Swellsville : March 2023

The Great Divergence (GD) in the title refers to a dramatic split in world economic development that takes place in the mid-19th century. Europe shoots ahead of China and so the rest of the world, making more or less the modern global political economic arrangements we know today. On top super rich countries, Great Powers, the height of European imperialism in the world (including US, Japan), and on the bottom the rest of the world, China's "unequal treaties" century of humiliation, the "sick man" Ottomans imperial implosion, and so many one-time colonized countries that now, today, these "undeveloped/underdeveloped" GD losers make up a big super majority in the United Nations General Assembly. In other words, the GD of 1850 is year zero for a global economic divide in the world still with us today: a few rich, technologically advanced countries on top, with their leadership institutions, the Security Council of the UN, the G8, the World Bank, etc, and below many many more Third World, or more recently, Global South, countries trying to develop, to catch up, but often stuck in a poverty trap. The GD marks the birth of the modern global economy and its yawning divide in political-economic fortunes.

So, by1850, according to Kenneth Pomeranz, as measured by most standard measures of economic development (wealth, lifespans, per capita consumption, technology, etc) Europe moves decisively ahead of the rest of the world. Prior to this time Europe is more or less on a par with development in China, and a small batch of other centers of civilization. Places like Europe and China, America, Japan, India, and various urban trade centers of the Muslim World have all gone through revolutions of “industriousness”-- expanding luxury trade, more production for distant markets-- lifting these areas beyond the more traditional peasant agricultural subsistence and localized economic conditions found everywhere else in the world outside these trading centers. But by 1850 only Western Europe and a few other global power centers have turned this expanding global trade into a full-scale industrial revolution and the global divide in economic wealth and power we know today.

The primary subject of the book is straight-forward enough: what were the causes of the GD in modern economic development? And Pomeranz does eventually make that case but perhaps more significantly, I think, along the way he delivers a withering and devastating critique of the library shelves of venerated history books that attempt to root the causes of a Great Divergence, when Europe jumps ahead of the rest of the world, much, much earlier. It is canon in the history of Western Civilization, if not propaganda, that various exceptional cultural traits of Western societies, some special genius for free enterprise, a special work ethic tenacity, or some singularly scientific mindset, according to many conventional histories, were inherently superior to those characteristics in other global civilizations, and evident in history by 1750 or 1492 or even earlier; say, the rediscovery of classical Greek learning in the 12th century (and given to the West by Jews and Muslims, a point often passed over). To these forests of scholarship devoted to the glory of Western Civilization Pomeranz's GD is, for me, a devastating broadside.

Professor Pomeranz shows in slow, meticulous, scholarly detail how these mythic Western textbook (i.e., hyped-to-the-point-of-being-taken-entirely-for-granted) so-called advantages, epic rationalizations for global inequality today, do not actually stand up to any close comparative scrutiny of the world historical economic evidence.

Not that getting to Pomeranz’s evidence and conclusions is all an easy go. This is academic history and suffers as a reading experience for what such writing often does: too many statistics, too much painstaking technical explication about how/why various analytical comparisons can be verified and trusted, and a dizzying number of narrative momentum-killing citations and footnotes. This is not entirely surprising in that I picked up on the book from French economic historian Thomas Piketty, whose astonishingly popular Capital in the 21st Century (2013), is about as academic and scholarly as popular histories get. But very surprising in that the only other book by Pomeranz I know, The World Trade Created: Society, Culture, and The World, 1400 to the Present (1999), is, by contrast, a bunch of short, rich in detail, geographical portraits of world trade; no technical discussions, no footnotes (and easy to use in a high school APWH course, by the way). (1)

All of which is to say as a reading experience The Great Divergence can be a slog but I'm here to tell you worth the effort. Exceptional “free enterprise” or “work ethic” or "scientific" traits in the West prior to 1850 represent a triumvirate of conceits Pomeranz contradicts at every turn. Some greatest hits:

