"The Great Divergence" brings new insight to one of the classic
questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in
Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced
areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently
as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very
high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets,
and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly,
Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no
worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout
the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages
of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly
resolved by trade.
Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from
the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which
substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land
intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in
energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he
notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the
Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe
than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow
dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and
remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than
maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe
to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.
Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian
hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in
manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from
exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a
result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially
stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along
labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have
been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource
stocks from underground and overseas.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!