Introduction

Any evaluation of either the standard of living or subsistence security in eighteenth-century China will have many gaps. Even for China's richest and best documented region—the Yangzi Delta, with roughly 31,000,000 people (using a narrow definition) in the late eighteenth century—there is a great deal we do not know.

Also at issue, of course, is the relationship between ‘standard of living' and subsistence security—a relationship that was becoming increasingly indirect in early modern Europe, as average real incomes rose while the distribution of income became more unequal. Indeed, the chapters by Hoffman et al. (Chapter 6, this volume) and Allen (Chapter 5, this volume) strongly suggest that both these trends were more pronounced than we realized, in part because rich and poor consumed different market baskets, whose relative prices underwent very significant shifts. When we add the cost of housing to the standard Phelps Brown price index—which is largely focused on the commodities purchased by the poor—trends in their real income become even more unfavourable in most of Europe's early modern cities. On the other hand, once we add some of the goods and services purchased by wealthier people (in ever-increasing amounts) during the early modern era, it becomes likely that for a significant minority of the population, the standard of living was improving considerably more rapidly than we had realized, raising the overall European average. My own Sino- European comparisons have been centred largely on the poor majority in both societies; and while there were groups of ‘middling' and wealthy Chinese who also enjoyed rising fortunes in the eighteenth century, we are nowhere near being able to estimate their numbers.

been a smaller percentage of the general population than in at least northwestern Europe; in that case, there would be more difference than I had seen between average standards of living in eighteenth-century China and Europe, even if my comparisons of the relative well-being of the majority in each society are roughly accurate. In what follows, I hope to at least make clear what we do and do not know about subsistence security, average living standards, and the living standards of the poor, and to point to places where East—West comparisons along these multiple axes may differ from each other. Finally, I discuss a number of reasons why both average standards of living and subsistence security may have declined sharply in some parts of China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is important both in its own right and to reinforce the plausibility of relatively high eighteenth-century estimates.

2.