Metallurgy output in the Roman and Han empires

[Big Orange]

Then there is the decline of the multilayered, well maintained roads that linked the Provinces in the 1st to 4th centuries: at its maximum extent the road network went from Scotland all the way down to Syria. Once the laying down and upkeep of Roman roads gradually ceased from the 4th century onwards, little wonder the passage of goods, material and people over long distances and in large quantities was seriously hamstrung, with ore mining and processing becoming much more localized.

Even well over a millennia later when Europe was rebounding with printing presses and matchlock firearms the roads throughout the continent remained awful and bare, routinely rendered useless by bad weather. Things only improved when Pierre-Marie-Jérôme Trésaguet and John Loudon McAdam reintroduced multilayered roads in Europe around the late 1700s to early 1800s. And there was a significant population crash in wake of the fall of Rome: the garrison town of York around the 3rd century had perhaps over 20, 000 inhabitants while 1350s London had roughly 80, 000 inhabitants.

The Chinese not having as much ore as Europe is an interesting revelation. I guess that's partially why they adopted the use of paper currency notes first.

[Iosef Cross]

In comparison, therefore, the Han Empire appears to be severely less industrialized/wealthy, at least as far as minerals are counted.

Sources:
Scheidel, W., The monetary systems of the Han and Roman Empires, in: Scheidel, W. (ed.) Rome and China. Comparative perspectives on Ancient World Empires, pg. 137-208.

I think that this article also adds that the total purchasing power of the Roman money stock was probably several times than the Chinese money stock:

Due to the deficiencies of the evidence, my estimates for size of both the Han and the Roman money stocks vary by a factor of four or five. However, despite these very considerable margins of uncertainty, even the broadest range of guesses for the money stock in Han China of between 6 and 28 billion liters of grain equivalent barely overlaps with the much higher range from 22 to 90 billion liters proposed for the Roman empire.

With means that the Han was not only less advanced in mining and metallurgy, but in other areas as well.

Would you mind giving a proper source? Page 52 is not really helpful, seeing how his work does not start before 138.

It is the page of the article PDF's version. So it would be page 188, if 137 is page 1. Did you read the entire paper? It is there.

[Iosef Cross]

I'll try to find sources for it, but Ming China had a production (I've researched it before) of iron of around 400,000 tons a year. This was however in the 1400s - 1500s CE, and China was much more extensively populated. However it's generally known that much more iron was available in medieval Europe, too; pre-industrial figures for England are still a substantial fraction of the Roman Empire's figures, for instance. This is one of the subtle aspects of history--that the availability of iron tools increased substantially throughout the pre-industrial revolution iron age--which belies the idea of any kind of truly grand collapse in the wake of the "fall" of Rome. I suspect Chinese nationalists and so on ignore this point and tend to assume that China remained fairly constant from the Han to the Ming.

I have read that in the 16th century, Europe was producing 60,000 tons of iron per year, compared to the 85,000 tons to 120,000 tons for the Roman Empire, as provided by Thanas. I don't have the sources in hand for the 60,000 tons figure.

Also, the Romans used other metals more extensively than the medieval and early modern europe, with used iron as their standard metal for everything.

But European metal production surpassed the Roman levels by the 18th century, UK in 1780, however, was producing nearly 100,000 tons of iron per year, a country of only 10 million people, several times the per capita production of the Roman empire.

[Iosef Cross]

There is the PDF of the paper The monetary systems of the Han and Roman empires, Walter Scheidel, Stanford University:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/sc ... 020803.pdf

This page also has some interesting working papers of Scheidel:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/papers/ ... eidel.html

[Thanas]

There is the PDF of the paper The monetary systems of the Han and Roman empires, Walter Scheidel, Stanford University:

http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/sc ... 020803.pdf

This page also has some interesting working papers of Scheidel:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/papers/ ... eidel.html

Thanks. That'll come in handy. (I read it in print, hence the confusion).