We should note from the outset that Europe’s initial expansion in trade in the 15th and 16th centuries, called the Columbian Encounter, is motivated by already circulating luxury goods from China and Asia. In fact, Europe’s discovery of the New World, and its colonization of the Americas in the 17th-18th centuries, are the dumb-luck good fortune of Spain and Portugal trying to find direct trade links with the Asian spice trade; direct links without having to go through the Muslim middlemen, the Ottomans, then dominating the trade with Eastern riches. Such dumb-luck world historical good fortune Pomeranz dryly calls a “conjuncture” or a “convergence of otherwise independent historical phenomena.”

He shows that per capita consumption of trickle-down luxuries such as sugar, tea, and coffee in Europe, for instance, never exceeds that in China (or Japan) before 1850. And the thriving markets in Asia for these goods and others (silks, pepper, porcelain, etc), going back to the 10th century, were almost exclusively in the hands of small-scale “free market” competitive merchants, with significantly less State intervention than existed in the Western European ports of Amsterdam, Marseilles, or Liverpool.

Moreover, according to Pomeranz, women’s participation in the economy in Western Europe was often severely restricted, and outlawed as unfair competition before 1850. Whereas women in China were expected to produce from home, weaving, and/or other handcrafts, and often their incomes made a significant contribution to the economic well-being of their households. So patriarchy, while evident in both Europe and China, in terms of ‘free enterprise’ or a ‘work ethic’ contributing to economic development, appears more economically open to both gender and individual initiative in China.

Or consider another confounding comparison for West-is-best free market devotees: interest rates in Western Europe between 1650 to 1800 hovered around 5-7%, significantly lower than the 10-15% rate common in China during that period. This gives the impression Europe was more open to investment and economic development. But this is deceptive Pomeranz contends because borrowing in China customarily did not risk loss of property, as it often did in Europe, and so capital flow rates, investments rates, despite the higher interest rates, were as high or higher in China in the period under consideration. In other words, there was actually more market investment economic activity in China than in Europe in this period.

As for scientific achievements, the industrial revolution in England and Western Europe is the great game changer, of course. But what is remarkable about the path leading to that turning point is how many technological conveyances that eventually get Europe to the Industrial Revolution actually originated in Asia. Note the technologies from Asia that made possible Western Europe’s great age of maritime exploration in the first place: the compass, lateen sail, and astronomical charts. In the 17th century English philosopher of Science Francis Bacon asserts that three inventions were most crucial to "modern" development in Europe, “printing, gunpowder, and the nautical compass”; again, all technologies spread to Europe from Asia. Pomeranz points out that all the science related to steam power already existed in China prior to the development of the steam engine, the Big Bang symbol of the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe. What catalyzed these technologies to be put together in England in the 17th and 18th centuries was the geographic luck of finding ample coal supplies in land with a shallow water table, requiring the development of a water pump to dig out the coal. And these developments in science and technology do not separate Europe from China before the mid-19th century.

So, again, another lucky “conjuncture” for Europe. Which brings us back to the original question: so what then were the real causes of The Great Divergence? We’re getting there but, first, a little more context is needed.

By the 17th and 18th centuries, 1600-1800, in Pomeranz’s account, Europe and China (along with Japan and India, etc) have gone through revolutions of “industriousness,” expanding trade, more production for distant markets, and extensive cash economies, but all of them are also at the same time, crucially, pushing up against environmental limits. The energy systems, the old biological regime dependent on wood, wind, sun, and arable land, are straining. Deforestation pressures, wood shortages, and the rising costs of transporting wood greater distances stress and impact Western Europe, China, and Japan during this period.

In China and Japan these environmental limits turn economic development and growth, naturally, towards intensification; how to make more of the finite available land arable, forest conservation, and more intensive labor.

