Comment on Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence

With scores of readers in history, the social sciences, and the public at large, Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence has been an enormous and well-deserved success. Within history itself, its achievements are nothing short of miraculous, for it has overcome our discipline’s obdurate balkanization (“I do early modern Europe—why should I care about Qing China?”) and managed to bridge the gap between people who would rarely cross paths or even talk to one another: a world historian, for example, and an economic historian; or a scholar of ancient East Asia and a specialist on the British Industrial Revolution. And it has shaped the research agenda in a variety of history’s subfields.

It did all this by posing a question that could not be ignored, even by the many historians who have absolutely no interest in economic history—namely, when did the yawning gap in incomes open up between the West and Asia? China’s astounding economic growth and rise to power on the world stage made the question all the more pressing. It had to be answered, and it was clear that the smug old responses of the past would simply not do.

Pomeranz’s answer was that the West and East did not diverge until after 1800, at least if it is the wealthiest parts of Europe and Asia that are compared. He argued that incomes in the richest parts of Asia, such as the Yangzi Delta in China, were just as high in 1800 as in Britain, the richest part of Europe, and he also found that there were no essential differences between economic institutions in the two regions. Given his conclusions, it was no longer possible to blame China’s failure to develop on ancient poverty or on some long-term institutional handicap. Those sorts of arguments, which had been common, would simply not work anymore, particularly after other work in Chinese history had called attention to extraordinary technological advances in medieval China.

In their place Pomeranz advanced his own explanation for China’s failure to industrialize early, as Great Britain had. Britain, he pointed out, had two crucial advantages over the Yangzi Delta and other wealthy regions of Asia. First of all, it possessed cheap, easily accessible coal, which provided abundant energy for factories; and second, it had colonies that could furnish land-intensive commodities such cotton and timber. Britain therefore escaped the constraints of preindustrial farming and forestry that hobbled Asia and the rest of Europe. With coal, the British could heat their homes and run their blast furnaces without chopping down every tree in the United Kingdom. And with colonies they could get all the raw cotton they needed to turn out the printed textiles that were the rage during the Industrial Revolution.

An illustration of the Corn Exchange, London, mid-19th century. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-97321].

Like all successful books, The Great Divergence has triggered an avalanche of research, particularly in economic history. What does all this subsequent work say about Pomeranz’s conclusions? As other members of this panel have pointed out, recent publications suggest that the gap between Britain and the richest parts of China actually opened up well before 1800 and thus earlier than Pomeranz claimed. Building workers in Britain were earning more than their counterparts in the wealthiest parts of China as far back as the early 18th century. The British workers’ real wages were higher and so were their earnings in silver. The Chinese building workers were in fact not on a par with Britain but rather with the building workers in the backward parts of Europe.¹

One may of course worry that building workers are not representative of a whole economy. Furthermore, families drew earnings from sources other than wages, particularly in China. Still, the wages do say something about what semi-skilled workers earned for their labor alone, and if further research confirms the wage figures, then it will be impossible to avoid the conclusion that the relative price of labor was higher...