The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
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The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.
Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.
Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.
Kenneth Pomeranz
Kenneth Pomeranz is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.
Read more from Kenneth Pomeranz
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Reviews for The Great Divergence
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Pomeranz de-centers Europe, in part by emphasizing “reciprocal comparisons between parts of Europe and parts of China, India and so on that seem…to have been similarly positioned within their continental worlds.” (10) The use of nations as the basis of analysis makes little sense, he suggests, when China was as large and populous as Europe, and the Yangzi Delta was equivalent in many ways to England. (13) “Our perception of an interacting system from which one part benefited more than others,” Pomeranz says, “does not in itself justify calling that part the ‘center’ and assuming that it is the unshaped shaper of everything else. We will see, instead, vectors of influence moving in various directions.” (10)
Pomeranz suggests that the timely discovery of America by Europeans provided them an opportunity to avoid moving onto the type of labor-intensive, land-scarce economic path taken by India and China. The discovery of coal was the other major element of the divergence, although in a very interesting aside, Pomeranz calls attention to the influence of the addictive New World stimulants sugar, tobacco, cocoa, and coffee, which along with tea became early mainstays of a mass consumer market. (281) Overall, he concludes that “forces outside the market and conjunctures beyond Europe deserve a central place in explaining why western Europe’s otherwise largely unexceptional core achieved unique breakthroughs and wound up as the privileged center of the nineteenth century’s new world economy.” (297)