Customer Reviews

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

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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 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: 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

The Great Divergence is a multi-causal explanation for the economic rise of Western Europe. The book draws upon diverse existing accounts, including those that see the root causes within Europe itself, and those that see the causes as being related to overseas enterprises by the European powers. However, the book goes beyond these existing accounts by offering a synthetic, multi-stage story, showing how each factor mattered at a certain point in time, but was not alone sufficient to trigger the rise of the West. Thus, one comes away with a belief that the story of the West's ascendency cannot satisfactorily be told by Marx's focus on "primitive accumulation" in the New World, nor by North's focus on institutions of property rights in Europe, nor by Braudel's focus on intra-Europe trade and accumulation.

What is the structure of Pomeranz's argument? Again, it sees different factors as mattering at different times. Thus, the argument is causally sequential, going from technology, to war, to colonization, to markets, with supplies of natural resources a constant bonus and an important final step to industrialization (coal). All of these causes are necessary, for Pomeranz, but none are sufficient, explaining why Asia, despite having many of these same variables (some in even more favorable combinations than Europe), was not able to match Europe's rise.

Part 1 begins with the puzzle of "why Europe and not Asia?", going back to pre-1800 times. Against those who would see crucial pre-industrial differences between the two regions, with Europe having some kind of proto-industrial edge, Pomeranz demonstrates with statistical and secondary evidence that Europe possessed no edge over Asia in either life expectancy, fertility, or supply of capital. While he does find a slight technological edge in Europe, as other scholars have posited, he argues that this edge would not have alone been sufficient to cause Europe's rise, without the later use of favorable stocks of natural resources, and overseas conquest and exploitation. Thus, the sequential nature of the argument comes in here, showing how an earlier technological edge, combined with later colonialism and accidents of natural resource endowment (e.g. coal), allowed Europe to escape the Malthusian trap of population growth under constrained resources.

Indeed, Pomeranz demonstrates that the "silverization" of the Chinese economy, coupled with slavery, plantations and precious metals extraction in the New World, were the only factors differentiating markets in Europe from those in Asia - otherwise, the relationship between consumers and goods was relatively similar in both regions. Against Braudel and North, who emphasize economic institutions, Pomeranz shows that nonmarket factors like colonization and wars between European states, coupled with lending institutions that had lower interest rates than in Asia, laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution. This groundwork wouldn't have mattered, however, if continued New World settlement didn't ease the growing scarcity of land, since more plentiful labor and capital would have been bottlenecked in the absence of a new land supply.

The focus on nonmarket factors like war is important, because it ties in with later developments that impacted market forms. Because states projected interstate rivalries overseas, according to Pomeranz, organizational forms like joint-stock companies and licensed monopolies arose. This is because armed long-distance trade and export-oriented colonies required "exceptional amounts of capital willing to wait a relatively long time for returns" (20), which could only be provided by these new organizational forms.

However, the book is not a simplistic account that sees colonization as the sole solution, since Pomeranz spends an entire chapter showing how overseas colonies alone could not provide a market impetus for the Industrial Revolution, due mainly to the initially high costs of transport and low demand for manufactured goods in the colonies. Instead, Pomeranz sees the growing use of coal as a key factor in spurring industrialization in Europe, and combining with increasing use of slavery (since slaves produced less subsistence products and thus lived more off imported, manufactured goods) to begin the construction of a world market that traded manufactured goods for raw materials and land-intensive products, while further easing Europe's ecological burden through continued settlement.

The New World had another advantage over Asia. In Asia cash-cropping was through free labor, meaning that exporters and manufacturers were free to shift away from activities with diminishing returns. This efficiency was a double-edged sword, however, since it allowed rising incomes and population growth, which Pomeranz claims diminished Asians' need to both import manufactured goods and to export surplus products. In the case of China, well-functioning regional markets, because of growing population, scarce land, and proto-industrialization, precluded empire-wide markets that could take advantage of more scale and specialization. In the New World, however, production was much more specialized (again, because of slave-based colonies), meaning that larger surpluses of people, raw materials and products were exchanged between the New World and Europe. This dynamic of increasing returns continued even after independence and emancipation, leading eventually (with coal) to the Industrial Revolution.

Again, Pomeranz's argument is about timing as a key factor. Since his Malthusian trap and balance between factors is delicate and fragile, if variables appear at the wrong historical time in this balance, their impact can go awry. An example is the timing of coal and colonization, which, had they appeared later, might have come too late to rescue Europe from Malthusian crisis. Methodologically, Pomeranz acheives much of his arguments about timing through counterfactuals, which generally do a good job of showing how Asia originally had much of the potentiality that Europe did, thus illuminating the large amount of sheer luck that factored into Europe's rise.

Pomeranz's other methodological tool is statistical data. The book has exhaustive appendices with detailed data on soil, timber, grain acreage, etc. Further, the breadth of his historical scholarship is impressive, showing an ability to cite widely from area experts in both Asia and Europe; no mean feat. In short, the high quality of the data, coupled with the reassuring, causally multidimensional sophistication of the argument, make the book a formidable target for any potential criticisms.

