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

"Yes. Pomeranz was in a group of historians and historical sociologists in the California system, including UC Davis and Irvine and UCLA historians. They were debating these issues of comparative history and what became known as global history. There had been world histories before this and some, like Ken Pomeranz, were very much engaged in the world history movement. There had long been a Journal of World History; indeed there was a whole subject area called ‘world history.’ This was replacing ‘western civ’ courses in American universities, in the school system and also, interestingly, in the American military academies. One of the early global historians, Jerry Bentley, who was also very much engaged in world history , told me he thought the origins were in the American military academy, where they were trying to give all these soldiers that they were sending around the world some background in other people’s histories, because they really only received American history at school and university. “Global history is a way of thinking” So there was that older tradition, but it was mainly a teaching tradition. It was not a tradition of research initiatives in new directions in historical research. That really all started with those debates that were going on in this California school and the wide impact of Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence . He was looking at China in comparison with Europe, not Europe in comparison with China, with China always being the lesser player. He tried to develop what he called ‘reciprocal comparison,’ looking at the region that you’re dealing with through the lens of another region. His is a comparison between China and Europe in the period leading up to 1800. He made this quite big claim that China was equal to Europe right up to 1800. Then the paths diverged. It was a very big claim to make at that time. He compared natural resources, he compared agricultural systems, he compared industries, and went through all these comparisons. He also zeroed in on a comparison between the Yangtze Valley and Britain, because Britain was the first country to witness the Industrial Revolution and the Yangtze Valley was the most highly developed area of China that transformed from the 16th century into the 18th century. I cannot tell you how exciting that book was when it hit the press. It was a Princeton University Press book, so very much an academic publisher, but one looking out for new directions, in fields being developed. Pomeranz was almost instantly on a lecture tour all over the world and for at least two years after that book was published; it was being read everywhere."

"This book sets up the modern question of the Great Divergence in an economic history sense. Jones’s book is a little bit more ad hoc, presenting a more traditional stylized history. Pomeranz puts the debate into rigorous quantitative terms. I won’t say he comes up with a grand theory, but he sets the terms of the debate such that everyone who is attempting to research this question knows what side they’re taking. Pomeranz particularly takes issue with Jones, who is arguing that Europe was markedly different from Asia on a number of cultural, social and political indicators that predicted its growth. Pomeranz takes the opposite perspective. He argues that prior to 1800 the advanced parts of Europe and Asia were on very similar trajectories. He calls it “a world of surprising resemblances,” a term that’s stuck. In Europe, the advanced regions are England and the Netherlands. In East Asia it’s the Yangtze Delta and the Kantō Plain of Japan, as well as Gujarat in India. Prior to 1800, all of these places have relatively similar economic structures. They are characterized by relatively free and open markets, lots of mercantile activity and increasing population growth. They also have similar ecological bottlenecks, as he calls them, where increasing population and economic activity run up against the constraints of their own fuel consumption and resource needs. For Pomeranz, if these are left unchecked, this eventually results in these societies falling into a Malthusian equilibrium, because the soil is going to be exhausted, and agriculture is going to be less productive. You’re trying to fit more people onto a finite area of land and, ultimately, no modern economic growth emerges. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Pomeranz doesn’t like Jones’s comparison of Europe, China, India and the Middle East as macro regions. He says that these sweeping perspectives are wrong and that they conceal a lot of heterogeneity. The poor regions of Europe are very poor, and the poor regions of Asia are very poor. But there are smaller regions within these larger spheres that are comparable with one another up till the very end. So the question then is, how exactly does Europe become so prosperous if the advanced parts of Europe and the advanced parts of Asia are just about the same in 1800? If you remember the phrase “coal and colonies,” you will be able to remember the essence of Pomeranz’s book for the rest of your life. He argues that the windfalls from Britain’s large coal deposits and the vast land spaces of the Americas relieved these ecological bottlenecks. He talks about the ‘ghost acreages’ provided by the Americas and by British coal, a concept that is in Jones, and that he borrows, but that he exaggerates the importance of. By using coal as your source of fossil fuel for power you don’t have to maintain large forests to provide wood for your industries. By using the Americas as your source of raw materials—particularly cotton, but also other crops like sugar and tobacco—you don’t have to grow these crops in your own country. You can use the land for food and then use your population for manufacturing, which is what he correctly sees as being the motive force behind industrialization. So whereas China does not have access to coal because it’s in the interior, far away from its commercial areas, and it doesn’t have access to the Americas, it has no relief for its ecological bottlenecks. Britain gets this colonial and geological windfall and that is what triggers its industrialization. It’s the received wisdom among some historians. However, I would say that the empirical evidence has moved against it in the last 20 years. Pomeranz’s main contention is that the advanced regions of Europe and Asia are at the same level of economic complexity, free market activity and living standards prior to 1800. This isn’t really the case. Empirical work has been done getting real wages in Britain and several European cities and then also cities in the Yangtze delta, which is Pomeranz’s leading region in China. It turns out that in England silver wages were three times those in the Yangtze delta and five times those in India already by 1600. So the latest you can probably put the Great Divergence is 1700, which means that Pomeranz’s story about it being all about colonial windfalls and British coal use is probably misguided. These were definitely important factors and it’s possible that European industrialization would not have continued without them. But there was definitely something different about Europe from an earlier stage. There are also other questions. One historian, Deirdre McCloskey , has pointed out that if coal was so important, Chinese industries could just have moved closer to coal because they have tons of it. Also, if Britain didn’t have coal, it simply could have imported it from other countries, which is what ended up happening during the Industrial Revolution itself. Britain exported a bunch of coal and continental countries imported it."

"Professor Kenneth Pomeranz’s book is more or less a synthesis of Jones and Wong. What he achieves in the book is to show the reader that Europe (Western) and Asia (China) departed from each other in terms of quality of life (everyday consumption) only after 1750. Before that date, Europe was not superior to Asia in those terms. The significance of Pomeranz’s findings is twofold: firstly, he created a universally homogenous gauge for all societies in the form of material life, living standards, instead of inputs and outputs in the production system; secondly, given that China remained stable in living standards, it was Europe that changed beyond recognition. In his own phrase, China was normal but Europe was a freak. His eye-opening comparison of living standards between China and Western Europe bins the old cliché that China was desperately poor and rapidly declining. In contrast to early thinkers like Hegel and Marx who view Europe as the mainstream of world history and the rest of the world as less important, Pomeranz’s new approach puts China back in the mainstream of world history. This has huge implications as to how we view China in the 21st century."