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Summary:

Large-scale comparative economic history of westernmost and easternmost Eurasia is of importance for the understanding of global history. The book provides a description of material life in North-western Europe and East Asia, for the period from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, with a focus on developments in Great Britain and the Dutch Republic on the one hand and China and Japan on the other hand. Like an atlas it provides information, in an accessible format, on the main characteristics of the economic landscape of this period. Maps, tables, graphs and figures are a prominent and integral part of the book. It shows the constraints to which all pre-industrial economies were subjected because of their dependence on organic natural resources but also the different ways in which the societies discussed dealt with those constraints. To provide a better understanding of this economy of limited possibilities, the final chapter of the book is devoted to the emergence of modern economic growth in Western Europe.

Table of Contents:

• Machine generated contents note: Geography And Demography
• Sizes
• Physical geography
• Weather and climate
• tyranny of distance
• variability and unpredictability of life in the pre-industrial world
• Population and population density
• Life expectancy, health and disease
• Violence
• Energy
• Human labour power
• labour power of animals
• Firewood
• Peat
• Coal
• Gunpowder
• Watermills
• Windmills
• Water and wind and their role in transport
• Resources

• Land
• Animals
• Animal manure and night soil
• Wood
• Metals: iron and bullion
• Frontiers and ghost acreages
• Agriculture
• agricultural labour force, the share of agriculture in GDP and urbanisation
• importance of food in budgets
• Agricultural productivity
• Agricultural systems: China's rice economy
• Agricultural systems: Great Britain's wheat economy
• What about Japan?
• Exchanges
• Migration
• Intercontinental migration
• Slave trades and the importance of other forms of coerced migration
• demographic impact of European overseas migration
• Chinese and Japanese overseas emigrations
• Columbian Exchange: flora, fauna and diseases
• Flows and stocks of bullion
• Monetary systems
• Technologies and relative scarcities
• Intercontinental commodity trade
• modern world-system?
• sinocentric alternative to Eurocentrism?
• Intercontinental trade as an almost entirely European affair
• Stagnation And Growth
• tension between population and resources
• Positive checks
• Preventive checks: The (Western) European marriage pattern and East Asian alternatives
• Sustainability in Tokugawa Japan
• world without growth?
• Malthusian constraints?
• Efflorescences
• Modern economic growth before the Industrial Revolution? The case of Song China, 976-1279, as compared to developments under the Ming and Qing
• Modern economic growth before the Industrial Revolution? The case of the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age
• Sprouts of pre-modern growth?
• GDP, wages and incomes
• Inequality, poverty and famine
• Consumption
• Sources of growth? Changes in production and transport
• Increased production and productivity in agriculture
• Industrious revolutions
• Increased investment and (micro-)innovations
• Improved human capital
• better measure of reality
• Improved transport
• Transport over land
• Transport over water
• Shipping on the open seas
• Sources Of Growth? Markets And States
• Specialisation and market extension
• Global market integration
• rise of capitalism?
• decline of the commons?
• decline of the guilds?
• rise of free labour?
• Capitalists, capitalism and the state
• State formation, state capacity and empire
• State formation and state capacity
• Military strength
• Empire building versus imperial disintegration
• Great Divergence
• emergence of a new economic regime
• New energy and new technology
• Railways and steam shipping
• wider impact of the new economic regime
• Great Divergence and fossil-fuel ghost acreage
• Exchanges
• Migration during the Great Divergence
• Great Divergence, import ghost acreage and Great Specialisation
• Different trajectories, change and continuity
• Investment and Great Divergence
• case of Great Britain
• Did the Dutch Republic, Qing China or Tokugawa Japan have sufficient financial resources to industrialise?.

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Author/Creator:

Vries, P. H. H. , author

Contributors:

Vries, Annelieke , author

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Main Work:

Atlas of material life: Northwestern Europe and East Asia, 15th to 19th century [by Vries, P.H.H.]

Other Related Resources:

Print version: Atlas of Material Life : Northwestern Europe and East Asia, 15th to 19th Century [by Vries, P.] (Leiden : Leiden University Press,c2020 — ISBN 9789087283544)

Subjects:

Material culture — Europe, Western — History

Material culture — East Asia — History

General Notes:

Peer Vries was professor for Global Economic History at the University of Vienna from 2007 to 2016. Since 2016, he is Honorary Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. He published widely on global economic history and on the Great Divergence. Annelieke Vries-Baaijens studied physical geography with a major in Cartography at Utrecht University. She defended her PhD in mathematics and computer science at Delft University. Since 2010, she makes digital maps of historical subjects.
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 05, 2021).

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Call Numbers:

GN406 .V75 2020eb

ISBNs:

9789400603929 (electronic book)
9400603924 (electronic book)
9789087283544 (paperback) [Invalid]
9087283547 (paperback) [Invalid]

OCLC Numbers:

1227395205

Other Control Numbers:

EBC6423309 (source: MiAaPQ)
[Unknown Type]: ybp17154183