Feeding the People, Starving the State: China’s Agricultural Revolution of the 17th/18th Centuries, paper prepared for a conference in

agriculture stagnated for centuries in pre-industrial China. This is usually considered to be in sharp contrast to pre-industrial Europe, where an “agricultural revolution ” occurred in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries (Overton 1996), built on technical advances imported from the Low Countries and involving new crops, new crop rotations, and new national patterns of land use. Of course, it is widely recognized that China’s population grew massively in its pre-industrial period – increasing from roughly 120 to 150 million in the late Ming (c. 1620) to 350 million c. 1800 (Lee and Wang 1999, pp. 6, 27) – and that throughout this period, Chinese agricultural output kept pace with population. Thus there was growth in Chinese agriculture, but this is thought to have a taken a particular form, commonly called “involution ” (Huang 2002, Brenner and Isett 2002). In involutionary growth, the expansion of output reflects neither technical change in agriculture, nor gains in the productivity of labor. Rather, gains in output simply arise from the more intensive application of traditional and long-practiced techniques (e.g. putting more care and effort into seeding, transplantation, fertilizing, weeding, and harvesting). Since such techniques are labor-intensive, increased effort in their application raises the input of labor per unit of land farmed, in order to increase output per unit of land