Ages, double those in 1600 and 130 times larger than farms in the Yangzi Delta
(Brenner et al.,2002).
In the Yangzi peasants had to increase yields (output per unit of land) to
maintain consumption levels on ever smaller plots of land and did so through
increasing labour inputs. Higher output per unit of land was achieved at the
cost of long extra hours of labour such that between 1600 and 1800 grain
output per capita fell by 30 per cent. In England large farms were able to use
animals and nitrogen-fixing fodder crops (sainfoin, clover and turnips) that
both supplied feed and increased soil fertility. Between 1500 and 1750 agricul-
tural and labour productivity in England rose by between half and two-thirds
(Brenner et al.,2002). In England fewer people were required to produce suffi-
cient food, enabling the migration of labour from agriculture into manufactur-
ing. The share of the population in towns of more than10,000 people increased
from 5.5 per cent of the labour force in 1500 to 24 per cent in 1800. More agri-
cultural output led to falling grain prices, freeing wages to be spent on manu-
factured consumer goods. Between 1600 and 1750 the population in England
increased by 40 per cent, the population working outside agriculture by 80 per
cent and real wages by between 35 per cent and 40 per cent (Brenner et al.,
2002). Evidence from Bairoch (1993) is consistent with the Brenner thesis and
shows that until the early 1820s wheat imports into England were negligible
and even by the 1840s what imports were only 12 per cent of consumption,
most of which came from Russia and Prussia, not the Americas.
In the Yangzi Delta all available arable land was being cultivated by
around1800,and traditional methods of production were unable to further
raise output. The outcome was a subsistence crisis marked by falling life
expectancy for males caused by steadily increasing child and infant mortality.
The origins of the Western lead
A related debate asks whether the West’s lead at the beginning of the sixteenth
century was internally generated or came from borrowing technology devel-
oped elsewhere. It is important to note, however, that the historical ability to
diffuse and utilize ideas and technology productively is what typically distin-
guishes successful growth stories.
One traditional historical drama centring on Britain is that of the ‘heroic
entrepreneur’. This view argues that from the eighteenth century a series of
innovations transformed the British cotton sector and gave rise to the modern
factory system. These innovations included the Spinning Jenny (1766),
Arkwright’s Water Frame (1769), Crompton’s Mule (1779), Cartwright’s
Power Loom (1787) and the Self-Acting Mule (1830) (Roberts, 1985). ‘Some
time in the 1780s, and for the first time in human history, the shackles were
taken off the productive power of human societies [and represented a] sudden,
qualitative, and fundamental transformation’ (Hobsbawm, 1995:28–9). By
1850 the cotton textile industry had been completely transformed. Of the
The Great Divergence since 1750 159