I have been giving a great deal of thought to the origins of modern commerce the so-called industrial revolution.
I believe I have managed to do original thinking about this because it is a subject mostly treated by historians. It is seldom looked at by people with a business background that I have.
I further believe that the current world of commerce gives us a different perspective on what may have been the origins of industrial commerce.
When I mentioned my interests to David Boxenhorn in Jerusalem his response was wise. The commercial explosion happened once and the sparks from that fire spread to many parts of the world. It is not so important what caused that fire because the explosion has change the world already.
My concern turns out to be the question of whether the sparks that created the fire have been suppressed by the modern Lefty world sufficiently for America to lose its driving role. The role that keeps commerce alive in the world today.
That is the reason for my blog title.
In the world in which the sparks of the American commercial genius have been carried to every corner, there are a few exceptional cases. Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Each of these were traditional societies where radical change permitted the explosion of modern commerce to occur. Each was a non-European unique situation that made modern commerce viable.
Taiwan had been invaded by Chiang Kai Shek in 1946 and the traditional Taiwanese society was pushed aside.
Japan was invaded by Adm. Perry in 1853 and Japan decided to make radical changes in its structure to accommodate the new outside world of industrial commerce.
We find the same thing in Korea where the American army arrived for a war in 1950 and created the commercial infrastructure that later exploded into a commercial society.
So what happened in China? The subject of this blog.
First we must examine the unique circumstances about the first industrial commercial revolution. Holland was the home of modern commerce in the 1600's. Holland invaded England in 1687 and dramatically changed England into a Protestant outpost for commerce. Both Holland and England then became a joint global empire.
For the previous 50,000 years humans had been trapped in the Malthusian cycle of increased food production resulting in population increases to destroy the productive benefits. What the explosion of the British-Dutch Empire provided was the export of the surplus population as the productivity of the food supply increased. Simultaneous with the export of the surplus population to the Empire the exported citizens then had the benefit of forming societies without the traditional hereditary hierarchy. It was these newly freed citizens of the Empire that led to international trade and commercial growth.
These exported citizens to new worlds were the essential root of the commercial industrial revolution.
A similar social decapitation of hereditary hierarchy and newfound freedom for the invading citizens explains the commercial explosions in Taiwan, Japan and Korea.
Now back to China.
It was chairman Mao who slaughtered 60 million people in the 1960s in China. He especially focused on the hereditary hierarchy. It was this Mao cleansing of the Chinese society that allowed for the explosion in commerce in the 1980s.
Killing that many people is not the recommended way to jumpstart a commercial society but it does help us to go back and understand the other circumstances where commerce began and where it exploded.
(I have not forgotten that Japan conquered Taiwan, Korea and China but Japan did not destroy the hereditary hierarchy and release the entreprenurial spirit. It may have created some infra-structure such as banks and telecom.)