Re: Pomeranz Thesis (fwd)

[Louis Proyect <vze47t8m@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anthony:
>Since I do not have the book here, and haven't
>read it, I would like to know in which period of
>history - according to Pomeranz - Chinese
>agriculture was more captitalist than in Great
>Britain, and in which ways.

Kenneth Pomeranz, "The Great Divergence", p 74:

The overwhelming majority of land in all parts of China was more or 
less freely alienable. The early Ming (1368-c.1430) had confiscated a 
good deal of land in the Yangzi Valley, but these lands always 
drifted back toward private status; in the mid-1500s, the government 
gave up and recognized all tax-paying land as otherwise unencumbered. 
Some land, mostly in the north, still theoretically belonged to the 
state and was leased to hereditary groups of soldiers or Grand Canal 
boatmen; the crown itself had an estate of about 700,000 acres in 
Qing times. But even on paper, all such land never amounted to more 
than 3,500,000 acres, or perhaps 3 percent of total arable. Moreover, 
much of this land came to be treated as private property anyway, with 
its supposedly hereditary tenants selling or mortgaging it and 
protesting indignantly (and successfully) when the government later 
tried to make them pay to formally remove it from state ownership.

Somewhat more land was rendered inalienable by being placed in 
private "charitable estates," which were meant to provide for the 
widows, orphans, and ceremonial expenses of corporate lineages, or 
for the upkeep of temples and schools. These estates were important 
in a few areas?they may have held as much as 35 percent of the arable 
in Guangdong province?but they were trivial in most of the country. A 
twentieth-century survey estimated that 93 percent of all Chinese 
farmlands were held in fee simple. Moreover, even where inalienable 
estates were common, it is not clear that they were used any 
differently from other lands.

-- 
Louis Proyect, vze47t8m@xxxxxxxxxxx on 06/15/2002

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