Establishing statistical foundations of a chronology for the great divergence: a survey and critique of the primary sources for the construction of relative wage levels for Ming–Qing China

Abstract

This article is a survey and critique of recent endeavours to establish statistical foundations for a chronology for the great divergence based upon trends and levels in relative wages. Our reading of the bibliography in Chinese labour history, together with a preliminary investigation into other primary sources, suggests that the Kuznetsian paradigm for empirical economics may not be viable for the construction of analytical narratives for the Chinese and other premodern imperial economies in South and West Asia. Nevertheless, two datasets currently in print will continue to be quoted to lend support to numerically grounded speculations for levels and trends in real wages and welfare for the families of wage‐dependent urban workers in China over the eighteenth century. Statistical evidence for the Ming and Qing dynasties calibrated for the purposes of comparing real wage levels for wage‐dependent labour between China and western Europe can, however, be placed on a spectrum for accuracy and inferential analysis that runs from ‘unfounded guess work’ to ‘plausible conjectures’. The unwelcome contention of this article is that the data published and potentially available for China (and probably for India and the Ottoman Empire) stand close to the unfounded guess work end of that spectrum. Meanwhile, and as a speculative conclusion, we offer a conjecture that the ‘real wages’ for Qing China's tiny proletariat, whose income included high proportions of wages in kind, have remained as elusive as they were when the real wage debate began a decade ago.

The Labor-Intensive Path: Wages, Incomes, and the Work Year in Japan, 1610–1890

“…The advantage of this source over earlier wage estimates based on day laborers by Saito (1975) and Bassino and Ma (2006) are summarized in Table 1. First, the use of urban day wages for Asian societies has been criticized because urban day laborers were not as common in Asia relative to Western European societies (Deng and O'Brien 2016;Parthasarathi 2011). Estimates from the Kai region in central Japan in 1789 suggest they represented perhaps 4 percent of the population (Bassino, Ma, and Saito 2005).…”

China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850

“…That changed with Angus Maddison’s (2001), The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective , published shortly after Pomeranz’s (2000) The Great Divergence , although Maddison’s medieval and early modern estimates can best be described as controlled conjectures, rather than estimates derived from contemporary data. This has had an unfortunate effect of leaving some historians with the impression that quantification of the Great Divergence is not possible because of the absence of useable quantitative data (Deng and O’Brien 2016a, 2016b). In fact, however, medieval and early modern Europe and Asia were much more literate and numerate than is often thought, and left behind a wealth of data in documents such as government accounts, customs accounts, poll tax returns, parish registers, city records, trading company records, hospital and educational establishment records, manorial accounts, probate inventories, farm accounts, tithe files, and other records of religious institutions.…”

“…To achieve this, governments could establish a special institution with responsibility for compiling and recording laws and policy, and these institutions collected important economic data. It would surely be an astonishing act of neglect to throw away this rich stock of data on the grounds that it does not provide a complete picture, as if the same issue of the representativeness of the surviving records does not affect the use of qualitative information (Deng and O’Brien 2016a, 2016b). In addition to this official historical literature, there are two additional types of material that we have drawn from in the estimates provided later, a private historical literature and regional gazetteers.…”

Wages, Labour Markets, and Living Standards in China, 1530-1840

“…In contrast with the picture painted by Broadberry and Gupta (2006), the unskilled wages estimated by Allen et al were considerably higher, and continued to fall between 1738 and 1850. However, Deng and O'Brien (2016) argued that Allen's et al wage estimates suffer from sample selection biases and data processing problems. Similar issues of data processing can be found in other scholarly works.…”

“…This figure is then widely cited in the English literature and generalised as the overall size of wage-dependent labours. See, for examples, Deng and O'Brien (2016) include payments to doormen and runners (ya yi) in prefectural and county governments, to construction labourers working on the Grand Canal and riverbank, and skilled and unskilled workers in the construction, handicraft, and service industries in Beijing. Wages in the private sector include woodblock engravers in the Lower Yangzi and a variety of scattered quotations for other occupations across China.…”