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

The transformation over the last two decades of the Chinese economy into a contemporary superpower has brought renewed attention to two questions. Did China have the potential to undergo this economic transformation earlier? And why did the nineteenth-century industrial revolution bypass China and emerge in Western Europe? Several recent books take up this historical conundrum, including David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (1999), Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998), and the work by Kenneth Pomeranz under review here. In many ways, Pomeranz is in explicit debate with Landes and the Eurocentric model. Far from being in "retreat," Pomeranz argues, the most developed regions of Asia, such as the Yangtze Delta in China, which is the focus of his study, had many indicators of development that would put it at par with Western Europe in the eighteenth century on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

The Great Divergence is presented in three parts, of which the first two are devoted to an examination of living standards, consumption and nutrition data, and land, labor, produce, and livestock markets in the Yangtze and in northwestern Europe. Pomeranz contends that these indicators of economic development suggest that China was on a par with the most developed parts of Europe. But the contours of the story may not exactly show the parallels he proposes. For example, in chapter 3 he argues that Chinese levels of consumption of sugar and tea were as high as those to be found in Western Europe, developing this argument by totaling the acreage under cultivation for these cash crops in China. However, these commodities were also among China's main exports to Southeast Asia, Japan, India, Europe, and even the United States. The equation between land cultivated for sugarcane and amount of sugar consumed remains problematic. Enormous quantities of sugar were exported, more than 23,500 (British) tons in an average year like 1792. Domestic consumption figures are far lower when we factor in export data. Pomeranz also assumes, rather than proving, the existence of free markets in land and labor, disregarding substantial historical evidence that various types of extra-economic coercion and customary laws controlling market access continued to exist even in the most highly commercialized regions of the country.

Part 3 of The Great Divergence examines ecological constraints, including soil depletion and timber shortages, which Pomeranz argues affected both Western Europe and China by the end of the eighteenth century. He suggests that England was able to escape the Malthusian trap of resource scarcity and launch the industrial revolution because of two factors: the ready availability of coal and "geographic good luck" (p. 66) in the form of proximity to the Americas, which provided it with raw materials and a market for its finished goods. The crucial technological input of coal allowed British industry to break out of the energy limits imposed by timber shortages. This effort to identify a single resource as the enabling element for the industrial revolution has a prestigious lineage, having first been articulated in John U. Nef's 1932 classic, The Rise of the British Coal Industry. As numerous studies have since established, however, water mills and windmills rather than steam continued to provide the energy driving cotton mills well into the nineteenth century. The real innovation was a new spatial flow of production.

Divergent patterns of development have repeatedly emerged in countries that seemed to have very similar starting levels of infrastructural development and resource endowment. But without consideration of the class structure of different societies and the consequent social, economic, and political dynamics, tabulating the number of livestock and so on remains peripheral to explaining historical developments. Ultimately Pomeranz falters in trying to find a single, all-encompassing technological input...