The Economist has an interesting review of a new book entitled Peak Human, by Johan Norberg. This caught my eye:
Song emperors were much keener on the rule of law than their predecessors, who tended to rule by whim. To enforce predictable rules, they hired lots of officials via meritocratic exams. The first Song emperor enacted the “unconventional policy reform” of “[not] killing officials who disagreed with him”.
Peasants were granted property rights and allowed to move around, rather than being tied to a lord’s land. Farm output more than doubled, and the extra food supported much larger cities. In the 1100s Kaifeng, the capital, had 65 times the population of London. Canals made domestic trade easier. International trade followed. . . . Artisans devised new industrial processes, such as burning coal to smelt iron. The invention of movable type in the 1040s allowed the printing of books so cheap that one philosopher griped that people would stop learning the classics by heart. By 1200 Song China had the world’s richest economy, a merchant navy with “the potential to discover the world” and a habit of tinkering that could have brought on an industrial revolution centuries before Europe’s.
Unfortunately, the Chinese golden age did not last, as the Ming dynasty switched from classical liberalism to statist nationalism:
Free movement within the country was ended. Free exchange gave way to forced labour. Foreign trade was made punishable by death, and even the construction of ocean-worthy ships was banned. Pining for the good old days, a Ming emperor brought back the fashions of 500 years before. Men caught with the wrong hairstyle were castrated, along with their barbers. Largely thanks to reactionary Ming policies, Chinese incomes fell by half between 1080 and 1400. The country did not recover its mojo until it opened up again in the late 20th century.
By modern standards, all ancient civilizations were highly flawed. Nonetheless, Norberg shows that at least in a relative sense, the golden ages of civilizations in many different eras tended to occur when political and economic policies were marginally less restrictive.
Song Dynasty Junk Ship, photo by meckleychina (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)
READER COMMENTS
SI
Jun 18 2025 at 8:08pm
It is misleading to blame the Ming Dynasty (began 1368) for economic decline from 1080 to 1400, a period largely under the Yuan Dynasty, where wars and the Black Death caused setbacks. The claim that a Ming emperor castrated men for hairstyles seems false (likely confusing with the Qing’s Queue Order), as no evidence supports such Ming practices.
Mactoul
Jun 18 2025 at 11:52pm
Regarding Korea and Japan as within China’s cultural zone, the question arises why didn’t the industrial revolution took place in Korea or Japan, protected as they were from political whims of Chinese rulers but enjoying benefit of innovations and ideas from the Chinese mainland.
Scott Sumner
Jun 19 2025 at 1:09am
Wasn’t Japan fairly closed to the outside world until the mid- to late 1800s?
Mactoul
Jun 19 2025 at 7:05am
Japan was open earlier and there were many Japanese converts to Christianity too. The Christianity was then violently suppressed and the country closed foreign contracts,
But, we are talking of a much earlier period. There was certainly a lot of Chinese cultural influence–Buddhism, language, the script, architecture.
Scott Sumner
Jun 19 2025 at 10:31am
“But, we are talking of a much earlier period.”
Ok, but that’s true of all countries, isn’t it? The industrial revolution began in Britain in the 18th century.
john hare
Jun 19 2025 at 4:23am
Somewhere in my book pile is one suggesting that at least one of the Chinese fleets made it to both continents of the Americas in the early 1400s. If true, the Chinese missed a major opportunity almost a century before Columbus. I’m not knowledgeable enough to evaluate the evidence in the book.
Scott Sumner
Jun 19 2025 at 10:29am
Yes, that story is true. After returning home, they decided not to do further exploration.
Roger McKinney
Jun 19 2025 at 11:17am
This historical evidence for the superiority of capitalism is enormous! So why do PhD economists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, theologians and others promote socialism? Clearly, it’s not because of history, facts, or logic. Socialism is purely emotional, based mostly on envy.
As Mises wrote, the “intellectuals” are envious of the wealth and prestige of business people whom they consider inferiors.
Scott H.
Jun 20 2025 at 11:39am
The purported why has always been clear: ethics.
And this goes back to Prof. Sumner’s post a few days ago about people not believing what he was teaching in his Econ classes (about subjects like supply and demand). It’s not that people didn’t understand supply and demand. They were not being rigorously taught that allowing the free interaction and consequences of supply and demand is ethical. That requires a special focus in my opinion.
In fairness, the class might move at an unacceptably slow rate if taught in this manner. When I was an MBA student, I took a class that was essentially an ethics of econ, markets, and price theory class. When that was the primary emphasis, it was very slow going to get past the years of cultivated prejudice against the concepts presented.
Warren Platts
Jun 26 2025 at 2:05pm
The Ming were a so-called Han dynasty, but were they not famous for their ceramics? The later Qing (Manchu) Empire, however, was quite successful: they expanded the borders of the Chinese Empire further than practically anybody else besides Genghis Khan. The current Communist Empire is not nearly as big as the Qing Empire was at its height!
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