ninth century and was in general use by the tenth century, though publication
remained dominated by government controls over the spread of printing presses
and the content of publications. In Europe printing in the vernacular broke the
monopoly of Latin but Muslim countries were opposed to a printed Koran for
much longer (Landes, 1998). Between 1405 and 1431 the Chinese undertook
seven major naval expeditions to explore the waters of Indonesia and the Indian
Ocean – the first in 1405 comprised 317 vessels and 28,000 men – but further
maritime enterprise was banned by the Ming court. Some argue that the rising
power of merchant traders was being perceived as a threat to the scholarly court
bureaucrats so ocean-going trade was abandoned by an authoritarian monarchy
with the power to enforce such a decision (Landes, 1998). The Portuguese
voyages of discovery, by contrast, were cumulative. In the medieval period the
Portuguese pushed down the coast of Africa, reaching the Senegal River by 1450
and the Congo by 1485; in 1498 Vasco De Gama rounded the Cape and reached
India. Within a few years Portugal was trading regularly with the Malabar Coast,
had built ports there,and dominated Indian waters; soon after a Portuguese
squadron appeared in Canton (Roberts, 1985). This Portuguese success was the
result of decades of exploration and extension of navigational possibilities in the
Atlantic. The Portuguese were not innovators but very successful at learning. As
Portugal faded as a naval and colonial power in the late sixteenth century they
were replaced by the Dutch and later the English.
Hobson (2004) argues that this notion of a ban on and subsequent decline of
naval trade in fifteenth-century China is a myth for three reasons. First, many
private Chinese merchants ignored the ban by relocating to other parts of the
region in order to export products back to China. In the first half of the
sixteenth century Chinese merchants spread to all parts of South-east Asia,
dominating this trading network into the nineteenth century. Second, not all
private trade was banned and much of it was officially sanctioned in three key
ports – Macao, Changzhou in Fukien province and Suzhou in Shensi province
- and later through Amoy, Ningbo and Shanghai. Finally, as most of the
world’s silver ended up in China, the economy must have been well integrated
into the global economy through a consistently large trade surplus (Hobson,
2004). If true then this argument makes the China problem even more of a
puzzle. If China was so open to trade why did its technological innovativeness
slow down so dramatically in the fifteenth century? Why did the Chinese fail
to learn from superior European science and technology once they were
exposed to it from the sixteenth century onwards?
Thinking about learning as a cumulative process helps us to answer this ques-
tion. China was the self-proclaimed Celestial Empire; first in the world in its own
eyes in terms of age, experience, cultural achievement, moral and spiritual supe-
riority. This cultural triumphalism, argues David Landes, made China a bad
learner. Chinese scientific enquiry tended to look back at its own writings to
confirm there was nothing new from outside, so China had no tradition of ‘stand-
ing on the shoulder of giants’. China also lacked the organizations that made for
a cumulative process of finding and learning, such as schools, academies,
164 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth