warfare ... quarrelsome kingdoms ... anarchic wilderness’ (2012:2), while in
1411 the Chinese were building the Grand Canal and the Forbidden City. If, as
Diamond suggests, urbanization leads to at least guns and steel it is not clear
why warriors from urban Angkor or Lahore were not heading West to conquer
Europe. The answer lies not in the urban world but in the rural economy of
Western Europe.
Social and property relations and the Brenner thesis
Pomeranz argues that growth across Europe and Asia in the eighteenth century
coupled with a limited supply of land and the rising demand for food and raw
materials pushed countries into ever more labour-intensive methods to
compensate. Europe sustained growth beyond 1750 because it gained access to
American colonies that supplied sugar and grain for food, cotton for fibres for
manufacturing, and timber for heating that together enabled England, then
Europe,to save on the extra acres and additional labour otherwise required to
produce them. There is persuasive evidence refuting this pessimism and
explaining the English lead in around1500 as due to an earlier revolution in
agriculture.
Brenner et al. (2002) argue that in England the system of social/property
relations underwent significant change after 1400 and was radically different
to that in the Yangzi Delta during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). This
economic and social revolution in English agriculture paved the way for higher
incomes in 1500 and subsequent income growth and urbanization.
Peasants in the seventeenth-century Yangzi Delta had no land ownership
rights, possessing instead various customary forms of ownership or secure
tenancy. One such customary right in China was that of peasants to inherit
land. This meant that landlords effectively could not vary rents in accordance
with market conditions or remove tenants. Fixed rents and lack of exposure to
market competition reduced the incentives for landlords and tenants, respec-
tively, to raise the productivity of agriculture (Brenner et al., 2002:614).
Fertility was high and so land holdings fragmented between generations. The
av erage size of family holdings fell from 1.875 acres in 1620 to 1 acre in 1850.
In Europe the Black Death (1348–49) had caused a radical transformation
of social/property relations in the countryside. The sharp drop in population
(by an estimated 25–60 per cent) led to a shortage of labour and forced land-
lords to offer concessions to peasants to persuade them to remain working on
their land. This shifted rural agricultural relations to a commercial lease basis
in a competitive land market, creating a class of direct producers who did not
own the land but were compelled to produce competitively and efficiently to
survive economically. Those who weren’t efficient faced losing their tenancy
to those who were. In England commercial tenants could not bequeath the land
they farmed to their (multiple) children which supported the rise of ever larger
farms. Land was entailed so would pass intact to the eldest son of the landlord.
By 1800 English farms were on average ten times larger than in the late Middle
158 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth