence to
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences, 1750–1850
105
accumulate sufficient capital to invest in improving agricultural and industrial productivity. Also necessary for the success of markets was a state that
protected (or at least respected) private property rights. This combination
likewise, according to the Eurocentric version of the origins of the modern
world, grew more or less naturally into the Industrial Revolution.
Of course, the population- and market-driven story lines of industrialization are not incompatible, and many historians have melded them together
in explaining why Europeans were uniquely capable of launching an industrial revolution. As proof, they often point to China as a counterexample.
China, it is alleged, had ‘‘a preindustrial demographic regime,’’ in which
nothing was done to keep birthrates down. Hence, population surged, eating
up any surplus above subsistence and rendering the investments necessary
for an industrial revolution impossible.17 Similarly, it is alleged, China was
‘‘despotic’’: it had a state that meddled in private affairs, property rights were
not respected, and markets could not operate efficiently. Hence, it is concluded, there was no possibility for an industrial revolution.
There is only one thing wrong with these assumptions about what ‘‘went
wrong’’ in China: they are wrong. As I will show below, Chinese families in
fact had numerous ways—albeit different from Europeans—of limiting their
size and hence keeping the overall Chinese population above subsistence levels. Also, Chinese markets of all kinds not merely existed, but arguably functioned better and more efficiently than those in Europe. If both of those are
true for China, then their value as ‘‘explanations’’ for why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe is questionable. To see why, we must take a closer
look at China.
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, agriculture in China (as well as in
India and numerous other parts of Asia) was highly productive, harvesting
twenty bushels of rice for every one sown. Rice has the unique capability of
gaining nutrients not directly from the soil, but from the water (and so it is
grown in ‘‘paddies’’), eliminating the need for the land to lie fallow, as was
the custom in Europe, to regain its fertility. Additionally, Chinese farmers
had learned how to prepare the soil, to irrigate, to fertilize, and to control
insect pests in order to maximize the harvest yield. Moreover, farmers in the
southern half of China could get two or sometimes three harvests per year
from the same plot of land, drawing the amazement of early-eighteenthcentury European travelers to China. ‘‘By what art can the earth produce
subsistence for such numbers [of people]?’’ asked the Frenchman Pierre Poivre in the 1720s.
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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Do the Chinese possess any secret arts of multiplying grain and provisions necessary for the nourishment of mankind? To solve my doubts I traversed the fields, I
introduced myself among the laborers, who are in general easy, polite, and knowledgeable of the world. I examine, and pursue them through all their operations,
and observe that their secret consists simply in manuring the fields judiciously,
ploughing them to a considerable depth, sowing them in the proper season, turning
to advantage every inch of ground which can produce the most considerable crop,
and preferring to every other species of culture that of grain, as by far the most
important.18
Such an impressively productive agriculture certainly allowed the Chinese
population to grow, from 140 million in 1650, to 225 million in 1750, and
then to 380–400 million by 1850. Numbers like these also convinced European observers, in particular Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, whose ideas
about markets and population have so shaped Eurocentric views of the modern world, that the Chinese just could not control their population growth.
Malthus believed that populations like the Chinese who could not control
their growth would overshoot the capability of the land to support their
numbers until ‘‘negative’’ population checks, such as famines or wars,
reduced the population size. Malthus also believed that Europeans avoided
those fates by having ‘‘preventative’’ checks on population growth.
Where Malthus certainly was right about Europeans, he was wrong about
the Chinese. The fact is, they could—and did—control their family size,
although in ways quite different from the Europeans. Although almost all
Chinese women married and married early, Chinese families developed many
methods for controlling the number of children. Abstention from having
sexual relations, especially early in the marriage, was a preferred mechanism
and was enforced by married couples living with their parents. Infanticide,
especially of daughters, was another means to limit family size, leading as well
to a gender-unbalanced population of more men than women, and hence of
forced celibacy for many poorer men. As James Lee and Wang Feng summarize the Chinese demographic system:
In contrast to the European system, in which marriage was the only volitional
check on population growth, the Chinese demographic system had multiple conscious checks, and was therefore far more complex and calculating than Malthus
or his successors thought. As a result . . . population never pushed the economy to
subsistence levels.19
Nevertheless, because of the productivity of agriculture and the ability of
the Chinese economy to produce more than enough food for its population,
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=1962483.
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The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences, 1750–1850
107
the population did in fact grow, and as mentioned above, it grew rapidly from
1750 to 1850.20 In the densely populated core areas of the Pearl River delta
in south China, along the southeast coast, and in the Yangzi River delta,
populations did reach the size where people started migrating out into lesspopulated areas. Sometimes these regions had exceptionally fertile soil that
could be brought into production by clearing the land, as in Hunan up the
Yangzi River from Shanghai, or in the West River valley in Guangxi province, or sometimes the land that was brought into production was more marginal and less fertile, as in the Jiangxi highlands on the southern bank of the
Yangzi River.21
Wherever new land was being brought into agricultural production, especially by 1800 when it was land that was not as fertile or productive as land
in the densely populated core regions, that was an indication that the limits
of growth within the biological old regime were being reached. That does
not mean that a Malthusian disaster was imminent—the Chinese were in
fact very much in control of their reproductive capabilities—but that good
agricultural land was becoming in short supply. The reason for this is that
the four necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter, and fuel—all came from
the land and hence were in competition. Clearing land for food decreased
the amount of wood available for fuel, either to cook and heat homes