第 2 章
The Great Divergence: How the Impoverished West Overtook the East
In 1420, the contrast between East and West couldn't have been more stark. China's Forbidden City, built by over a million workers between 1406-1420, symbolized an advanced civilization at its peak. The Yongle Emperor commissioned a 11,000-volume encyclopedia requiring 2,000 scholars to complete-the world's largest until Wikipedia appeared in 2007. China's Grand Canal system stretched over a thousand miles with sophisticated pound locks, while nearly 12,000 grain barges traveled yearly, maintained by 50,000 workers. Nanjing, with a population approaching a million, thrived as a center of silk and cotton industries.
By comparison, London was a primitive backwater with only 40,000 inhabitants. Its crude walls extended just 3 miles compared to Nanjing's 20-mile fortifications. London's poor sanitation made it a death-trap, with plague, typhus, dysentery, and smallpox rampant. Life expectancy in England was a miserable 37 years, with one in five children dying in their first year. Violence was endemic-war with France, Celtic conflicts, aristocratic power struggles, and commonplace homicide with murder rates exceeding modern Detroit's worst years.
East Asian agricultural productivity far surpassed Europe's, with one acre of rice cultivation supporting a family compared to England's 20 acres per family. Chinese civilization had consistently pioneered technological advances: Su Song created the world's first mechanical clock in 1086, an intricate 40-foot contraption predating similar European devices by centuries. Other Chinese inventions included movable type printing (11th century), paper money, the seed drill (2,000 years before Jethro Tull), the curved iron mouldboard plow, blast furnaces for smelting iron (before 200 BC), iron suspension bridges, the spinning wheel, land and sea mines, rockets, matches, the magnetic compass, and even golf, which appears to have preceded Scotland's version.
Yet within a century, the trajectories of East and West would dramatically diverge. While China turned inward after Zheng He's massive naval expeditions, Portugal's Vasco da Gama set sail with just four modest vessels seeking "to make discoveries and go in search of spices." Unlike the Chinese expeditions focused on collecting tribute, the Portuguese sought trade advantages against European rivals. This fierce competition drove Western expansion, with Portugal establishing Macau by 1557, soon joined by Spain, the Dutch, and English in the "spice race."
This competitive expansion stemmed from Europe's fragmented political geography-roughly a thousand competing polities in the fourteenth century, compared to China's unified empire. Europe's constant warfare yielded three unexpected benefits: military innovation, efficient taxation systems, and decentralized exploration that no single monarch could halt. Meanwhile, China's imperial examination system, while fiercely competitive, rewarded conformity rather than innovation, producing a conservative elite resistant to change.
The Ming dynasty's inward turn proved fatal. Despite impressive outward appearances, China's high-level equilibrium became fragile. When crisis struck in the mid-17th century through political factionalism, fiscal problems, harsh weather, and epidemics, the system collapsed. Between 1580-1650, China's population fell 35-40%. Without external resources to draw on, the trap snapped shut. By contrast, England's overseas expansion helped escape the Malthusian trap through new nutrients from transatlantic trade and emigration opportunities.
