The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia

"While this is the oldest book on the list, obviously the Great Divergence debate does not start with Eric Jones. The first thinkers to really tackle the question were two Germans, Max Weber and Karl Marx , in the 19th century. Their debate was on the causal factors behind the rise of capitalism. Capitalism was then, in turn, associated with the economic growth that differentiated Europe from the rest of the world. Weber was interested primarily in endogenous factors, like culture and institutions, that made Europe particularly special. He particularly cited Protestantism as a motive force in making Europeans much more likely to accumulate wealth and be entrepreneurial. Marx stresses free wage labor and capital accumulation, and particularly the dispossession of European peasantries. I see Jones as being very much in the Weberian camp. He’s looking at factors that are internal to Europe, for the most part. His concept of ‘a European miracle’ is an attempt to codify a scientific theory of the factors that differentiate Europe. That’s different from previous books on this subject, which were not quite as systematic. I think that’s what makes Jones special. Also, he’s just a really beautiful writer. “The ‘West’ was moving ahead of the ‘rest’ at least by the beginning of the 18th century” The basic idea behind The European Miracle is that Europe was highly differentiated from and ahead of Asia from an early date (Jones doesn’t bring Africa and North America into the question). One of the major indicators of Europe’s early success was the fact that, on a per capita basis, it had a very large capital stock. That basically means livestock. Europe had a lot of sheep, cows, and pigs. More livestock, in turn, meant more traction power and manure (and thus higher productivity) in agriculture . The reason that capital accumulated is that Europe had a special demographic regime, which the demographer John Hajnal called the European Marriage Pattern. Fewer Europeans marry than in the rest of the world and they marry later, which means they have fewer children. This reduced the demographic pressure on European wages. Whenever incomes rose in Asia, by contrast, fertility increased more rapidly, and incomes fell back down toward the subsistence level. In Europe, because of this demographic restraint, wages either don’t fall back down to the subsistence level or are just much slower to do so. So European living standards remain higher for longer and this allows capital to accumulate because people have more purchasing power. That ultimately leads to the rise of cities because when people have more disposable income, they’ll buy goods that are produced by urban artisans. For Jones, the rise of cities leads to the rise of parliaments and the fragmented European political system, which protected the freedom of intellectual and economic enterprise, and you can see things spiraling from there. Many scholars have taken Jones as a starting point for thinking about the Great Divergence, though not all have agreed with him. Also, he’s not just examining Europe in isolation. He looks at the Ottoman , the Chinese and the Indian Mughal empires . He tries to explain why these similarly advanced civilizations don’t succeed in reaching industrialization first, because it seems that these commercial societies, with high levels of trade integration and often advanced intellectual cultures, should be much better sites than violent, often backwards-seeming Europe for producing industrialization. His comparative perspective is something that has borne fruit and is exemplified in many of the other books that we’re going to talk about, too. One of the debates in the Great Divergence is how backward Europe was. Was Europe backward at all? Jones is of the opinion (at least partly correct in my view) that it’s not so backward and living standards were pretty high and that people who look at Asian empires as being particularly prosperous are actually just looking at the magnificence of their courts and not at the immiseration of the average person. Other authors that I’ve cited will disagree with that."