The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. by Kenneth Pomeranz (PDF)

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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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Winner of the 2000 John K. Fairbank Prize, American Historical Association””Co-Winner of the 2001 Book Prize, World History Association””One of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2000″”The vast international disparity in incomes and standards of living between Western Europe and its offshoots on the one hand, and most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America on the other, is a striking feature of the modern world. Pomeranz’s study is an important addition to the literature that challenges elements of every major interpretation of the European take-off.” ― Choice”A profoundly though-provoking book which will change the terms of the debate about the origins of capitalism, the rise of the West and the fall of the East.”—Jack Goody, Times Higher Education Supplement”This book makes, bar none, the biggest and most important contribution to our new understanding of the causes and mechanisms that brought about the great divergence’ between the West and the rest of China in particular. . . . An entirely new and refreshing departure. Although he makes new comparisons between Europe, China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Pomeranz also connects all these and more in a bold new sweep that should immediately make all previous and most contemporary related work obsolescent.”—Andre Gunde Frank, Journal of Asian Studies”This book is very important and will have to be taken seriously by anyone who thinks that explaining the Industrial Revolution . . . is crucial to our understanding of the modern world. . . . [A] book so rich that fresh insights emerge from virtually every page.”—Robert B. Marks, American Historical Review”Exhaustively researched and brilliantly argued. . . . Suffice it to say that The Great Divergence is undoubtedly one of the most sophisticated and significant pieces of cliometric scholarship to be published of late, especially in the field of world history.””—Edward R. Slack, Jr., Journal of World History Review “Pomeranz uses that European invention―economics―to overturn Eurocentrism, establishing beyond cavil a New Fact in our world. Never again will Europeans imagine they stood alone in the doorway of economic growth. Pomeranz and his colleagues in the new sinology have reintroduced the Central Kingdom and its stunning historical sources, and Pomeranz has written the one essential book.”―Deirdre McClosky, University of Iowa”Pomeranz uses a mixture of institutional forces and technological/geological luck to explain how an economic and ecological ‘tie game’ suddenly became a victory for western Europe over China. He combines global imagination with the scientific detail needed to make his points hold firm. The Great Divergence should command widespread respect.”―Peter H. Lindert, University of California, Davis”A truly magisterial effort based on an immense knowledge of the field, a vast amount of reading, and on close and careful analysis, informed by both social science and history.”―Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University”This is an outstanding book, painstaking and devastating in its attack on received wisdom, supported by a wealth of solid evidence and elegant argument.”―Jack A. Goldstone, University of California, Davis From the Back Cover “Pomeranz uses that European invention–economics–to overturn Eurocentrism, establishing beyond cavil a New Fact in our world. Never again will Europeans imagine they stood alone in the doorway of economic growth. Pomeranz and his colleagues in the new sinology have reintroduced the Central Kingdom and its stunning historical sources, and Pomeranz has written the one essential book.”–Deirdre McClosky, University of Iowa”Pomeranz uses a mixture of institutional forces and technological/geological luck to explain how an economic and ecological ‘tie game’ suddenly became a victory for western Europe over China. He combines global imagination with the scientific detail needed to make his points hold firm. The Great Divergence should command widespread respect.”–Peter H. Lindert, University of California, Davis”A truly magisterial effort based on an immense knowledge of the field, a vast amount of reading, and on close and careful analysis, informed by both social science and history.”–Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University”This is an outstanding book, painstaking and devastating in its attack on received wisdom, supported by a wealth of solid evidence and elegant argument.”–Jack A. Goldstone, University of California, Davis About the Author Kenneth Pomeranz is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937, which won the John King Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association, and coauthor (with Steven Topik) of The World that Trade Created. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐China’s Advocate: A Review of Ken Pomeranz’s The GreatDivergenceThe Great Divergence ——————– Forsome time now it has been becoming clear that there is something wrong with the traditional story of the coming of the nineteenth-century European industrial revolution and the associated trans-oceanic European empires. The conventional wisdom sees Western European civilization’s edge building gradually yet inexorably–with a pronounced setback during the Dark Ages–from the days when the conquests of Julius Caesar and Rome’s Julian dynasty emperors brought the high civilization of the Greeks to Eboracum, Londinium, Lutetia, and Colonia Claudia. Western Europeans then build on top of Greek philosophy, Greek literature, Roman engineering, and Roman law. From Naples in the south to Stockholm in the north, from Vienna in the east to Sagres in the west, the tide builds to a flood: the rule of law, the consent of estates to taxation, rational thought, the replacement of magic by religion, security of private property, the horse collar, the scientific revolution, and war-driven technological advance gave–according to the conventional wisdom–European societies as of 1500 a substantial and decisive edge in technology and productivity. During the early modern period from 1500 to 1800 this decisive edge blossomed into the social, political and economic institutions of the modern age that created today’s wealthy industrial democracies.Elsewhere, according to the conventional wisdom, civilizations with agriculture, metalworking, and complex social organization hit the Malthusian wall: populatoin pressure and lack of resources kept standards of living low in spite of sophisticated but non-mechanical technology, and elites focused much more on grabbing the surplus from the people and from one another than on enlarging the surplus through further investment or innovation. The great Eurasian agrarian empires and civilizations had larger populations, more splendid courts, and richer elites, but they were a dead end for a humanity trapped under a monstrous regiment of kings and priests.