LATE CHaSON PROPOSALS 355If, on the other hand, progress means a tendency toward modernity, as Ch'on
K wan 'u has suggested, then what other model of modernity has there been except
the path trodden by those nations on the way to modem industrial capitalism,
particularly the model of the developmcnt of England, the first industrial nation
in the world? If that becomes the criterion for modernity, thenYu's program for
the abolition of private property, egalitarian state-regulated distribution of land
for the subsistence of the peasantry, and support of a monolithic bureaucracy
are all items that are contrary to the developments achieved by England, the first
nation to embark on a successful program of industrial capitalism. England's
"development" toward capitalism was marked in the rural sector by a long tran-
sition from the feudal demesne to the private ownership of land, accompanied
by the enclosure of fields for sheepherding, dairying, and cattle-brceding from
[300 to 1800, the expUlsion of the peasantry to the towns and the disappear-
ance of the small owner-farmer, the development of market forces and commercial
agriculture by entrepreneurial leaseholders or tenant-farmers producing wool
to meet the new demand for textiles in what was really a regional, if not world,
market. [ In that scenario the equal distribution of land to the peasantry was totally
irrelevant to, if not obstructive of, the forces needed to free labor and capital for
new forms of investment and manufacture.
State control of the economy was more characteristic of the age of absolutism
in France after 1466 and particularly under Colbert in the seventeenth century,
in Spain from the sixteenth century when it monopolized specie imports from
its empire in the New World through the eighteenth century, and in Germany
under Frederick the Great in Prussia and Austria under Joseph II in the eighteenth
ccntury, when governments sought to maximize wealth at the expense of their
national rivals by export promotion and import restriction. While some scholars
grant that state control of the economy had dynamic qualities in the stimulation
of production and trade and that concern for the balance of trade and protectionism
was important for the maintenance of infant industries, most prefer to think that
mercantilism interfered with the full flowering of capitalism, which required an
international free-market trading system to thrive and flourish.^2
Only after England had led the way by carrying out the industrial revolution
did some of the late developing nations, like Germany and Japan in the late nine-
teenth century, take an active role in accumulating capital, directing it toward
industrial investment, and creating the basis for a modem industrial economy.
And when those governments did so, they cared more about industrial growth
than the equality of distribution. In Japan, for cxample, thc state had been more
interested in extracting savings from the agrarian sector to invest in urban indus-
try, and by the 1930S a growing number of peasants were left to fend for them-
selves as dependent and defenseless tenants.^3
The problem with statc or bureaucratic control of a rural economy dominated
by a landlord class was that it maintained the status quo based on gross inequal-
ity in the distribution of wealth. As Barrington Moore, Jr., has argued, some agrar-
ian nations like Russia and China came into the twentieth century dominated