26 Chapter Twonaval hegemony that extended briefly throughout the Indian Ocean.
In the meanwhile, active hypothesis is all that can be hoped for.^2
All the same, scholars working in the field have assembled some
startling data about Chinese accomplishments. Robert Hartwell, for
example, in three remarkable articles,^3 has traced the history of iron-
working in north China in the eleventh century. The technical basis of
the large-scale development that then occurred was already old in
China. Blast furnaces, using an ingenious bellows that produced a
continuous flow of air, had been known for up to one thousand years^4
before the ironmasters of north China began to fuel such furnaces with
coke during the first decades of the eleventh century, thereby solving
a persistent fuel problem in the tree-short landscape of the Yellow
River valley. Coke, too, had been used for cooking and domestic
heating for at least two hundred years before being put to use in
ferrous metallurgy.^5
Yet even if the separate techniques were old, the combination was
new; and once coke came to be used for smelting, the scale of iron and
steel production seems to have surged upward in quite extraordinary
fashion, as the following figures for iron production in China show:^6
- Stefan Balazs was the great pioneer with his “Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte
der T’ang Zeit,” Mitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen zu Berlin 34 (1931):
21–25; 35 (1932): 27–73, and his later essays gathered in two overlapping collections,
Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy (New Haven, 1964) and La bu
reaucratie celeste: Recherches sur l’économie et la société de la Chine traditionelle (Paris, 1968).
Yoshinobu Shiba, Commerce and Society in Sung China (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970) offers a
sample of recent Japanese scholarship, which also influences the essays collected in John
W. Haeger, ed., Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China (Tucson, Ariz., 1975), and a bold
effort at synthesis by Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, Calif., 1973).
For an interesting attempt to put China’s economic history into the context of contem
porary theory of economic “development” see Anthony M. Tang, “China’s Agricultural
Legacy,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 28 (1979): 1–22. - Robert Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and the Structure of Enterprise in the
Development of the Eleventh-Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry,” Journal of
Economic History 26 (1966): 29–58; “A Cycle of Economic Change in Imperial China:
Coal and Iron in Northeast China, 750–1350,"Journal of Economic and Social History of
the Orient (JESHO), 10 (1967): 103–59; “Financial Expertise, Examinations and the
Formulation of Economic Policy in Northern Sung China,” Journal of Asian Studies 30
(1971): 281–314. - Joseph Needham, The Development of Iron and Steel Technology in China (London,
1958), p. 18. - The use of coal as fuel in ironworking also was of long standing; but the method
used to prevent the iron from becoming useless by contamination with sulphur from the
coal was to encase the ore to be smelted in cylindrical clay containers. This meant
small-scale production and high fuel consumption. Cf. ibid., p. 13, and pi. 11, showing
modern craftsmen using such hand-sized crucibles. - Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and the Structure of Enterprise,” p. 34. As Hart
well points out, these statistics parallel British output in the early phases of the indus
trial revolution. As late as 1788, when Britain too had begun to shift to coke fuel for