(^112) Chapter Three
of production and small-scale trading still could flourish, since confis
catory purchase or outright seizure of goods from large numbers of
small people was administratively impracticable.
Rough-and-ready command mobilization of this sort had its price,
of course. By making large-scale private accumulation of capital diffi
cult and precarious, the pace of economic development and techno
logical innovation was restricted to things that small-scale artisans
could undertake. The only way larger enterprises could be sustained
was by public management; and officials nearly always preferred
familiar and routine methods in order to minimize risk of failure.
As we have seen, in military technology after about 1500, Asian
officials clung fast to gigantesque siege cannon, the sovereign weapon
against town and castle walls. No one had the means or the motive for
developing gunpowder weaponry in new directions; and only the
Japanese redesigned their fortifications to diminish the effect of
gunfire.^43 Asian regimes accordingly fell behind European military
and technological development in a way that cost them dearly in the
long run.
Similar conservatism or inattention prevailed in such fields as min
ing and shipbuilding, where European superiority to other civiliza
tions had become apparent from the fourteenth century. This re
flected the fact that private capital financed these relatively large-scale
activities in Europe, and did so with the profit motive very much to
the fore. Consequently, any technical change that cut costs or in
creased returns was eagerly sought after and rapidly propagated
throughout the European world, in striking contrast to the conserva
tism and indifference of Asian regimes. In other fields of economic
production, the contrast between European and Asian institutional
patterns did not lead to equally drastic divergence until the eighteenth
century, when linkage of inanimate power to industrial processes took
on a new impetus in Europe and eventually left artisan and hand
methods of production far behind. Nevertheless, the fundamental
difference between western Europe and the rest of the civilized world
- Cf. photos in Kiyoshi Hirai, Feudal Architecture in Japan (New York and Tokyo,
1973). Protection against small-arms fire was, however, more important for the
Japanese than protection against cannon. This was because Japanese armies lacked
logistical resources for conducting prolonged sieges where cannon would have been
decisive; and the national economy, correspondingly, failed to develop a technical base
for cannon manufacture on anything approaching the European scale. Samurai ideals,
emphasizing hand-to-hand combat, may have inhibited efforts to develop artillery; fuel
shortages were also probably important. I owe these suggestions to private corre
spondence with John F. Guilmartin, Jr.