#Eurasian Parity ————— However there was always something wrong with this triumphal march, something visible to those with eyes to look. The fifteenth-century Portuguese Infante Dom Henrique sat in his castle at Sagres and sent his ships in small squadrons groping for perhaps a thousand miles south along the coast of Africa. The fifteenth-century Chinese notable Cheng Ho–in modern transliteration Zheng Ze, the eunuch admiral who was a trusted lieutenant of the Yung-lo Emperor–took 30,000 men and seventy ships on eight voyages to the Indian Ocean, reaching as far as Zanzibar and projecting power on such a scale that Sri Lankan kings who were not properly respectful of Chinese power were brought back to China to make their apologies. The Ottoman Emperor Mehmet II deployed the largest and strongest pieces of artillery in the world–specially made for the occasion–for his conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The Great Moghul Babur’s use of advanced technology–matchlocks–and tactics–wagons tied together as field fortifications–allowed him to decisively defeat an army eight times his size at Panipat and conquer northern India. We think that the populations of China and India grew more rapidly than the population of Europe from 1500-1850: this suggests–at least if we believe in Malthus–somewhat more prosperous societies with more rapidly growing economies in the Eurasian “east.”In the efficiency of agriculture, in the scale of social organization, in the sophistication of consumer goods, in the density of population, and even in navigation and military technology the fifteenth-century Eurasian east–from the Ottoman Empire through Iran and India to southeast Asia, China, and Japan–appears nowhere less and almost always more “civilized” than the small, semi-anarchic proto-nation-states of western Europe. As Pomeranz puts it, the core regions of Eurasia “the Yangzi delta, the Kanto plain, Britain and the Netherlands, Gujarat–shared some crucial features with each other, which they did not share with the rest of the continent or subcontinent around them… relatively free markets, extensive handicraft industries, highly commercialized agriculture…” The similarities are more impressive than the differences.So what happened? If the western European edge in technology, organization, and productivity was not a long-standing broad tidal wave building slowly since the coronation of Charlemagne, then how did the world we live in come to be? How did the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century become a Portuguese (and later a Dutch) lake? How did Britain conquer India in the century from 1750? And why did the industrial revolution take place in late eighteenth century Britain? In Ken Pomeranz’s book The Geat Divergence we have one serious attempt at an answer. It is a wonderful book. It is the first book I have read that takes the problem of the post-1500 great divergence between the Eurasian west and the Eurasian east seriously and thoughtfully, and that does not run far ahead of its evidence in pursuit of pre-chosen conclusions.This is not to say that I agree with the book. I think that it misses–or rather downplays–three important phenomena that, in my opinion at least, are key to understanding the past millennium of world history. The first is the shift in the locus of invention–not in the level of technology, but in the birth of new technologies–from China to Europe around the year 1000, and subsequently what appears to be a steadily growing European lead in inventiveness and science. The second is the extraordinary organizational coherence of western Europe by 1700, which shows itself in areas as divergent as the military superiority of European-trained musketeers in eighteenth century India, in the extraordinary reach and longevity of Europe’s armed trans-oceanic trading companies, and the requirements of at least the appearance of due process of law–trials and bills of attainder–imposed on even the most tyrannical northwest European rulers. The third is the late nineteenth century firebreak: as Sidney Pollard put it, the fire of nineteenth-century industrialization burned brightly to the limits of western European populations and colonial settlements, smoldered in eastern Europe, and there stopped (with the single exception of Japan)–no nineteenth-century industrialization in Turkey, Egypt, India, or China. The fact that the nineteenth-century Eurasian east did not while the nineteenth-century Eurasian west easily did adopt British-invented industrial technologies must be explained somehow.But even though I think that in the end the book misses the bullseye, it is definitely a solid hit on the target. It is very much worth reading. In the past I have had a very hard time finding a book that challenges the conventional wisdom that I am not ashamed to give to my students–for example, I can’t get my students to take Immanuel Wallerstein seriously, for his unwillingness to count makes it impossible to assess whether his anecdotes are representative and his teleological functionalism makes it nearly impossible to figure out just what the proposed chain of causation is; and they have a hard time dealing with Jack Goody, who splits hairs ever more finely as if deconstructing sociological and anthropological concepts will somehow lead to understanding. This is a book I will not be ashamed to give my students. And it makes me think.#The Grand Counterfactual ———————— At the core of Pomeranz’s book is a grand counterfactual. Suppose that you removed the Americas from the surface of the globe: Columbus sails west in 1492 and dies of thirst in a mammoth world ocean. And suppose that you erased the coal deposits from the island of Britain and from the Rhine valley. What would post-1500 world history have looked like then?Pomeranz’s answer is that the most likely trajectory would have seen economic life in northwest Europe evolve the way that economic life in Gujerat or the Yangzi delta evolved between 1500 and 1800: a flourishing commercially-revolutionized society bumps up against ecological limits as deforestation, declining marginal products of labor, the rising ability of peripheral regions to make their own manufactures, and so forth reduce the returns to innovation and commerce and increase the rewards of landlord or priestly surplus extraction. Thus growth stops. And what growth there is follows a labor-intensive, resource-economizing logic that–as it did in the nineteenth century Yangzi delta–boosts elite consumption but not mass standards of living, and leaves no space for an industrial revolution.Pomeranz’s argument is powerful. For he is right in saying that “industrial capitalism, in which the large-scale use of inanimate energy sources allowed an escape from the co END