Europe faced the same predicament but was able to escape these constraints, this economic fate, by pluck and dumb-lucking into a previously unknown continent; a New World fantastically rich in natural resources and arable land. And as if that wasn’t lucky enough— and possibly the most perverse conjuncture of fortune/misfortune in world history?— the people already living in the Americas are entirely defenseless to infectious diseases that Europeans bring with them to the Americas, and so wiped out in numbers as high as 90% in densely populated areas of American civilization (Central Mexico and The Andes); largely clearing the way for European economic development, plantation slavery, and industrial scale mining with very little local resistance. And then to top it all off, not making this up, the Spanish find a motherlode of silver in the Andes Mountains in the 16th century, at the very same time China, or the Ming Dynasty, is making silver its currency of exchange as a matter of internal economic reform, thereby giving the Europeans something to trade with China (the goal of European maritime exploration in the first place, remember). And generating another important pivot in Europe's developmental prospects as China had up to that time shown very little interest in European trade goods. So China became a great sink to which Spanish silver flowed for a time, establishing the first direct trade between the West and the riches of Asia. In short, the conquest of the Americas was probably the greatest lucky streak of development-boosting historical conjunctures in world history for Europeans. For everyone else, not so lucky.

So Europe’s colonization of the Americas is crucial to establishing the GD by 1850, argues Pomeranz, but it is his case that close scrutiny of the historical record indicates the impact of this conquest actually takes centuries to be felt. This is at least in part a testament to how much bigger and more extensive was world trade already by 1492 in the Indian Ocean trading system knitting together China, India, and the Muslim world, and with which up to that point Europe had no direct contact. But also it shows how long, and uneven, is the advance of economic development in the early modern period. There is a lot of regional variety, urban centers and rural margins, in the economic development of Europe and China and the rest of the world before the GD. Pomeranz says the English per capita consumption of luxury sugar, for instance, was equal to China’s by 1750 but the rest of Western Europe doesn’t catch up until 1850 or thereafter.

Anyway, the final linchpin to the GD, beyond the conquest of the Americas, is, yes, another lucky conjuncture: the invention of the steam engine between 1600-1750. Developed first to pump water out of coal mines, to get around deforestation, and which England had, again, the geographic luck to have in abundance close at hand, the water pump eventually leads to the invention of a coal driven steam engine that will catalyze into an Industrial Revolution and an entirely new energy system based on fossil fuels that by 1850 has propelled England and Western Europe and eventually the United States into a position of global imperial technological military domination.

For me, Great Britain’s Opium Wars against China, 1839-1860, drives home the decisiveness of the GD. China is forced by gunboat diplomacy to accept Britain’s opium trade and a series of humiliating “Unequal Treaties” in the name of “Free Trade." Ironically and tragically known in China as the “Century of Humiliation,” gunpowder weapons technology that was invented in China has now been advanced in Europe into guns so much more deadly that the China has no effective defense. And Western industrialization is ascendant and driving global imperial domination. (2)

This is a simplified account of Pomeranz’s nearly 400 page study, for sure. He brings to his subject an exhaustive attention to detail and many interesting nuances I’m leaving out. Both because there is so much history in the book and because I'm terrible at remembering the details. But one notable omission that does still come to mind is a curious tangent to his discussion about growing biological limits in the 17th-18th centuries; deforestation, lack of arable land, etc. Pomeranz asks why doesn’t Western Europe spread more into Eastern Europe the way China, by comparison, spread their economic model to the south and west of their economic center in the Yangtze and Yellow River deltas? Maybe it was in part that colonization in the Americas reduced some of the pressure to push trade and development into Eastern Europe but Pomeranz also brings up cultural resistances, a few super rich authoritarian landlords and very poor serfs, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, very little cash culture and, generally, a point he makes repeatedly, how hard it is to expand Western European model of economic development where it encounters cultural resistance, or before the late 19th century and its industrialized military advantages are decisive, anyway. (3)

