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

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.

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 maintain food productivity, and decay of proto-industrialization. Western Europe escaped this fate by the lucky series of events sketched above. Pomeranz presents a set of interesting examples to buttress his hypotheses. For example, Denmark, a major loser in 17th century wars and a failure in overseas trade, followed a path similar to that seen in Japan and China. The Chinese state, both under the Ming adn Qing, was expansionist but expansion was directed west into Asia and the result was reproduction of existing zones of economic activity, not the highly specialized colonial-core structure developed by the Atlantic economy.

There are some significant deficiencies in this book. One is rhetorical; at no point does Pomeranz specifically and explicitly differentiate between necessary and sufficient causes. The reader is left to infer Pomeranz's view of what factors are sufficient (individually, none), what is necessary, and what has to be combined in order to produce a Europe. Another defect is that the book reflects clearly Pomeranz's training as a China specialist. Simply put, despite an impressive amount of reading, he is not nearly as knowledgeable about Europe. There is a lot less detail about Europe. Partly, this is because he takes a lot of effort to demonstrate the equivalence of China, Japan, and Western Europe in key areas. But, as he acknowledges at the beginning of the book, Western Europe must have had unique features that made it possible of European societies to seize the opportunities presented. Expansionist capitalism is one but the genesis of this institution is not really explored. I suspect also that he underestimates considerably the importance of the European scientific and technological tradition. Finally, in a book that emphasizes the fortunate contingencies that led to European success, he overlooks a really obvious fact of geography. The Atlantic is a much narrower ocean than the Pacific and the Western Hemisphere was more easily available to Europe.

A really stimulating book. Not the last word but the first major installment in a major research program.


China's Advocate   March 21, 2000
James B. Delong (Lafayette, CA USA)
73 out of 79 found this review helpful

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.

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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.

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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


Why Europe Won?   May 19, 2000
E. N. Anderson (Riverside, CA USA)
24 out of 30 found this review helpful

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.


A Joy to Read that Sets the Record Straight   January 30, 2004
The Independent Review (Oakland, CA)
15 out of 18 found this review helpful

"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 thinly populated northwest, hundreds of miles from the potential manufacturing centers in the south and east. Thus, China was at a relative disadvantage compared to Europe in terms of the luck of the geological draw. At the same time that coal in eighteenth-century Europe was cheap and readily available to fuel industry, in China that resource remained relatively expensive and in large part a curiosity relegated to the collections of rock hounds.

"The second argument is another variation on the `good luck versus bad luck' theme. The fortuitous (for Europe) circumstance of the discovery of the Americas and the subsequent availability of resources for the Industrial Revolution that this discovery entailed were the exogenous factors. The flow of cotton, sugar, timber, and tobacco to Europe from the New World gave economic development there a significant boost at a critical time; China enjoyed no advantage even remotely comparable.

"The Great Divergence is a synthesis created from a rich array of secondary sources. In style and scholarship, it is reminiscent of E. L. Jones's European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1971] 2003), which is ironic given that the thrust of Pomeranz's argument is exactly the opposite of Jones's. Pomeranz's book is a joy to read, and though it demands the reader's close attention, it is accessible to those who are not economic history specialists. It is a very useful corrective to the overenthusiasm of writers who claim a unique status for Europe in terms of the preconditions for sustained economic growth."

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Adapted from a review by Gary M. Anderson in "The Independent Review," Winter 2004


Powerful data and arguments   April 25, 2007
Faruk Ekmekci
6 out of 7 found this review helpful

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," (p. 107).

Part II of The Great Divergence deals with the less-analyzed issue of consumption. Pomeranz takes issue with Sombart and some others' argument that Europe a produced a unique "consumer society" that provided a demand base for industrial revolution. Pomeranz challenges the "consumer society" argument on two grounds. On the one side, he demonstrates that the rise in the European consumption of such luxury goods as tea, sugar, and tobacco was very incremental until the 19th century. He therefore asserts that imagining an irreversible "birth of a consumer society" before 1850 may be seriously misleading (p. 119). On the other side, he demonstrates that consumption of these everyday luxury goods were at comparable levels in China and Japan. The consumption of durable luxuries (furniture, pictures, china, books, jewelry, etc.) was not significantly different in these three regions either (pp. 130-1). Thus, Europe did not have any type of "consumer society" advantage vis-à-vis China and Japan that would give her a head start in the competition to rise. I should also note that European figures as to consumption of luxury goods refute the arguments on "European" miracle as well. Pomeranz demonstrates that, if anything, it was a British, and to lesser extent Dutch, revolution and not a European one until 1850 (pp. 119).

To sum up the first part, Pomeranz demonstrates that Europe was not exceptionally different from China or Japan in terms of production, market regulation, or the consumption of luxury goods. Given this similarity of internal factors, Pomeranz turns to external linkages to explain the nineteenth-century divergence.

Explaining the Divergence:

A weakness in Andre Gunder Frank's book was that he could not adequately account for the "rise of the West" in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Frank's argument was that Asian economies were altogether facing a Kondratieff B-cycle in the first half of the 18th century and this allowed Europe to finally outdo the Asians. He therefore asserts that "the fall of Asia" preceded European political and military intervention in Asian nations (ReOrient, pp. 266-8). Pomeranz finds this argument impressionistic and discards it on the grounds that population growth and ecological effects that were argued to make China "fall" were present in Europe as well. Thus, he asserts, "if Europe was not yet in crisis, then in all likelihood China was not either," (p. 12).

Pomeranz argues that the primary problem that both European and Asian nations were facing by 18th century were the ecological constraints that resulted from increasing population and scarce land. Therefore, the real and long-lasting solution would necessitate land-saving innovations rather than labor-saving ones.
As such, industrial revolution was a cause of later European rise than result of previous European exceptionality.

A Conclusion:
When compared with Frank's ReOrient, Pomeranz's The Great Divergence is more robust and convincing in two respects. First, it does not have a "Sinocentrism" bias and argues that the pre-1800 world was "a polycentric world with no dominant center," (p. 4). Second, it tries to explain the rise of Europe in the 19th century with substantive factors rather than mysterious Kondratieff cycles. In that respect, The Great Divergence is a nice remedy to the gaps and problems in ReOrient. However, I think that Pomeranz's downplaying the importance of profits that European made through colonialism is misleading. In evaluating the role of colonial profit-extraction in Europe's rise, one should take into account its impact on the continuation and spread of industrial revolution as well as on industrial revolution itself. Even if the spark of the industrial revolution could be lighted without the profits made in the New World, the fire of industrial revolution would not have survived a couple decades if it were not for the colonial resources and markets.