[PEN-L:3562] Re: Colonial trade

[Colin Danby <danbyc@xxxxxxx>]

Ricardo,

from your first post:

> Colin, you are raising an important point which, as I said in a
> previous post, Frank also makes, the logic of which runs like this:
> the colonial trade was instrumental in the development of the British
> textile industry, an industry which in turn was the key propelling
> force of the industrial revolution. I guess if you want to make this
> case, your task is to offer us some data on, say, textile production
> as a percentage of GNP, textile exports as a percentage of total
> exports. Do you have time for this?

Just to pull the nearest book off the shelf,
Braudel's _Perspective on the World_ has a
subtle discussion of the British Ind Rev,
with a vigorous presentation 571-4 of cotton
as a leading sector and further discussion
575-81 of the role of trade including colonial
trade, a discussion then integrated with some
nuance into, yes, the home market.  I don't
agree that "my task" should be to reproduce
AGF or Braudel.  On numbers see next.

> Yes, every counterfactual raises more questions than it answers,
> but it is your position that needs counterfactuals, since numbers
> don't show the colonial trade was "decisive".

There is a basic methodology problem which
you won't confront -- how does a number show?
What do these numbers show and how and why?
We have a dynamic process which needs to be
understood qualitatively.  By using figures
in this naive way you have already posited a
sort of additive theory of growth which assumes
away almost everything interesting about this
period.  The answer to this kind of question
requires *history,* not odd synchronic slices.

> Landes says, without
> elaborating, that such innovations as the steam engine and coke-
> smelted iron were "largely independent of the Atlantic system, so
> was the attempt initially to mechanize wool spinning" (121)

Coke smelting took a long time to spread because
scale of demand was not enough to make new
capital investment profitable, so we have to
look to where demand was for iron.  And why
are we limited to the Atlantic system?

from your second post,

> I think this answers Colin's question. Why Asia did not
> industrialize if it was the ultimate sink of (about 40%) of the wealth

> extracted from the Americas? Shouldn't this have been the case if
> one holds an externalist theory of development? But Frank, as I was
> starting to say yesterday, brings in Elvin's "high-level equilibrium
> model"...Colin now asks Green how does he differentiate the internal
> from the external? So, let's say they are a compound: which element
> dominates?

Parts of Asia trade one commodity, like tea
or silk, for another, gold or silver.  You can
think of the metals as "wealth" in the limited
sense that the metals are assets, but they were
sterile assets.  The countries that did best
were generally those like England that kept
the least gold.  This is not a new problem for
AGF in any sense -- it is just a restatement of
the question of why Asia did not industrialize
first.

This does point up the fact that Europeans had
difficulty selling their manufactures in Asia
for a while but their response is emblematic:
they forcibly destroyed the Indian textile
industry and forced their way into China in the
opium war and so forth.  Colonialism was the
forcible rearranging of the material lives of the
rest of the world to both produce inputs for and
buy output from Europe.

Enough.

Best, Colin