⭐In “The Great Divergence”, Kenneth Pomeranz presents an exhaustive investigation of the minutest differences and similarities in development of China and Western Europe. His claim, and stated objective, is to show that Europe’s emergence as a preeminent power was the result of privileged access to overseas colonies, exploitation of non-Europeans, and a fortunate `geographic accident’ of the location of coal in England. However, considering China’s significant, and much earlier, developments in science, technology, and shipping, not to mention their huge deposits of coal, and its use some 600 years before the Europeans to make iron, it’s difficult to understand Pomeranz’s rationalization of those claims and ultimately the whole point of his book.His specialty and interests clearly lie in China. In this book he attempts to shed a somewhat biased benevolent light on China by explaining the violent circumstances that led to the industrial revolution in Europe, and why it didn’t happen in China. He presents a comparative analysis in such close, tortuous, detail that he becomes myopic in drawing his conclusions. His joy and skill clearly lie in analysis, rather than synthesis, and in the process, and among the ensuing debris, he loses a view of the whole as processes of nation building rather than competing sets of historical data. The outcome notwithstanding, he consistently paints each step in the process of growth in Europe and its colonies as a violent and ugly stepsister to a more sophisticated, benign version taking place in China. All of which may be true, but he discounts the effects of institutions, capital markets, capital accumulation, and regulatory competition in Europe as having marginal effect on the difference in outcome between the two areas because in his opinion what was happening in Europe was so similar to what was going on in China. He states that “European science, technology, and philosophical inclinations alone do not seem an adequate explanation, and alleged differences in economic institutions seem largely irrelevant”.Regulatory competition in Europe, for Pomeranz, equates to military competition. Although it could be argued from a more objective perspective that military research and development regularly spins off technological advances applicable in commercial areas, Pomeranz claims that in Europe `the net effect of warfare on technological innovation is likely to have been negative’. Clearly not true, but his argument about it possibly killing off other inventors was kind of funny. The development of institutions and property rights arising from this competition for him equals only the purchases of position, interference of guild control, and the granting monopoly privileges. He claims that all served to keep prices high, limit the extent of markets, and restrict output. The most positive function of `military’ competition seen by Pomeranz is in the overseas projection of power. This lies in contrast to his claim that China was engaged in competitive trade with low margins, unprivileged by the state, that couldn’t generate enough profits to finance a European style military capitalism. Here he ignores the Chinese obsession with intensive land use to feed its armies. The vast differences between the European states and the diversity of politics, social constructs, and institutions therein will show that had any single one of them been dominant the story of Europe, and the world, would have been very much different. Had the Chinese the benefit of this fracture, the voyages of Zheng He would have been continued, but when he died, the Confucians were regaining power and There was no political or spiritual will to continue. They felt that other nations had nothing to offer the already prosperous Chinese and they had no need to conquer their souls. Their voyages were ended, their fleets were dismantled and they turned inward. It became a crime to set sail from China in a multi-masted ship. This was their choice. One nation, one choice. Had there been competition among states in China, someone, somewhere would have chosen to continue.As far as ethical systems and ideology are concerned, Pomeranz doesn’t consider the consequences of differing motivation but only writes that philosophical inclinations do not seem an adequate explanation of divergent paths. Lost in analysis of the details of the similarities, here he misses the significance of the differences. Arguing that they were too small to create the large disparities in outcomes, he fails to ask whether those differences were what led to different choices. The differences in the ethical systems of Christian Western Europe and Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist China are enormous. The differences in the choices made within the context of those systems, especially within the protestant reformation and the creation of the Church of England, are significant. Pomeranz claims that ideology, or `philosophical inclinations’, can’t explain the different outcomes in the fortunes of China and Europe, but it was ideology and philosophy that led to the divergence in their development paths. Western Europe’s history of fighting Muslims to keep them at bay and out of Europe established their crusading zeal to protect themselves by trying to convert everyone they could find. They embodied this fear and hegemonic drive and made Christian solipsism an imperative part of their culture. Vasco Da Gama said that the objectives of his voyages were “Christians and Spices”. This dogmatic drive of the Europeans and their churches’ implicit consent of their conquests and colonialism lent a higher power to their expansion. The Chinese chose not to continue their voyages. The Europeans were on a mission from God.In this book, great tenaciousness in presenting historical data meets an astounding lack of insight into behavior and economics, and leaves the reader (at least me anyway) wondering why it was written in the first place.

