China

The data for China are the most limited. Li (1998) provides a detailed, quantitative account of farm productivity in the Yangzi valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

information about wages in Chinese cities. One thing India and China had in common was low wages and prices in the early modern period: the Chinese price and wage levels were only about one-third of the English levels when expressed in grams of silver. This is the immediate reason that China was so competitive in the production of manufactured goods.

Since prices as well as wages were lower in China than in Europe, low Chinese silver wages do not imply that the standard of living was lower in China. This is confirmed by Table 5.4, which shows the real wage of farm labour c. 1500, c. 1600, and c. 1750. The Chinese value shown for 1750 really applies to the late seventeenth century. The real wage of unskilled labour in India c. 1595 is also shown. It is not certain that this refers to farm labour; however, the similarity of the wage of farm and non-farm labour in pre-industrial Japan and in seventeenth-century Oxfordshire increases the interest in the Indian comparison, whatever the exact nature of the work being done.

Table 5.4 shows the well-established fall in English real wages after 1500. The level of wages in 1600 and in 1750 can be compared to the Asian economies. By this reckoning, European farm wages were slightly higher than Asian wages in the early modern period, but the difference is small.

Farm workers were poor and devoted large fractions of their income to bread or rice. In view of the weaknesses of the Asian price data for other commodities, it might be better to relate wages to the cost of a calorie implied by bread and rice rather than to the broader cost of living index. Table 5.5 does this. It shows the number of calories that could be purchased with a day's wage if all of the money was spent on rice or bread. The real wage was generally of the order of 10,000 calories per day. In interpreting this figure, allowance must be made for non-working days and for the other family members supported by the wage earner. Allowing a 300-day work year would reduce family calorie consumption to 8,219 (=10,000 * 300/365), which would support a wife and several children. Of course, if any of them generated income, as they often did, the situation would be eased further. The family could then buy items besides food and expand their consumption of animal products that cost more per calorie. Using the price of a calorie as a deflator indicates that there was little difference in the standard of living of English, Chinese, and Japanese farm workers. Italian farm workers, by these figures, were in a particularly difficult situation: their earnings

Table 5.4 Real wages of farm workers, CPI deflator

Source. Appendix, Tables 5.A1—5.A4.

Table 5.5 Real wages of farm workers, calorie price deflator

Notes: Figures in the table show the number of calories that can be purchased with a day's earnings if all of the money is spent on bread (in Europe) or rice (in Asia).

were not enough to support a family. Asia did not lag behind Europe according to Table 5.5.

If China was not far behind Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution, did the large difference in living standards in the twentieth century result from European advance or Chinese decline or a combination of the two? Buck's (1937: 306) famous survey of Chinese farms in the 1920s throws some light on the matter. He reports that the average full-time farm labourer in the Yangzi could buy 1,187 kg of rice if he spent his full yearly earnings (including the value of payments in kind) on that commodity. Assuming he worked 300 days per year, this corresponds to a daily ‘real’ wage of 14,125 calories in the 1920s. This is the ‘real’ wage using the rice price as the deflator and is, therefore, directly comparable to the figures in Table 5.5. By these figures, the standard of living in the Yangzi rose by over 40% between the early eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. This assessment of living standards is consistent with Brandt's (1989) interpretation of Chinese agricultural development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chinese poverty in the early twentieth century, by these figures, was not the result of Chinese decline but rather of growth that was slower than Europe's.

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