Table Of Contentcontents i
Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy
in the East and the West
ii contents
Global Economics History Series
Series Editors
Maarten Prak, Utrecht University
Jan Luiten van Zanden, Utrecht University
Editorial Board
Gareth Austin, Graduate Institute of
International and Development Studies, Geneva
Şevket Pamuk, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul
Kenneth L. Pomeranz, University of Chicago
Tirthankar Roy, London School of Economics and Political Science
Peer H.H. Vries, University of Vienna
VOLUME 10
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/gehs
contents iii
Technology, Skills and the
Pre-Modern Economy in the East
and the West
Essays dedicated to the memory of S.R. Epstein
Edited by
Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013
Cover illustration: Porcelain painting in China. Porcelain was a very popular product in Europe, which
iv contents
led to various attempts to imitate the quality of Chinese porcelain. Such attempts were
ultimately successful in the 18th century. Source: Walter A. Staehelin, Das Buch vom Porzellan: Herstel-
lung, Transport und Handel von Exportporzellan in China während des 18. Jahrhunderts, erläutert anhand
einer zeitgenössischen Folge chinesischer Aquarelle (Berne: Benteli, 1965); reproduced with the pub-
lisher’s permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Technology, skills and the pre-modern economy in the East and the West :
essays dedicated to the memory of S.R. Epstein / edited by Maarten Prak
and Jan Luiten van Zanden.
pages cm. -- (Global economics history series ; volume 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-24535-8 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN
978-90-04-25157-1 (e-book) 1. Guilds--History. 2. Skilled
labor--History. 3. Industrialization--History. 4. Technological
innovations--History. 5. Economic history. I. Epstein, Stephan R.,
1960-2007. II. Prak, Maarten Roy, 1955- III. Zanden, J. L. van
HD6456.T43 2013
330.9--dc23
2013009558
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ISSN 1872-5155
ISBN 978-90-04-24535-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-25157-1 (e-book)
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contents v
CONTENTS
Foreword by Patrick O’Brien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
List of Tables, Figures and Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
Introduction: Technology, Skills and the Pre-modern Economy in
the East and the West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Maarten Prak, Jan Luiten van Zanden
PART I
REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES
1. Transferring Technical Knowledge and Innovating in Europe,
c.1200 – c.1800 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
S.R. Epstein†
2. Apprenticeship and Industrialization in India, 1600-1930 . . . . . 69
Tirthankar Roy
3. Skills, ‘Guilds’, and Development: Asking Epstein’s Questions to
East Asian Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Kenneth Pomeranz
PART II
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVES
4. Mega-structures of the Middle Ages: The Construction of
Religious Buildings in Europe and Asia, c.1000-1500 . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Maarten Prak
5. The Technology and Teaching of Shipbuilding, 1300-1800 . . . . . 161
Richard W. Unger
vi contents
6. Moving Machine-makers: Circulation of Knowledge on Machine-
building in China and Europe between c. 1400 and the Early
Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Karel Davids
7. Guilds and Apprenticeship in China and Europe: The Jingdezhen
and European Ceramics Industries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Christine Moll-Murata
8. Labour Relations, Efficiency and the Great Divergence:
Comparing Pre-industrial Brick-making across Eurasia, 1500-
2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
Gijs Kessler and Jan Lucassen
9. Explaining the Global Distribution of Book Production before
1800 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
Jan Luiten van Zanden
Bibliography of the Published Works of S.R. Epstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
foreword vii
FOREWORD
Our dear friend Professor Stephan (Larry) Epstein, then Head of the
Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics, died
without warning on 3 February 2007 at the age of 46. His field—the eco-
nomic history of medieval and early modern Europe—demands more
credentials to become recognized as a scholar than almost any other
branch of the humanities. Thanks to schooling in Switzerland, higher edu-
cation in Italy and postgraduate research at Cambridge, Larry almost ef-
fortlessly acquired the palaeography, a full range of languages, the
comprehension of separated but rich histories of several Western countries,
a firm historiographical grasp of Smithian, Marxist, Weberian, Schumpet-
erian meta-narratives, as well as the rigour acquired from critical reading
in economics, sociology and, latterly, cognitive psychology to be much
more than a mere expert. Indeed his peers were beginning to see that
Larry Epstein would, in the fullness of time, take his place among a pan-
theon of scholars that includes the likes of Henri Pirenne, Marc Bloch,
Munia Postan, Frederick Lane and Fernand Braudel. As promise, that view
emerged in early career in the form of cum laude degrees, fellowships from
Trinity, Cambridge, a British Academy Readership, prizes from foundations
in Switzerland, Italy and England, accolades from academic journals, as
well as visiting professorships at New York University, the Dibner Institute
at MIT, Harvard and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Meanwhile his
smooth transition to a chair at the London School of Economics occurred
before his fortieth birthday.