⭐The Great Divergence is by no means an easy read, however, for those who are seeking answers as to why Europe paced ahead of Asia, or more specifically, China, Kenneth Pomeranz provides answers, within a mammoth work of scholarship.The Great Divergence is clearly very well researched and sheds new light on the processing of the European Industrial Revolution, and the perceived Chinese stagnation.Pomeranz takes many factors into account, in fact almost every conceivable factor, in analysing what made some areas suited for industrialization more than others, and many other issues such as diet, consumption patterns, or even the replacement of beer and gin with tea in the British daily diet, thus allowing British workers to do more demanding, dangerous work (one cannot underestimate the importance of the tea break).A central part of Pomeranz’s thesis is the discovery of the New World and with it sliver and extra space, coupled with the Chinese demand for sliver.This book is by no means easy to swallow and does not provide simple answers, but for those who want a fuller picture of why the West got ahead, this is the book. An easy read it is not, but a scholarly work it is.

⭐An historiographical milestone. But a flawed one both in stylistic (you know what the point and argument is after a few pages, which is honest but a bit childish) and in scientific (the data presented is great, but not as definitive as the author suggests) terms. That said it remaind compulsory reading for anybody interested in modern/contemporary history.

⭐The idea of the author is interesting – challenging the supposed uniqueness of Western Europe with respect to industrialization – but the thesis gets lost between an incredible amount of (sometimes pointless) data. This is not an easy reading, and it is unlikely to be appreciated by a non specialist

⭐Coal and Colonies are the points Pomeranz listed, but there are a lot more factors he didn’t consider.

⭐Excellent

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