Book review: State, Economy, and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s – 1850s, by Peer Vries.

Yet another book on why Britain and China diverged dramatically starting around 1800. This one focuses on documenting the differences between the regions, with relatively little theorizing.

Some interesting differences of possible relevance to the divergence:

• British per capita tax collections were 15 times China’s [1]; Vries emphasizes the underlying British bureaucratic competence.
• Britain changed its tax rules often; China treated tax rules as if set in stone.
• British tax policy caused it to promote standardization of a wide variety of weights and measures, which helped long-distance trades; China had nothing similar.
• Britain’s taxation was more egalitarian than China’s (but still much less egalitarian than today).
• British government debt looked recklessly high; China consistently had a surplus.
• British elites wanted to keep the masses poor (to make them industrious); China’s elites seemed neutral or had slight preferences for the poor to prosper.
• Most British workers were nearly slaves – laws restricted their mobility due to the expectation that most who left their area of work were beggars/thieves; China was less restrictive.
• Britain condoned or supported powerful monopolies; China broke up concentrations of merchant power / capital under the assumption that they came at the expense of ordinary people.
• Britain had three times as much farm land per capita as China.
• Britain was more urban, so it had more commercial / monetary activity.
• China denied that anything outside its borders mattered. Britain had a fairly global worldview.

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