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of the hoe because people were cheaper to hire than draught animals. This was a time of rapid population expansion, made possible by the high productivity of paddy rice, naturally fertilised by nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in the water and therefore needing little manure (though human night soil was assiduously collected, carefully stored and diligently applied to the land). With abundant food and a fastidious approach to hygiene, the Japanese population boomed to the point where land was scarce, labour was cheap and it was literally more economic to use human labour to hoe the land than to set aside precious acres for pasture to support oxen or horses to draw a plough. So the Japanese, to a spectacular extent, retreated from technology and trade and reduced their demands on merchants as they became more self-sufficient. The market for technology of all kinds atrophied. They even gave up capital-intensive guns in favour of labour-intensive swords. A good Japanese sword had a blade of strong though soft steel, but with a brittle, hard edge made lethally sharp by incessant hammering.

Europe probably came close to going down the same path as Japan in the eighteenth century. Just as in the thirteenth century, the European population boomed in the 1700s, helped by wealth generated by local and oriental trade and agricultural improvements. New crops like the potato, though often treated with suspicion when urged on the populace by rulers (Marie-Antoinette’s wearing of potato flowers put the French off eating them for decades), allowed the population of some countries such as Ireland to boom. Potatoes could be grown using a spade rather than a plough, and their fantastic productivity – more than thrice the calories per acre of wheat or rye – and high nutrient content encouraged a very dense population. An Irish acre in 1840 could yield six tonnes of potatoes, almost as much food as an acre of rice paddy in the Yangtze delta. (Sir William Petty, lamenting the idleness of the Irish in 1691, blamed the potato: ‘What need have they of work, who can content themselves with potato’s [sic], whereof the labour of one man can feed Forty?’ Adam Smith begged to differ, crediting the potato for London having the ‘strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions’.) At the time, an English worker needed twenty acres to grow his bread and cheese. The subsistence farmers of Ireland, even into the 1800s, were not only dependent mainly on their own muscle power for cultivation and transport, but were ‘out of the market’, consuming very few manufactured goods for lack of disposable income. (Rapacious English landlords did not help.) As the size of each family potato plot shrank, Ireland was a Malthusian disaster waiting to happen even before the Phytophthora famine of 1845 killed a million people and drove a million more to America. In the Scottish Highlands too, the population boom of the 1700s caused a retreat to subsistence, or crofting as it was known there. Only a vast ‘clearance’ and emigration to America and Australia, highly coerced and highly resented to this day, relieved the Malthusian pressure.

Denmark followed Japan’s path, too, for a while. The Danes responded to increasing ecological constraints in the eighteenth century by intensifying their agricultural labour. They banned cattle from forests to protect the supply of future fuel, which increased the price of manure. To maintain the fertility of their soil, they worked extraordinarily hard at ditching, clover growing and marling (laboriously digging up and spreading lime and clay subsoil to neutralise and release nutrients from sandy or acid soils). Hours of work increased by more than 50 per cent. By the 1800s, Denmark had become a country that was trapped by its own self-sufficiency. Its people were so busy farming that none could be spared for other industries and few could afford to consume manufactured products. Living standards stagnated, admittedly at a relatively decent level. Eventually in the late nineteenth century the industrialisation of