The Transformation of the World (47 page)

In many parts of India, farmers drove agriculture to the limits of the possible, mostly by using poorer soils that required a greater input of labor and reliable irrigation. Often these conditions were not present. The race to produce for export markets resulted in large-scale privatization of common land; shepherds were driven into mountainous country with their animals; trees and bushes were cleared away. Ecological stress on soil reserves was therefore part of the fateful modernization crisis. The growing economic vulnerability of families and individuals led to an upward spiral of debt, and urban moneylenders and their village agents, alongside grain speculators, were a great threat to the existence of the peasantry. The lack of adequate communal or government-controlled credit for small landowners fueled the debt spiral, which the colonial regime shrugged off as a consequence of the free play of market forces. The landless seem to have been the hardest-hit by famine, neither having their own means of production nor being able to assert ancient rights, however rudimentary, to the moral economy of mutual aid. The evolution from harvest problems to a full-blown famine did not depend only on the “free play” of market forces and self-interested policies on the part of the colonial rulers. Peasant producers were mostly cut off from the market and exposed to the machinations of landowners, merchants, and moneylenders, many of whom tried to profit from the crisis. The distribution of power in rural societies was one of the causes of starvation.
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In northern China, nightmare scenarios similar to those in India played themselves out between 1876 and 1879.
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The Great North China Famine, which claimed 9 to 13 million lives (most of them from typhoid), was the most serious and geographically most widespread human disaster in any time of peace during the Qing era; the region had seen nothing like it since 1786. The only Westerners who observed it were not colonial officials but individual missionaries and consuls. It is therefore little documented in Western sources, whereas Chinese sources are filled with detail. The sense of horror that the Indian famine aroused abroad was due not least to the spectacular photographs of its victims, the first of their kind to be published anywhere in the world. Very few similar pictures exist from northern China; the famine there was in media terms the last of the “old type.” Nearly a year passed before foreigners in Shanghai or Hong Kong became aware of its scale in a remote province such as Shaanxi. But then a private China Famine Relief Fund was soon set up in Britain, which transferred funds to China in an early charitable application of telegraph technology.
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Unlike India, northern China had not yet been opened up by the railroad and was all but untouched by capitalism. The province of Shanxi, for example, was linked to the coast only by narrow, frequently impassable roads that wound across high mountains. Aid from other regions of the country was more difficult to organize than in India, especially as the Great Canal, which for centuries had supplied the capital Beijing with rice from the lower Yangtze region, had silted
up and fallen into disrepair. The famine-stricken regions had long been among the most precarious economically and the least productive in their agriculture. China's real granaries—the lower Yangtze and the southern coastal strip—were not hit by the natural disaster that lay at the origin of the famine. In the end the Chinese state did undertake considerable relief efforts, but the results were paltry in comparison with the size of the challenge, or indeed with some of the great relief campaigns of the eighteenth century. But this discrepancy had less to do with a doctrine of cheap government plus free markets than with the fact that the Qing Dynasty had been financially drained by the suppression of the Taiping and Muslim rebels. In contrast to the Indian famine, the one in North China was more a crisis of production than a crisis of distribution. It broke out in an ecologically precarious niche, where for centuries state intervention had been able to ward off the worst consequences of disastrous weather conditions. The limits to such intervention were now greater than in the past.

A “Land Stalked by Hunger”?

The famine of 1876–79 leads us on to the general standard of living in nineteenth-century China. Had it really become a “land stalked by hunger”? The question is so interesting partly because recent research, in both China and the West, has painted an extremely rosy picture of the eighteenth-century Chinese economy, confirming the favorable reports of missionaries at the time. The variants of agriculture in the Qing Empire ranged from pasture farming in the grasslands of Mongolia to the highly productive mix of rice terraces and fish ponds in the south to the export of products such as tea and sugar. But however hard it may be to make a generally applicable statement in this regard, there is now agreement among experts that until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Chinese agriculture kept a fast-growing population adequately fed. The claim that eighteenth-century Chinese peasants lived at least as well as and probably better than their counterparts in the France of Louis XV—a claim that people in the West long found beyond belief—has something to be said for it in the state of our present knowledge.

The comparison with eastern Europe is certainly favorable. Almost constantly one district official or another would report food supply problems from a part of the vast empire and ask the imperial court for help. The Chinese state responded to such appeals on a scale that had no parallel in Europe at that time; the care and maintenance of its famed system of public grain reserves, which reached its peak of efficiency under the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1737–96), was one of the principal duties of local officials, and the relief it gave in an emergency was several times greater than the tax yield in a normal year. The emperor and provincial governors personally concerned themselves with the functioning of this system. The dynasty of the Qing conquerors from Manchuria derived some of their legitimacy as rulers of China from their success in ensuring internal peace and public welfare. When urban leaders other than government officials
began in the 1790s to take on philanthropic commitments, the first goal they set themselves was to build up private grain reserves.
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The state granaries also had ongoing responsibilities. Especially in Beijing and its surroundings, they took delivery of taxes and tribute in grain and even sold it in normal times at below the market price, keeping a close eye on private traders to prevent hoarding. The mixed state-private grain market that developed in this way had to be repeatedly kept on a middle course, and in general this was successfully achieved. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, 5 percent of China's total grain harvest was being stored in public granaries. The system proved its worth under the rule of the Qianlong Emperor. Despite numerous droughts and floods, no famine remotely comparable to that of the 1870s is known to have occurred in the eighteenth century.
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It is not yet fully understood how Chinese agriculture fared in the nineteenth century. The climate seems to have worsened after the turn of the century, and there was a rise in the number of natural disasters. At the same time, the capacity of the state to intervene proactively in society gradually declined. Little use was made of the usual method of tax deferrals or exemptions, while fewer and fewer disaster areas received old-style direct support from the government. The general plight of the Qing Dynasty was palpable in the lower ethical standards of public officials and the spread of corruption, which must have negatively affected the complicated system of grain storage. Grain rotted away in poorly maintained storehouses, and there was a failure to keep the reserves regularly replenished. When the Opium War then opened a long series of conflicts with the Great Powers, and the Taiping Revolution shortly afterward started a chain of internal revolts, the Qing state began to set new priorities for its dwindling resources. The supply of food to the army would now take precedence over civilian disaster relief. This reorientation contributed to the virtual disappearance of the granary system in the 1860s, a hundred years after the height of its functioning.
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Yet famine on the scale of the 1870s was a unique event. It may well be that until the 1920s Chinese agriculture was still capable of providing a reasonably tolerable average supply of food to the population.

