The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [92]
The point is this. In 1300, Europe was probably on a trajectory towards a labour-intensive ‘industrious’ revolution of diminishing returns. Remember the miller of Feering who halved his wage by sharing his job with his son in the 1290s? Or consider the women who were paid half what their menfolk earned when they carried water (for making mortar) to the site of a new windmill being constructed at Dover Castle in 1294. No doubt they were delighted to have a job and earn a little cash, but they came so cheap they provided their employer with an incentive not to buy a cart and bullock. Yet by 1400, Europe had partly switched to a labour-saving ‘industrial’ trajectory instead, and the pattern was repeated after the cold and brutal seventeenth century, when famine, plague and war once more reduced the European population: in 1692–4, perhaps 15 per cent of all French people starved to death. Unlike Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Mexico, Peru, China and Rome, early modern Europe became capital-intensive, not labour-intensive. That capital was used to get work out of animals, rivers and breezes, rather than people. Europe was, in Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘the first society to build an economy on non-human power rather than on the backs of slaves and coolies’.
The industrious revolution
To imagine what would have happened to Europe without the Black Death, consider the case of Japan in the eighteenth century. In the 1600s Japan was a relatively prosperous and sophisticated country with a population the size of France and Spain combined, and a strong manufacturing industry, especially in paper products, cotton textiles and weapons – much of them for export. In 1592, the Japanese had conquered Korea carrying tens of thousands of home-made arquebuses copied from Portuguese designs. Japan was none the less mainly an agrarian economy with plentiful herds of sheep and goats, lots of pigs, some cattle and oxen and quite a few horses. The plough was in common use, both ox-drawn and horse-drawn.
By the 1800s, domestic farm animals had virtually disappeared. Sheep and goats were almost unknown, horses and cattle were very rare and even pigs were few in number. As the traveller Isabella Bird remarked in 1880, ‘As animals are not used for milk, draught or food and there are no pasture lands, both the country and the farm-yards have a singular silence and an inanimate look.’ Carriages, carts (and even wheelbarrows) were scarce. Instead the power needed for transport came from human beings carrying goods hung from poles on their shoulders and racks on their backs. Watermills, though the technology had been known for a long time, were little used; rice was threshed and ground by hand querns or stone-weighted trip hammers, powered by treadle. Human rice pounders could be heard toiling away, naked behind a curtain, for hours at a time, even in cities like Tokyo; the irrigation pumps needed for the rice fields were often driven by pedalling coolies. Above all, the plough was now virtually unknown in the entire country. Fields were cultivated by men and women with hoes. Where Europeans used animal, water and wind power, the Japanese did the work themselves.
What seems to have happened is that some time between 1700 and 1800, the Japanese collectively gave up the plough in favour