A “Fertilizer Revolution”?

Abstract

The adoption of beancake, a new commercial fertilizer, marked a significant technological advance in Jiangnan agriculture in the late Ming. The popularity of beancake was a result of two developments: the severe fertilizer shortage in Jiangnan and the importation of Manchurian bean products during the Qing. However, recent studies by Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong exaggerate the volume of imports from Manchuria by ten to twenty-five times. They also ignore the limited time frame of the importation of beancake, for it was mainly concentrated in three or four decades during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, though Manchuria had a great potential to produce sufficient beancake to relieve the chronic fertilizer shortage in Jiangnan, this potential remained largely unrealized before foreign countries became involved in the trade. The nineteenth-century agricultural stagnancy in Jiangnan did not result from the absence of the kind of “geographic luck” enjoyed by England, as Pomeranz claims. Instead, Jiangnan failed to take advantage of its privileged access to Manchuria to improve its agriculture.