Re: "Hydraulic lock-in"

["Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie:
> Why, though, should it have occurred to the direct producers,
> imperial bureaucrats, sovereigns, etc. of "large-scale premodern
> hydraulic systems" to direct "a significant proportion of the economic
> surplus" to "other ends"?  Maybe they didn't have practical "other
> ends."  Maybe they just didn't live in a kind of society (like our
> capitalist world) that would make them say to themselves, "Well, we
> could be doing something else instead -- something else more
> efficient, more productive, more profitable."  It's not as if any
> class of pre-capitalist peoples were or should have been thinking in
> terms of scarcity and opportunity costs.

Elvin does tend to assume the surplus could have been used in
ways that might have allowed China to develop modern capitalism.
But your last point, "it is not as if any class of pre-capitalist
peoples should have been thinking in terms of scarcity", should not
be assume to be true either. All societies - to use Braudel's apt
phrase - face "limits of the possible".  China's organic-energy
based economy was encountering serious shortages...save for the
southwestern frontiers which gave the old regions of the Yellow
basin and the Yangze Delta extra slack...but  China's intensive
agrarian growth was ultimately unsustainable.