The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

The Era of Chinese Predominance, 1000–1500 25

mercial network, buying and selling to supplement every day’s liveli­
hood, made a significant difference to the way other human beings
made their livings throughout a large part of the civilized world. In­
deed, it is the hypothesis of this book that China’s rapid evolution
towards market-regulated behavior in the centuries on either side of
the year 1000 tipped a critical balance in world history. I believe that
China’s example set humankind off on a thousand-year exploration of
what could be accomplished by relying on prices and personal or
small-group (the partnership or company) perception of private ad­
vantage as a way of orchestrating behavior on a mass scale.
Obedience to commands did not of course disappear. Interaction
between command behavior and market behavior lost none of its
complex ambivalence. But political authorities found it less and less
possible to escape the trammels of finance, and finance depended
more and more on the flow of goods to markets which rulers could no
longer dominate. They, too, like humbler members of society, were
more and more trapped in a cobweb of cash and credit, for spending
money proved a more effective way of mobilizing resources and man­
power for war and for other public enterprises than any alternative.
New forms of management and new modes of political conduct had to
be invented to reconcile the initial antipathy between military power
and money power; and the society most successful in achieving this act
of legerdemain—western Europe—in due season came to dominate
the world.
Europe’s rise will be the theme of the next chapters. This one seeks
to examine the springs and limits of China’s transformation, and its
initial impact on the rest of the world.

Market and Command in Medieval China

In trying to understand what put China in the lead, and how its
technological headstart on the rest of the civilized world crumbled
away, one soon runs into difficulty. Historians of China have yet to
work through the voluminous records from the T’ang (618–907),
Sung (960–1279), Yuan (1260–1368), and Ming (1368–1644) dynas­
ties with the appropriate questions in mind. A generation or more will
be required before they can attain a clear vision of the regional varia­
tions and social and economic transformations of China that underlay
the rise and decay of a high technology iron and coal industry and of a

Population in Sung-Chin China,” Etudes Song I: Histoire et institutions, ser. 1 (Paris,
1970), p. 52.