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.

"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

In "The Great Divergence", Kenneth Pomeranz presents an exhaustive investigation of the minutest differences and similarities in development of China and Western Europe. His claim, and stated objective, is to show that Europe's emergence as a preeminent power was the result of privileged access to overseas colonies, exploitation of non-Europeans, and a fortunate `geographic accident' of the location of coal in England. However, considering China's significant, and much earlier, developments in science, technology, and shipping, not to mention their huge deposits of coal, and its use some 600 years before the Europeans to make iron, it's difficult to understand Pomeranz's rationalization of those claims and ultimately the whole point of his book.

His specialty and interests clearly lie in China. In this book he attempts to shed a somewhat biased benevolent light on China by explaining the violent circumstances that led to the industrial revolution in Europe, and why it didn't happen in China. He presents a comparative analysis in such close, tortuous, detail that he becomes myopic in drawing his conclusions. His joy and skill clearly lie in analysis, rather than synthesis, and in the process, and among the ensuing debris, he loses a view of the whole as processes of nation building rather than competing sets of historical data. The outcome notwithstanding, he consistently paints each step in the process of growth in Europe and its colonies as a violent and ugly stepsister to a more sophisticated, benign version taking place in China. All of which may be true, but he discounts the effects of institutions, capital markets, capital accumulation, and regulatory competition in Europe as having marginal effect on the difference in outcome between the two areas because in his opinion what was happening in Europe was so similar to what was going on in China. He states that "European science, technology, and philosophical inclinations alone do not seem an adequate explanation, and alleged differences in economic institutions seem largely irrelevant".

Regulatory competition in Europe, for Pomeranz, equates to military competition. Although it could be argued from a more objective perspective that military research and development regularly spins off technological advances applicable in commercial areas, Pomeranz claims that in Europe `the net effect of warfare on technological innovation is likely to have been negative'. Clearly not true, but his argument about it possibly killing off other inventors was kind of funny. The development of institutions and property rights arising from this competition for him equals only the purchases of position, interference of guild control, and the granting monopoly privileges. He claims that all served to keep prices high, limit the extent of markets, and restrict output. The most positive function of `military' competition seen by Pomeranz is in the overseas projection of power. This lies in contrast to his claim that China was engaged in competitive trade with low margins, unprivileged by the state, that couldn't generate enough profits to finance a European style military capitalism. Here he ignores the Chinese obsession with intensive land use to feed its armies. The vast differences between the European states and the diversity of politics, social constructs, and institutions therein will show that had any single one of them been dominant the story of Europe, and the world, would have been very much different. Had the Chinese the benefit of this fracture, the voyages of Zheng He would have been continued, but when he died, the Confucians were regaining power and There was no political or spiritual will to continue. They felt that other nations had nothing to offer the already prosperous Chinese and they had no need to conquer their souls. Their voyages were ended, their fleets were dismantled and they turned inward. It became a crime to set sail from China in a multi-masted ship. This was their choice. One nation, one choice. Had there been competition among states in China, someone, somewhere would have chosen to continue.

As far as ethical systems and ideology are concerned, Pomeranz doesn't consider the consequences of differing motivation but only writes that philosophical inclinations do not seem an adequate explanation of divergent paths. Lost in analysis of the details of the similarities, here he misses the significance of the differences. Arguing that they were too small to create the large disparities in outcomes, he fails to ask whether those differences were what led to different choices. The differences in the ethical systems of Christian Western Europe and Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist China are enormous. The differences in the choices made within the context of those systems, especially within the protestant reformation and the creation of the Church of England, are significant. Pomeranz claims that ideology, or `philosophical inclinations', can't explain the different outcomes in the fortunes of China and Europe, but it was ideology and philosophy that led to the divergence in their development paths. Western Europe's history of fighting Muslims to keep them at bay and out of Europe established their crusading zeal to protect themselves by trying to convert everyone they could find. They embodied this fear and hegemonic drive and made Christian solipsism an imperative part of their culture. Vasco Da Gama said that the objectives of his voyages were "Christians and Spices". This dogmatic drive of the Europeans and their churches' implicit consent of their conquests and colonialism lent a higher power to their expansion. The Chinese chose not to continue their voyages. The Europeans were on a mission from God.

In this book, great tenaciousness in presenting historical data meets an astounding lack of insight into behavior and economics, and leaves the reader (at least me anyway) wondering why it was written in the first place.

The strengths: Very provocative, aiming straight at conventional wisdom, be it euro-centric or world-system ones. Solid research behind the comparative study of Europe, China, and to a lesser extend, Japan. Pomeranz gives out hard evidence in life-expectacy, birth rates, market condition, ecological stress etc., hightlighting striking similarites between these socities in the 18th century.

Some readers may have problem with his conclusion that industrialization went ahead only because Europe got lucky in the convenient location of coal and the readily available resourses of the new world. However, just because these are paramount factors does not mean that they are all it needed. Put another way, had China got the same good fortune, it does not necessarily follow that China would industrilize, nor has Pomeranz argued this way.

