The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

by Kenneth Pomeranz

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691090106
• ISBN13: 9780691090108
• Release Date: December 2001
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 392 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Powerful data and arguments

Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence reinforces some arguments of Frank's ReOrient and reformulates some others. Like Frank, Pomeranz argues that European economy was not unusually different from or superior to the economies of China and Japan until the 19th century. Like Frank, Pomeranz also argues that the critical factors that made possible the rise of Europe were external rather than internal factors. However, unlike Frank who explained the rise of the West in the 19th century through "the fall of Asia" in the previous century, Pomeranz attributes the nineteenth-century divergence between the European economy and the Asian economies to Europe's coal and New World's land that jointly relived the ecological constraints of the nineteenth-century Europeans. Explaining Pre-Divergence Similarities: Pomeranz starts his book with comparisons of European and Asian economies in 16th through 18th centuries. A difference in Pomeranz's approach is that he prefers to compare "regions" rather than countries. He argues that such places as Yangzi Delta, The Kanto plain, Britain, the Netherlands, and Gujarat, shared some crucial features with each other, which they did not share with the rest of the world or subcontinent around them. Thus, he prefers to compare these special areas directly rather than within the larger "arbitrary" continental units (p. 8). Pomeranz first demonstrates that there were no significant differences between England, China, and Japan in terms of average standards of life. Average life expectancy and calorie intake were at comparable levels in all three countries. In the same vein, the European had no superiority to Asians with respect to technology and mining. China was ahead of Europe in physical science, mathematics, and maternal and infant health. Europe's irrigation technology also lagged behind China, India, and Japan. Even as late as first half of the 19th century, Indian iron was reported to be superior to English iron (pp. 44-6). If Europe had any real technological edge in the 18th century, it was not in tools or machines, but in "instruments" such as clocks, watches, telescopes, and eyeglasses (p. 67). Pomeranz then tries to show that differences in terms of labor and land markets in Europe and China in 16th through 18th centuries were significant and did not always favor Europe so that they would be a viable explanation for the later divergence. Indeed, overall China was closer to market economy than was most of Europe, including most of "western" Europe. Much of Western Europe's farmland was harder to buy and sell than that of China. In Yangzi Valley, for example, close to half of land was rented (p. 72-3). This was also similar in labor market. Labor was not less free in China than in Europe (pp. 80-1). Thus, Pomeranz concludes that Europe's factor markets for land and labor "seem no closer to Smithian ideas of freedom and efficiency than do those of China, and perhaps a good deal less so,"

A Joy to Read that Sets the Record Straight

"Why did the `Industrial Revolution' occur in northwestern Europe but not in China? This simple question has proven to be nightmarishly difficult to resolve definitively, although many explanations have been advanced. Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence is one such effort and an exhaustively documented one. Does it resolve the question successfully? The answer is a qualified `yes.'"Pomeranz is chiefly concerned with the comparison between England and China, but he also devotes a fair amount of attention to the rest of the world. He shows that many of the characteristics often thought to be peculiar to Europe applied to China as well. Thus, many of the institutional features that were important for the breakout into dynamic growth were not uniquely European."Pomeranz argues that many of the elements of the conventional wisdom about why China did not experience the explosive growth that characterized Europe after 1800 are seriously in error. China was not in the throes of a `Malthusian crisis,' heedlessly breeding itself into oblivion. The Chinese state was not the growth-choking anticapitalist machine that it has sometimes been portrayed as having been, and in fact it was probably less of a drag on private markets than were the states of mercantilist Europe...."Another seemingly plausible hypothesis involves property rights and incentive effects, but Pomeranz minimizes the importance of the definition and enforcement of property rights in explaining the different development experiences of the two regions. He argues that China, too, had competitive markets and an elaborate legal system of property rights; in contrast, he also notes the plethora of institutions and laws antithetical to capitalist enterprise, ranging from apprenticeship laws to actual serfdom, that hampered economic development in Europe. Indeed, he suggests that China provided a freer marketplace than did mercantilist Europe...."What, then, does account for the `great divergence' of the book's title? Pomeranz argues for the importance of two factors, essentially exogenous `shocks' outside the price system that had important effects on the economy: the distribution of energy-generating resources and the accident that Europe discovered the New World, whereas China did not."The first argument might be termed `geology is destiny.' Coal was the chief energy-generating resource significant for the Industrial Revolution. The location of major coal deposits was a critical factor in determining the viability of industrialization. England's coal deposits were located almost exactly where manufacturers would have placed them if they had had a say in the matter; transportation costs therefore were low and were made still lower by the ready availability of efficient water transport. Compare this development-friendly geographic distribution in Europe with the geographic distribution in China. Although China was blessed with large coal reserves, they were located for the most part in the thin

Rich and Provocative Book on Crucial Topic

This is a provocative book in the best sense; it addresses an important subject, is well argued, is based on an excellent scholarship, and reaches conclusions that will stimulate a great deal of debate. Pomeranz seeks to explain how Western European Societies made the leap into industrialization and world domination. Pomeranz begins by rebutting prior explanations of European success. Most versions of these models, which were reasonable proposals given prior fragmentary knowledge of Asian history, are demographic or economic in nature. Europeans had lower birth-rates, Europeans were the first to develop free markets, consumption of key luxury goods was higher and primed the pump for international trade, Early Modern Europe underwent proto-industrialization as handicraft production for trade spread into the countryside, labor was freer in Europe. Pomeranz, an accomplished specialist on Chinese history, demonstrates that there was little difference in all these important variables between China, Japan, and Western Europe. Indeed, in some respects, 18th century China may have had freer labor and markets than 18th century Europe. Pomeranz takes particular pains to attack the triumphalist notion that "free markets" lead inexorably to modernization. For Pomeranz, European capitalism is a key to development of industrialization but only a very particular form of capitalism unique to Europe. This is the state sponsored or directed capitalism that drove overseas expansion. This peculiar form of capitalism, not the untrammeled free market, became the key to European imperialism and colonialism, and the development of key capitalist institutions such as joint stock companies. Also, the success of this peculiar capitalism was contingent on a series of external factors beyond European control; access to coerced labor made possible by the existence of slavery in Africa, conquest of the Western Hemisphere made possible by the epidemiologic advantages of Europeans, and the establishment of transglobal trading networks created by the thirst of China for American silver. The uniquely and specfically European feature is the existence of state sponsored/directed overseas expansion. This in turn is seen as a function of dynastic/nascent state competition within Europe, a factor absent in China. The actual beginning of industrialization is attributed to the lucky availability of accessible coal mining in Britain and the need for better water pumps leading to the application of steam technology. From the starting point that China, Japan, and Western Europe were economically equivalent in the 18th century, Pomeranz develops a very interesting model of normative development. He sees China and Japan as preceding along the most likely lines of development; increased population growth leading to tremendous pressure on land and other resources like timber availabilty, economic stagnation, intensification of labor to maintai

Why Europe Won?

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.

China's Advocate

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--