"Hydraulic lock-in"

["Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>]

The best way to tackle this difficult question may be to start with
what has already been said, which is not much apart from a little
known yet long paper by Mark Elvin titled "Three Thousand Years
of Unsustainable Growth: China's Environment From Archaic Times
to the Present" (1993, 7-46). Elvin is well known for his "high level
equilibrium trap" hypothesis about why late Imperial China was
unable to industrialize. If you hear anything about Elvin, it  will
likely be about this "trap". No one will mention  his "technological"
or "hydraulic lock-in". Reading Frank, Landes and Pomeranz,  or
just looking at the bibliographies of their recent books,  would give
the impression Elvin has written only one book (1973).

Not only has Elvin re-analyzed his high level trap in various other
papers, he is now suggesting (in this 1993 article) that China may
have long been trapped in a pattern of development which
"require[d] indefinetely prolonged further inputs of energy for
maintenance if the original investment [was] not to be lost" (12).
The high-level equilibrium trap was something which he thought had
affected China in the late eighteenth century.  The idea of hydraulic
lock-in, however, goes to the very roots of China's pattern of
economic development.