The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

What seems to have happened is that some time between 1700 and 1800, the Japanese collectively gave up the plough in favour of the hoe because people were cheaper to hire than draught animals. This was a time of rapid population expansion, made possible by the high productivity of paddy rice, naturally fertilised by nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria in the water and therefore needing little manure (though human night soil was assiduously collected, carefully stored and diligently applied to the land). With abundant food and a fastidious approach to hygiene, the Japanese population boomed to the point where land was scarce, labour was cheap and it was literally more economic to use human labour to hoe the land than to set aside precious acres for pasture to support oxen or horses to draw a plough. So the Japanese, to a spectacular extent, retreated from technology and trade and reduced their demands on merchants as they became more self-sufficient. The market for technology of all kinds atrophied. They even gave up capital-intensive guns in favour of labour-intensive swords. A good Japanese sword had a blade of strong though soft steel, but with a brittle, hard edge made lethally sharp by incessant hammering.