COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
lesser or a greater measure of change would probably hâve provoked a
social and political crisis. [...] [This] helps to explain both the immobility
and the resilience of the last few centuries of the empire." (reprinted in
Another History, p. 100). What Li Bozhong has done is to add some interesting
and important détails. The Song style was in large measure a response
to the transition in Jiangnan from labour being the input in shortest
supply to to good-quality land being the scarcest input (as I hâve shown in
The Retreat of the Eléphants). My work with Su Ninghu since the early
1990s on the hydraulic history of Jiangnan also made it very clear to us
that in the Hangzhou Bay area, and nearby, there was a slow but increasingly
successful improvement in techniques from before the Song down to
at least the eighteenth century.
A conceptual problem with ail of Li's discussion is a tunnel-vision
insistence on treating 'productivity' as being defïned by yield per unit of
area. The core of productivity is the ratio of the energy input to the energy
output, and for Chinese lowland rice-farming it is vital to think not just in
terms of seed/yield ratios (for which data are scarce, but which mean more
than yields per hectare let alone the elusive mu) but in terms of the energy
spent in preparing and maintaining fields levelled and walled fields, sustaining
their fertility, which required collecting and applying manure continually,
the effort of transplanting and weeding, plus the building and
regular repairing of hydraulic Systems that are in most cases under nonstop
attack from hydrological pressures. It could even hâve been that the casual
broadcast-sown rice-farming, using ox-power for ploughing, found in
Guangnan-xi in the twelfth century {Pattern, p. 114) was more energyefficient
than the more 'advanced' forms in Jiangnan where Li says
"maximum productivity" was reached in mid-Qing (p. 173). Fine-tuning,
although often impressively ingenious, is at times less a sign of real progress
than a response to a shortage of resources. This discussion needs
rethinking in subtler terms.
Li does not discuss China as a whole, but for the most part only Jiangnan.
He does not, however, bring out the dynamic pattern hidden in
Shiba Yoshinobu's population figures for the préfectures of Jiangnan
during the Song period. If one calculâtes the annual rate of growth, one
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