A rare sour note, for me, includes Pomeranz abrupt dismissal of historian Eric William’s Capitalism and Slavery thesis. William's book documents copious amounts of evidence that slavery, King Sugar and King Cotton, primarily, provided essential financial support to early capitalist development. Pomeranz dismisses this point with some unconvincing hand waving about the ideological biases of Marxist historians and the small proportion of European economic growth attributable to slavery. I don’t know what’s entirely behind this gesture, he really doesn’t make much of a case, but it feels like a reflexive defense to any charge that his own critique of Western myths about modern economic development might be motivated by Marxist sympathies. Disappointing but worth noting that he is a professor at the University of Chicago, intellectual center of the sick fantasy of unfettered capitalism (Milton Friedman, et al), precisely the sort of academic setting one might imagine taking offense to a colleague throwing shade at their beloved Western “free enterprise” myths.

So what is the big deal with this book, I guess? I’ve read other histories that make the case the conquest of the Americas and the steam engine were the essential causes of the global divide in economic development in the 19th century. They are mostly of recent vintage, post-World Wars, but they are out there. But I’ve never read any better case, or one that so relentlessly brings the receipts, for why The Great Divergence was NOT caused by some special exception or genius in the European tradition that is lacking elsewhere in the world. And thereby Pomeranz's hard-to-read scholarly work makes it just a little bit harder to intellectually support Eurocentric myths that rationalize racist imperialist social conditions and gross inequality today with essentialist nonsense about inherent European developmental superiorities. Which, in the world history book game anyhow, is some of the best work I know. (4)

Footnotes (so I get to do/have to do a couple footnotes with a book like this)-

(1) One possible resolution to this seeming paradox I’d propose is looking at The World Trade Created as field work, delivered in accessible, colorful sketches, and The Great Divergence as burning polemic that came out of that field work; appropriately, respectfully, couched in the language of the academic scholarship it challenges.

(2) Kind of weird to me that Pomeranz, whose original subject is Chinese history, doesn't even mention the Opium Wars. As if they weren't even relevant, let alone perfectly indicative of the GD, as they strike me. Too obvious?

(3) Also, curious, although unmentioned by Pomeranz, how this dream of colonizing Eastern Europe that he talks about remains in Hitler’s World War 2 fascist fever dreams; Germany expanding into Eastern Europe, enslaving and/or wiping out the native peoples, capitalizing on Easter Europe’s natural resources, just like he has read about and imagines in America’s triumphant Westward Movement. But Pomeranz says not a word.

(4) If I were to take one last stab at arguing for some pre-1850 essentialist European advantage, looking for some loophole in Pomeranz's slam-dunk argument against pre-1850 European divergence, I’d try to ground my case in machine technology; machine shopped, so to speak, in local windmills for centuries, a common presence around Western Europe. This includes pumps, wheels, turbines and increasingly precise machine tooling in the production of clocks. As early as the 17th century China is fascinated with European advancements in mechanical clock technology; see the experiences of Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci. And in addition, and as alluded to before, while China invented the cannon, after only three centuries, 1300-1650 (and largely attributable to a growing arm’s race between European kingdoms and budding States), Europe’s machine-tooled cannons and machine guns are far superior to gunpowder weapons produced anywhere else, including China. I imagine in Pomeranz’s impatient reply something along the lines of, regardless, this assumed advantage doesn’t manifest as any measurable European economic advantage (lifespans, agricultural production, etc) before 1850. Actually, I'm afraid he'd dismiss my hot takes on his great book as Marxist doggerel. But, for what it’s worth: I’m really not a Marxist or Communist. Or not in any card-carrying doctrinaire sense, anyway. I believe in private property, so much so that like basic human rights I think everyone is entitled to some.

Swellsville

"Train in Vain," The Clash, London Calling (1979)

"Protex Blue" & "Garageland," The Clash (1977)

ADANTE, 1953 By Herbert Badham, Queensland, Australia

"Drommer," Bremer/McCoy (2013)

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and The Making of The Modern World Economy By Kenneth Pomeranz (2000)