China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (review)

Reviews 287 R. Bin Wong. China Transformed: Historical Change and theLimits ofEuropean Experience. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. x, 327 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-8014-3254-5. Paperback, isbn 0-8014-8327-1. Here is comparative history ofa new sort. Never before has a China historian produced a book of such vast scope that carefully and deliberately brings China and Europe into a single framework of analysis, one that evenhandedly addresses both ends ofEurasia with no prior assumptions about die universality ofEuropean themes. It is, the author tells us, "primarily a book about Chinese history and secondarily a book about European history" (p. 8). It is very much concerned with explaining what European history does not teach us about Chinese history. But in the end R. Bin Wong believes tiiat there is much to be gained by putting diese two histories side by side and viewing their similarities and differences afresh. Heretofore, he contends, scholars have mosdy interpreted the history of the modern world from a European point ofview, employing Western concepts and categories and evaluating the history ofall peoples by standards drawn from European experience. Professor Wong is entirely willing to give Europe its due, but he insists that the world outside Europe had its own "historical dynamics of change"; these dynamics in some ways parallel those ofEurope and in other ways do not. Looking at similarities and differences, he argues, can bring us to a new understanding ofhistory not only in the world outside Europe, notably in China, but in Europe, too. Wong is an admirer ofFernand Braudel and Charles Tilly. He ranges across centuries—and, on occasion, millennia—with a reach that fully matches Braudel's, and he zestfully accepts Tilly's challenge to analyze big structures and large processes by drawing huge comparisons. He has chosen to compare what he calls "the two master processes ofmodern European history"—the development of capitalism and the formation ofnational states—with economic and political changes in China. His main period of study is from about 1600 to the present. His strategy is to begin with similarities and then proceed from that foundation to assess differences. He first employs a wide-angle lens to frame the subject as broadly as possible. He then shifts to closer analysis ofnarrower subtopics and gradually moves back up to the middle range and above. A final chapter sums up the implications ofhis findings for the larger issues ofcomparative history and social dieory. The book is divided into tiiree parts. The first, "Economic History and the© 1999 by University Problem ofDevelopment," argues that from about the sixteenth century to the ofHawaii Pressiate eighteenth or early nineteenth there was no sharp economic divergence between China and Europe. Wong examines patterns of agricultural production, handicrafts, trade, labor and credit markets, per capita incomes, social structure 288 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 and questions of class differentiation, demographic patterns and life expectancy, and issues ofproto-industrialization and its connection with both industrialization and de-industrialization. In all this he finds numerous variations but insists that the simüarities are far more impressive: only around the end ofthe eighteenth century did a new world ofpossibilities emerge in Europe, propelling parts of it into the age of full industrial capitalism. Wong pays careful attention to debates among Europeanists about the course of the industrial revolution. He comes down rather strongly on the side of diose who have stressed tiiat a cluster of technological innovations combined with the opening ofnew energy sources and die progression from coal to steam to chemicals and electricity, leading to immensely enlarged production possibilities in the nineteentii century. China's lack of comparable access to mineral sources ofenergy was one marked contrast with Europe, but Wong also calls attention to another —the problems caused by China's size. Here he relies especially on the economist Thomas G. Rawski, who has pointed out tiiat two regions of China, possessing only one-seventh ofthe country's population in 1933, accounted for two-thirds of China's industrial output. This tends to undercut cultural and ideological explanations of China's uneven development and ofthe economic gap that opened between China and parts ofEurope from...