Eurasia as a whole differed from North America in that its western and far eastern (Japanese) extremities left the constant threat of famine behind only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the rest of the continent followed much later. This did not mean that all sections of society in Japan and Western Europe were now free of undernourishment or malnutrition, or that individuals were protected from extreme poverty, but it did mean that the specter of inescapable collective famine and widespread deaths from starvation was a thing of the past. Another ancient phenomenon also became unusual in nineteenth-century Europe: the starving of cities into submission through siege warfare. One notable exception was the siege of Paris in 1870–71, when the German blockade of food and fuel was partly responsible for a higher-than-usual number of civilian deaths, especially among the very young and the very old.
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Ten years earlier, in
the winter of 1861–62, there had been a similar episode in China, when imperial troops had besieged the city of Hangzhou in the hands of Taiping rebels, and two months of economic blockade had produced 30,000 to 40,000 deaths from starvation among the civilian population.
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During the First World War, one of the few examples of such a blockade was that which Ottoman troops mounted in 1915–16 against the British garrison at Kut on the Tigris, although there were more soldiers than civilians inside the fortress. During the Second World War, this form of warfare was practiced against the city of Leningrad, with the new impetus of an ideological war of annihilation. Of a different order was the blockading of whole countries and regions—a strategy twice implemented on a large scale, each time with grave consequences for the civilian population. In 1806 Napoleon imposed the so-called Continental System against Britain, which retaliated by taking up the idea in an escalating spiral. And between August 1914 (a fortiori 1916) and April 1919, Britain maintained a blockade against Germany.

7 Agricultural Revolutions

The nineteenth-century changes in the geography of shortage and surplus must be seen against the wider background of a global development of agriculture.
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The importance of agriculture everywhere at that time cannot be overestimated: most countries were still agrarian on the eve of the First World War; the world was still a world of tillers of the soil. This did not mean that the societies in question were mired in that general stagnation that city dwellers liked to ascribe to the alien world of the peasantry. After the middle of the nineteenth century, world agriculture experienced an extraordinary boom, most evident in the land area under cultivation. In the rice economies of East and Southeast Asia, there was literally no space for such expansion. But in Europe, Russia, and the neo-European overseas societies, total arable land rose by a factor of 1.7—from 255 million hectares in 1860 to 439 million hectares in 1910—which was a rate of growth without precedent in history over a period of five decades. Western Europe had only a minor share in this expansion, and the settlement and agricultural utilization of the vast Canadian prairie began only after 1900. The decisive advances were in the United States and Russia.
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Only in a few countries for which estimates are possible—above all, Britain and France—did the total area of land given over to field and bush crops decline between 1800 and 1910. But there is not a direct correlation between industrial growth and a decline in agricultural acreage, since in the United States, Germany, Russia, and Japan (which all had industrial structures at the latest by 1880) the extensive development of agriculture continued.
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In the years from 1870 to 1913, world agricultural output grew by an estimated annual average of 1.06 percent—a rate far higher than any achieved between the two world wars. The per capita increase was smaller, of course. But annual growth of 0.26 percent meant that, by the eve of the First World War, more food
and agrarian raw materials were available per capita of the world's population than there had been in the middle of the previous century. This outcome was made up of very different trends in individual countries. But the advances were by no means concentrated only in the North Atlantic space: output growth was higher in Russia than in the United States, and countries as different in their agrarian structure as Argentina and Indonesia occupied positions at the top of the league table.
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The expansion of production concealed huge differences in productivity, and hence in the ratio of resource inputs to outputs. The yield per hectare in American wheat production and in Indian rice-growing, for example, was roughly comparable at the end of the nineteenth century, but productivity in the United States was fifty times higher than in India.
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The international trade in agricultural goods rose even more sharply than production, although at a somewhat slower pace than world trade as a whole. New export regions emerged for wheat, rice, and cotton, and challenged the position of traditional producers. Agrarian frontiers opened up in the American Midwest and in Kazakhstan, but also in West Africa, Burma, and Vietnam. In Cochin China—that is, the Mekong delta and its hinterland, which were scarcely populated before the arrival of the French—a dynamic rice-exporting sector geared itself mainly to southern China, while Burmese rice was sold chiefly to India. Between 1880 and 1900 the area used for rice nearly doubled and the volume of exports tripled.
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New tropical products such as coffee, cocoa, and palm oil won overseas markets for themselves. “Developed” and “backward” countries alike offered agrarian products for sale on the world market; Britain obtained its wheat from the United States and Russia as well as from India.
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