The Great Divergence after Ten Years: Justly Celebrated yet Hard to Believe

My observations fall into two parts. The first is a three-fold appreciation of the importance and broad influence of Ken Pomeranz’s book, while the second, longer part offers a three-fold critique of its methods and historical claims.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-97321].

Why is The Great Divergence an important and influential book? Let me propose three distinct reasons why this book has engaged a large readership, influenced scholars in several disciplines, and continues to speak to our concerns today.

First, it is a book for our time. Western writers have been invoking the history and civilization of China since at least the Enlightenment era, usually to set in sharper relief the claims they were advancing about Europe. Typically, only a modest familiarity with China sufficed to make the point that a rich civilization was not enough to secure economic growth and prosperity. From this starting point arguments for the exceptionality of Europe, its western offshoots, and, oddly enough, Japan flowed easily. The economic rise of the so-called “East Asian Tigers” beginning in the 1970s initiated some tentative questioning of the venerable social science conventions that upheld slogans such as “the West and the Rest,” but economists tended to set them aside as follower economies and niche players.¹

The economic emergence of China changed all of this. China’s economic growth, launched with the reforms of 1978 and becoming visible to all in the course of the 1990s, fundamentally changed our perceptions about the present and thus, inevitably, our questions about the past. If China is now rapidly converging on the world’s leading economies, could its historical divergence have been as early and as profoundly disabling as so many deep thinkers long had claimed?

Pomeranz’s direct answer to this question and his explicit challenge to so much social scientific theorizing about China and “the rest” make The Great Divergence a book uniquely suited to our time. “Our time” has fallen upon us suddenly, and historiography normally develops at a leisurely if not a glacial pace, which makes the publication of this book (in 2000) all the more remarkable. Its author must be credited with considerable prescience, a prescience that has enriched historical scholarship.

Second, it offers a new approach to comparative history. Comparative studies certainly are not uncommon in historical research, but the musty odor of modernist social science methodology attaches to them. Historians are eager to pursue connections, transgressions, and transnational interactions, while systematic comparison seems to demand an unappealing allegiance to objective observation and even measurement. It can also be criticized for the asymmetry that seems inherent in the methodology. The comparativist agenda is guided by a standard: one of the units to be compared—typically the most powerful, influential, economically successful unit—sets the standard against which the shortcomings, deviance, or anomalies of the others are identified and measured.

This characteristic of comparative studies has led to countless “explanations” of why country X failed to grow because of the absence of feature Y, present in such abundance in successful country Z. And this is the sort of comparative study that Pomeranz was determined to avoid. In The Great Divergence he takes pains to deploy what he calls “reciprocal comparisons.” To begin with, Pomeranz insists on comparing like with like: not the most advanced parts of Europe with “Asia,” but England with the Lower Yangzi Delta region of China. He goes on to discuss potentially relevant economic features of these regions through an assessment of “equivalences.” Thus, observed difference does not imply inferiority of one of the comparators unless it can be shown to have led directly to a distinctly inferior outcome. Otherwise, one is left with equivalent approaches to the performance of the same function. Pomeranz stakes out a middle ground between the rigid traditions of comparative method on the one hand and, on the other, the postmodern inclination to celebrate the infinite incommensurabilities revealed by cultural comparisons. He decenters the Eurocentric comparisons with which we are all familiar without abandoning...