The Great Divergence

By K. Pomeranz. 2000

1,675 citations recorded by the source corpus.

"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.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c66d6b051617fe0b0d7bd2351473f050c0b2748

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Citations in the corpus

Will History Repeat Itself? Economic Convergence and Convergence in Energy Use Patterns (2012, background): “The Industrial Revolution also marks the beginning of the ‘great divergence’ (Pomeranz, 2000) characterized by steady increases in per capita incomes in a small number of countries while the rest of the world’s population lived in poverty.”
The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War, and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe (2013, neutral): “The country was politically unified, and governed by a career bureaucracy chosen by competitive exam (Pomeranz, 2000).”
Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, Japan, and Europe, 1738-1925 (2007, neutral): “Most of the comparative studies relied on indirect comparison based on scattered output, consumption or demographic data (Pomeranz 2000, Lee and Wang 1999).”
ECOLOGY, CAPITAL, AND THE NATURE OF OUR TIMES: ACCUMULATION & CRISIS IN THE CAPITALIST WORLD-ECOLOGY (2011, background): “Within environmental and world history, it is difficult to deny a rough-and-ready correspondence between the meta-theoretical insistence on the primacy of markets (Cronon 1991) and neoliberalism, or between resource constraint approaches (Pomeranz 2000) and neoMalthusian conceptions of peak oil.”
The Role of Energy in the Industrial Revolution and Modern Economic Growth (2012, background): “However, we cannot distinguish between labor- and capital-augmenting technical change and Holmqvist (2003) and Schön (2004) found that TFP growth was negative in Swedish industry and manufacturing during this period of capital deepening in the late 19 century.”
Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century (2002, background): “…Ocean and the Philippines—then and only then was a regular and lasting maritime connection established between the four great continents. sionism includes Blaut (1993), Frank (1998), Goldstone (1998), Marks (1997), Pomeranz (2000), Sugihara (1996), von Glahn (1996a), Wong (1997), and many others.”
The 'Out of Africa' Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development (2013, neutral): “The influence of geography has been stressed from a historical perspective by Jones (1981), Diamond (1997), and Pomeranz (2000), and it has been highlighted empirically by Gallup, Sachs, and Mellinger (1999) and Olsson and Hibbs (2005).”