Jonathan Wright

Précis # 9
HIST 685
04/13/2020
Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern
World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. x + 382 pp.

Kenneth Pomeranz has fully confronted the ageless question of why northwestern

Europe’s economic trajectory differed so greatly from late-imperial China. Moving on from

works such as Andre Frank’s Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998) coming out only

two years prior, The Great Divergence reveals how the presence of coal in Europe and the

access to the New World were the only disparities. Pomeranz utilizes works by Adam Smith

to structure the global economic and demographic explanation of the split between Europe

and Asia that occurred later than first thought.

One of Pomeranz’s greatest strengths in this monograph is pushing the view that

certain areas of interest within nations and continents can show extensive changes previously

assumed to be national or international in scale. The reader is made to understand that

Pomeranz is moving away from the traditional comparative method, viewing China and

Europe as alike entities, towards an evaluation of “selected key areas of China and Europe”

(12). This strategy is mostly successful as he utilizes the example of the Industrial Revolution

in Great Britain to show how localizing analysis concerning the location of coal caused

Britain’s economic deviation from China in the eighteenth century. He suggests that Britain

was able to escape the Malthusian trap of resource scarcity and launch the industrial

revolution because of what China did not have: “geographic good luck” (p. 66). Importantly

outlining how there were almost no prior economic variations between the two nations, The

Great Divergence has remained a groundbreaking work for launching the view that the

growth of the British economy specifically instigated a split between Asia and Europe.
Indeed, his quantitative study of the economics of the Yangtze region in China have become

universally known within Chinese studies. Pomeranz convincingly highlights how, while

previous discussions of economic transformation centered around Europe and how Asia

trailed behind, localizing analysis can be successfully utilized to show more significant

changes previously assumed to be on a larger scale.

Resources are the primary focus of the economic analysis as Pomeranz critiques

previously materialist accounts of the divergence between Asian and European expansion to

promote a more nuanced deconstruction of the evolution of the world’s economies. His

analysis draws extensively on Chinese, Japanese, and Indian economic sources to advocate

the view that the Smithian view of capitalism, with buyers and sellers being unable to control

markets, was just as accurate for Asian economies as in Europe (80). As well as revisiting

views on the early modern Chinese economy, Pomeranz highlighted the efficient agricultural

foundation in Asia. This forms part of his intentionally revisionist approach to European

understandings of technological superiority in the eighteenth century. His comparison of

resources such as rice indicate that Europe trailed behind practices in Asia that allowed for

more yield per acre (45-6). It is a convincing argument examining both internationally

varying ecological constraints and advantages that has enabled Pomeranz’s work to remain so

important today. However, despite the consistent theme of the “shared crucial economic

features […] in Eurasia,” his second principal point that access to the New World for

Europeans was another diverging factor can feel generalized when considering the care taken

to discuss localizing evidence (107). While significant themes such as the slave trade and

imports from the Americas are brought up with Europe, vital analysis is also placed on the

strength of China’s navy and mercantile control of East Asia. Pomeranz effectively advances

his revisionist agenda by proposing that the deviation between Europe and China’s

economies occurred later than previously thought in the globalized eighteenth century.
 A definitive and authoritative conclusion can feel absent in this monography before

his excellent appendices containing considerable quantitative data. Yet, the “Comparisons

and Calculations” section towards the end of the book importantly posits the major takeaway

from the work that “relatively small differences can create large historical divergences”

(279). Differences from the luck of accessible resources to agricultural efficiency

provocatively indicate that before the end of eighteen century, variations were insignificant.

Although the scale of the monograph is global in terms of economic analysis, Pomeranz’s

agenda is highly localized and effectively displays the reasons for the different economical

routes taken by western Europe and China for the last half-millennia.