Analytical reading Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Analytical reading - Essay Example Huang argues that Pomeranz and other scholars who write about the Chinese and European economies do from the point of view of their own countries and not from the point of view of the region in question. This is known as a lack of ethnocentricity in political science. What this means is that the political scientists resort to bias in favor of their own regions and also lack what is known as perceiving the world through the eyes of the inhabitants who are specific to the region in question. This apparent blindness towards the subject area is the lack of ethnocentric bias and this means that the scholars do not judge the subject material from the point of view of the subjects themselves. Huang is even handed when he points out studies by Chinese scholars fare no better when it comes to discourse on the European region and hence it is by no means settled that there is anything specific about claims made by both European and Chinese scholars. Hence, the criticism that Huang levels at Pomeranz is borne out by the lack of objectivity in Pomeranz’s analysis about the Chinese economy in the 18th century. Huang and Pomeranz contrast the differing ways in which the Chinese and European peasants went about their occupations by listing the differences that range from simple dietary practices to differences in clothing and other facets of agrarian life. Pomeranz quotes extensively from the data on the food habits of the peasants that include their calorie intake and other parameters that proved the premise that the Chinese were no worse when it came to food intake than their European counterparts. He further compares the non-grain intake with the consumption of meat and comes to the premise that the Chinese fared badly on this count due to the fact that they were pastoral in nature as compared to the meat eating Europeans. Whereas Huang