Weaknesses: The writing is BAD, very convoluted. However, the most important failure is that Pomeranz treats these societies as though they were static. He failed to take into consideration their difference in the RATE of change. The fact that Europe was playing a catch up to Asia through-out the middle ages, and achieved par in pre-modern time, had to imply a quicker pulse. Europe's gradual opening of the mind (reformation ,renaissance), was roughly concurrent with China's gradual closing (the advent of neo-confucianism, ossification of the civil examination system). It's hard to believe that this change of fortune had no long-lasting impact on the underlying dynamics of the societes. Culture does matter, it's just been given a bad name by the likes of Huntington and Landes:)

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.

I enjoyed reading this provocative work, which certainly expanded my understanding of China's economic history and development. But I found the central argument unpersuasive.

Pomeranz sees the most developed areas of the worlds being basically equivalent and technology and living standards as late as 1800, so to explain the European take-off must involve late-acting factors. The first problem with that is by 1800, Europe already dominated the Americas, much of coastal Africa, India and was settling Australasia. This suggests some crucial earlier divergence prior to the Industrial Revolution.

In agrarian societies, the land/population ratio dominates standard of living. Pomeranz wants to argue that NW Europe and the Yangtse valley essentially had equivalent standards of living yet the Europeans also had the great advantage of the Americas -- which thus becomes crucial but not significant. There is a contradiction here. One can see reasons why the Americas might be much less significant than one expects. First, New World products spread throughout the global trade networks (Pomeranz makes a point of emphasizing Chinese take-up of New World products). Second, the export of the Eurasian disease pool so depopulated the Americas, the Europeans massively imported labour to exploit the new territories. The 9 million African slaves imported may have been paid at subsistence levels, but they still reduced the land/population ratio. Third, the Atlantic itself was also something of a barrier (Pomeranz notes the expense of moving). Finally, sudden expansions in land/population ratio experienced by other societies did not have take-off effects (such as the Qing's expansion of China's borders).

The most obvious example of the last point being that the resources of the Americas were mostly controlled by the Spanish and Portugese, who certainly did not achieve any notable economic breakthrough (the "poor Portugal/rich Switzerland" problem is a perennial in "the overseas colonies did it" explanations). This points to institutional divergence of NW Europe from other regions as a key factor. Moreover, the later one wishes to push the divergence, the more problematic the Americas become as key factor, since Britain lost most of its North American colonies by 1783, Spain its Latin American ones by 1820, Portugal by 1822. If the issue then becomes trade access, that just reinforces an obvious crucial difference dating back to the C16th -- that China was a key part of global trade networks but not a global trader, unlike the Europeans. It begins to look like a "you have to be in it to win it" story.

Pomeranz also nowhere deals with Japan being much more successful in dealing with the Western challenge than China. Since Japan was the non-European societies whose institutions (and institutional history) was most like NW Europe, this is surely suggestive.

Given that other regions later industrialised without colonies, and the colonial states became richer after they lost or gave up their colonies, Pomeranz is also postulating a big difference between the first industrialisers and later industrialisers.

The big change in Europe was it moving from an adaptor civilisation to an inventor civilisation. If one locates the shift at about 1000AD, then one is looking at medieval origins. If one puts it later (as I would: the medievals were excellent adaptors, doing so on a much broader basis than the Graeco-Romans, but not notable originators), then the Scientific Revolution seems crucial. Learning how to learn is surely a crucial step in creating a continuing pattern of new forms of capital, particularly fixed capital (the Industrial Revolution achievement). As Europeans increasingly interacted with the entire globe directly, that gave them a further advantage in being exposed to other people's good ideas and techniques.

But this is a very informative and useful work which I recommend as a contribution to grappling with why the dramatic economic take-off from 1820 onwards happened.

This brilliant book seeks to explain why the industrial revolution occurred in Europe rather than Asia. As Pomeranz shows, no objective observer in 1750 could have predicted that a breakthrough would happen in Europe: Europe and China had comparable economic conditions and institutions, and both faced similar population pressures on the land. Pomeranz argues that Europe escaped its ecological constraints because of access to nearby coal deposits and to land-intensive products from the New World. In contrast, China had to resort to labor-intensive land management techniques. Europe took off while China entered an economic cul de sac.

For skeptics of neo-classical economics, "The Great Divergence" is a bracing example of how pat economic models can be undermined by historical evidence. In particular, Pomeranz's data and arguments cast doubt on the standard neo-classical version of Europe's development, which highlights the role of "efficient" markets while ignoring extra-market contributions from slavery, armed trading, and colonies.

Unfortunately, the book is really badly written. The text meanders from country to country, sector to sector, and era to era. Even worse, it is dense with facts, counter-factuals, arguments, counter-arguments, sweeping sociological speculation, and statistical minutiae. Almost every page has a paragraph (or two) of information that should have been briefly summarized or relegated to a footnote. A brilliant book like this should have been more reader-friendly. Shame on the editors at Princeton University Press.