The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton Classics)

China's Advocate: A Review of Ken Pomeranz's The GreatDivergence The 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 this excellent, tightly reasoned, and data-filled book, Kenneth Pomerantz argues that Europe grew rich, industrial, and mighty after 1500 largely because of expansion, colonization and exploitation of much of the world (and also by making use of strategically convenient resources at home). Conversely, China, economically and scientifically more developed than Europe as of 1000 or 1100, fell behind after 1500. Only Europe developed what Randall Collins calls "rapid development science" in his work THE SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHIES; the Chinese, Indians, and even Native American civilizations had excellent science, but based on very different plans, and they never made the breakthrough to the rapid development institutions. Pomerantz may paint a bit too rosy a picture of China at times, but the point is true enough. This book should absolutely end the facile racist and "culturist" explanations of S. Huntington, D. Landes and their ilk. Europe was not somehow superior all along; it took rapid advantage of a special situation. There may be more to the story--many (including Landes--who is right in this case) have pointed out that Europe's division into many rival states helped, because several of them found it to their strategic advantage to be ahead of the others in gaining information and developing technology. There will be ongoing debate about what are the drivers of Europe's sudden burst, but, after this book, no one can afford to ignore China's successes and the difficulties they make for conventional models.

I was taught in high school that the Industrial Revolution came about in England through technological innovation, which led to a fundamental reordering of British society, with old cottage industries overtaken by factories and with country laborers drawn into new, large, cities with perennial grey skies. Later on in lower division history survey course, I was taught that the depletion of English forests to supply the Royal Navy meant that those forests had to be protected and forced Englishmen to look elsewhere for fuel, namely underground, and that the struggle to keep the coal mines from flooding and to transport the coal long distances led to the development of the steam engine, which could then be put to a variety of labor-saving industrial tasks. This book doesn't address these issues so much. What it does do is provide international context to the Industrial Revolution, comparing the economies, laws, natural resources and social structures of Britain and China and Japan, and occasionally India or a few European nations to try and answer the question: Why England, or more broadly, which is what Pommeranz asks: Why Europe? To put, for example, China and Britain into context, he includes Britain as part of Europe, because it makes more sense to compare to large landmasses with large populations, some broadly shared cultural traits to each other. After all, he points out, while China's external trade paled in comparison with European trade in the 19th century, the nation's INTERNAL trade was just as robust as Europe's. Certain persistent myths about the Western cultural foundations of Capitalism should be thrown out-- in 1750 it was easier to buy and sell land on the private market in China than in England, which in retained more feudalistic social and economic structures later than did China. What Pommeranz suggests is that the great economic (and indeed political) lead that Britain and other western powers took on the world stage only occurred in the very late 19th century and lasted relatively shortly. Furthermore, he argues that it was not inevitable that only Britain (or other Europeans) would have developed the Industrial technologies that allowed for so much of European imperial successes, but that other countries (specifically China and Japan) very well could have produced similar technologies given the time or correct . Basically, it was not a matter of cultural determinism à la Weber that the Industrial Revolution occured, but rather largely through more proximate factors. The subject itself is interesting, but the evidence at times can be yawn-inducing. Charts and tables on productivity and the like aren't exactly page-turners for me. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the formation of Industrial economies and in the shaping of the modern world, assuming you have the patience to wade through the economic data. Pommeranz offers a compelling, if non-traditional, view of the Industrial Revolution. In history, context is everything, and this book helps provide that.

Fast shipment and properly packaged. Book is a bit older than what the seller described but it's a clean copy and the condition is acceptable. The author of this book was the President of the American Historical Association in 2013-14. This is the book that made him famous. Check it out!

It is a well-researched book, but it is also very dull to read. I would give the book a 4- or 5-Stars rating for the information but gave it a 3-Stars rating because it just is not exciting to read. It is one of those books written by an academic (the author is a history professor at the University of California, Irvine) with an academic audience in mind. Author Kenneth Pomeranz compares the economic developments of Europe, and especially Britain, with China, Japan, and India from about 1500 to 1800. He asserts that in terms of trading, legal, and economic systems the Asian countries were approximately equivalent to Britain and Europe. Food output per acre / hectare and per peasant farmer were similar. What he calls proto-industrial development were at similar levels. There was no reason to believe in 1800 that Britain and other European countries would greatly surpass the Asian countries over the next century. Pomeranz attributes this rise to two major factors: 1) the economic benefits of European colonialism, and 2) the coincidence of the locations of coal fields and river and ocean transportation. North and South America effectively served as land extensions of Europe and provided cheap sources of food, timber, cotton, sugar, and silver. In my opinion, Pomeranz too easily dismisses other factors. The book “The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created” by Bernstein (2004) discusses some key differences between Britain, Europe, and the rest of the world. Specifically (page 7) Bernstein maintains that the following factors caused the rise of Europe: • Private property and the rule of law, that is, the concept of civil liberties and a civil society; • Freedom of scientific inquiry; • A widely available system of credit, for both the funding of private companies through bank loans and stock markets and funding government debt through bonds; • An extensive transportation and communications system to transmit information and goods. I am far more sympathetic to Bernstein’s views than those of Pomeranz. Just look at the modern world. Countries that have those four characteristics are wealthy, technologically advanced, industrialized, possess good health care systems, and their populations are reasonably well-fed and have long lifespans. Consider the specific case of China today. China has the world’s second largest overall economy, but its per capita GDP of around US$12 000 puts it in roughly in the category of the poorer South American countries. China lacks the first of Bernstein’s attributes: the rule of law and the absence of a capricious and arbitrary government and I have doubts about the second factor. China may have some degree of freedom of scientific inquiry but it certainly lacks freedom of political inquiry. I disagree with Pomeranz’s assertions that in terms of trading, legal, and economic systems the Asian countries were approximately equivalent to Britain and Europe in 1800. They clearly were not. The gradual establishment of Bernstein’s above four factors began as early as the 12th century in England at the time of Henry II and in Renaissance Italy in the 14th or 15th centuries. It took several hundred years for all of them to evolve. Pomeranz is also very dismissive of what he refers to as “Euro-centric” economic and historical analyses. I have noticed that denigrating Europe and North American is apparently the latest politically correct trend in academia. A couple of other books that offer some insights into the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and eventually North America are: • “Coal: A Human History” by Freese 2003); • “The Birth of Europe: Colliding Continents and the Destiny of Nations” by Andrews (1991). It is almost as if the fate of Britain and Europe was inevitably determined hundreds of millions of years ago by the movement of tectonic plates and the eventual locations of coal fields, silver mines, copper mines, and future seaports.

This is a classical work of economic history. It seeks to answer the question of why Europe, rather than Asia, gained dominance after 1750. Pomeranz spends much of the book demonstrating that Europe and Asia were developing in parallel until the nineteenth century, when Europe surged ahead. Pomeranz credits Europe's fortunate possession of coal and proximity to the Americas for the West's advance. The Great Divergence is good for Westerners to read because it helps us recognize that there was nothing preordained about our present preeminence.

The author is amazing but the quality of the book is very very poor; it is very inferior.

Great read for anyone examining the historiography of World 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

本書は西欧諸国の「産業革命」を化石燃料の導入と新大陸における奴隷制の発展とを結びつけて論じている。非常に独創的な著書であり，エキサイティングである。 川北稔編訳『大分岐』も読んだ。筆者のような「マクロ経済分析」の素養のない日本人の米国史家にとっては，その細部の議論は難解であった。しかし初期共和国史家にとっては必読書である。 これは評者のミスかもしれないが，電子通信で購入した本書が時間をおいて二冊送付されてきて，戸惑っています。

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.

Excellent

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