Rating: 
Summary: A Joy to Read that Sets the Record Straight
Review: "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." --
Adapted from a review by Gary M. Anderson in "The Independent Review," Winter 2004
Rating:
Summary: A Joy to Read that Sets the Record Straight
Review: "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." --
Adapted from a review by Gary M. Anderson in "The Independent Review," Winter 2004
Rating: 
Summary: Heavy reading
Review: Beware- this is really "heavy" reading. This is one book that could be enjoyed far more with better print quality. Does however,make very good and convincing arguements and points which are well supported. The print however is hard on the eyes and makes it a chore to read through it. If not for the really ineteresting content, I do not believe I would recomend it.
Rating:
Summary: China's Advocate
Review: 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. # 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. # 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
Rating:
Summary: Why Europe Won?
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Winner of 2001 World History Association Book Award
Review: The Book Award Committee of the World History Association is pleased to announce that this book is co-winner of its 2001 prize, along with John McNeill's Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World. Jurors praised both books using words like "brilliant," "superb," tour de force, and "a classic." Pomeranz shows that China had more economic constraints than Europe, which profited from windfalls of land and silver in the American colonies, and available coal which fueled England's industrialization. Congratulations for an outstanding contribution to "history from a global perspective" in the field of economics. The prize will be presented at the June 2001 meeting of the WHA in Salt Lake City.
Rating:
Summary: A Joy to Read that Sets the Record Straight
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Trying to Explain It All
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant Mess
Review: This brilliant book seeks to explain why the industrial revolution occurred in Europe and not in Asia. As Pomeranz shows, no objective observer in 1750 could have predicted that the breakthrough would happen in Europe: Europe and China had roughly comparable economic conditions and institutions, and both faced similar population pressures on the land. Pomeranz argues that Europe was able to escape its ecological constraints by virtue of its access to nearby coal deposits and to land-intensive products from New World colonies. 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 about neo-classical economics, "The Great Divergence" is a bracing example of how pat economic models can fall apart in the face of concrete historical evidence. In particular, the data and arguments marshalled by Pomeranz undermine the standard neo-classical stories that attribute Europe's development to "efficient" markets and ignore the extra-market contributions of slavery, armed trading, and colonies.
Unfortunately, the book is also repetitive and disorganized: it meanders from country to country, sector to sector, and era to era. It's also 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. It's too bad. A brilliant book like this should have been more reader-friendly. Shame on the editors at Princeton University Press.
Rating:
Summary: How the West Won!
Review: This is a classical work of economic history. It seeks to answer the question of why Europe, rather than Asia, gained dominance after 1750. Pomeranz spends much of the book demonstrating that Europe and Asia were developing in parallel until the nineteenth century, when Europe surged ahead. Pomeranz credits Europe's fortunate possession of coal and proximity to the Americas for the West's advance. The Great Divergence is good for Westerners to read because it helps us recognize that there was nothing preordained about our present preeminence.
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