At the moment when his vulnerable body gave out, Larry Epstein had
been publishing for a little over two decades, but had already written three
books (two of seminal significance), 16 articles (in prestigious journals)
and 26 essays in collections in the company of Europe’s most distinguished
medieval and early modern historians. All that, and with so much more on
the stocks and in his sights, validates the claim that Larry Epstein’s
untimely death represented something of a calamity for scholarship in
economic history and for our field’s potential for advances in economics,
historical sociology and global history. Furthermore, and as those fortunate
enough to be taught by him will testify, as a teacher Larry Epstein success-
fully combined high expectations with a vigorously critical academic
viii foreword
engagement and an ability to inspire, relate to and communicate with his
students.
My perusal of his historiographical essays suggests that the range of his
intellectual interests was nothing less than catholic. Larry Epstein’s own
writings are already acclaimed and likely to remain as exemplars for all
social scientists and historians who engage with the core concern of our
subject, namely ‘The Wealth and Poverty of Nations’ for generations to
come.
After several decades when the best minds in their discipline became
fascinated with the mathematical theology of general equilibrium theory
and the construction of macro production functions (prompted by the
rediscovery of German knowledge for which Douglass North obtained a
Nobel Prize), one of our subject’s absent parents, economics, now takes it
as axiomatic that institutions are behind those proximate determinants of
long run growth (land, labour, capital, technology and other inputs) as
specified, re-specified, measured and re-measured in whole libraries of
increasingly sophisticated exercises in production function analysis. Theo-
ries formulated to include institutional variables fill the journals. Mecha-
nisms have been elaborated and taxonomies imposed to expose their role
in explanations of the glaring fact that after more than three centuries of
modern economic growth, some countries are rich but most of the world’s
population continues to live in societies that remain poor, and even, in the
interiors of successful economies like China and India, subsist in condi-
tions of poverty.
Larry, along with the rest of his academic tribe, became delighted when
economists and sociologists brought their mathematical skills, penchant
for theory and knowledge of canonical writings in social science to bear
on two tenets that have always remained foundational for the discipline
of economic history; namely that institutions (notwithstanding the recent
return to geographical reductionism) have always been ‘highly’ significant
for long-run growth; and that their construction and destruction could only
be explained as part of a process that has been fundamentally political,
geopolitical and historical in origin and evolution.
While he kept up with relevant theory from economics, sociology, an-
thropology and cognitive psychology, Larry became more sceptical about
the insights that those disciplines offered as to where, when, how and why
history conditioned the formation of institutions that either promoted or
restrained economic growth. As he saw it, the way forward resided in his-
foreword ix
toricizing particular contexts in which specific institutions functioned,
which might (as his own work exemplifies) be local, national, continental
or even global in scale; and then systematically comparing those histories
of institutional development and their failures to develop over long spans
of time. He remained entirely optimistic that economic historians, once
reliable maps of relevant data were in place, could navigate the social
sciences towards more grounded and plausible general explanations and
theories for material progress. Furthermore, as several chastened speakers
in his presence may recall, Larry emphatically rejected any suggestion that
it was the mundane role of economic historians to simply test (and prefer-
ably validate) whatever ideologically charged theory or anachronistic and
Copernican-style hypotheses that other social sciences lobbed in their
direction. For him the ontological realities and contingencies of time and
place really mattered for histories of economic progress, stasis and regres-
sion.
At the moment of his untimely death, his enviable credentials, extraordi-
nary range of historical knowledge and capacity for rigorous analysis have
left us with three programmes for future work in the subject he loved. These
unfulfilled plans anticipated that historical perspectives on Europe’s expe-
rience with the construction and development of institutions (pursued
with respect to Marc Bloch’s admonitions for reciprocal comparisons)
could reveal sustainable generalizations concerned with leads and lags in
passages to modernity in the West. They could also include valid sugges-
tions as to the nature of European exceptionalism in a recently revealed
world of surprising institutional and economic resemblances that charac-
terized the advanced maritime economies of Eurasia before the Great
Divergence between occident and orient set in after the French Revolution.
Chapters for a seminal narrative that Larry might well have been writing
by now are already anticipated in two of his books and present in several
articles emerging from a decade of fruitful involvement as the leading fig-
ure in a European network for the historical study of human capital forma-
tion. His views are spelled out with brevity and clarity as contestable
generalizations in his essay, ‘The Rise of the West’, in honour of Michael
Mann’s acclaimed contribution to the social theory of power.1
1 Stephan, R. Epstein, ‘The Rise of the West’, in John A. Hall and Ralph Schroeder (eds),
An Anatomy of Power: The social theory of Michael Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2006), 233-62.
