Introduction

The world economic history of nineteenth century witnessed with the emerging of huge gap in
technological development between Orient and Occident, mainly between China and England, which
was named as a “Great Divergence” by the economic historians. In this century, despite all privileges
of China and the technological development that it possesses for centuries, the Europe, mainly
Western Europe, entered into the world history with its immense development in technology, which is
later identified as Industrial Revolution by the world historians.
For that reason, on of the challenged question that the economic historians of the world came upon
today is, if China had a priority over the rest of world in the term of the technical development and
economic sense approximately a millennium and was in the same development level with the most
developed part of Europe around end of eighteenth and beginning of nineteenth century, why
Industrial Revolution was produced in Europe, which gave it a world economic and political
superiority, but why not in Asia/China?
Much has been discussed about the Great Divergence in the recent historiographical construct.
Scholars have taken various historically debatable stance regarding the validity and consequence of
the topic. Major contributions were made by the Classical school of Economists like Adam Smith,
Karl Marx, Thomas Robert Malthus and few others. However, major boost was received by the
ground breaking work of Kenneth Pomeranz, who in his book added considerable validity and reasons
for the explosion of Industrial West over Oriental Chinese society. However, scholars have critiqued
Pomeranz’s theory and various trends of factors gained way to the debate. This tutorial assignment
includes the survey of the “Great Divergence” in terms of its historiography with special concern to
China.

Classical Economist Perspective

Adam Smith explored this topic in his book titled “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations”, written in 1776. According to Smith, the keys to human prosperity were free trade, limited
government, competition, and open markets. He suggested that a minimal government led to free trade
regulated only by the “main invisible”, which was a metaphor conceived by Adam Smith to describe
the self-regulating behaviour of markets. It is clear that, according to Smith, will succeed those
nations presenting a minimal government that will led to the openness to trade and finally to a wealth
increase.
Thomas Robert Malthus suggested another hypothesis about the causes of the Great Divergence,
linked to the different marriage paths that characterized each area. He formulated that the younger was
marriage, the more was population growth and, consequently, the less were the possibilities to achieve
income growth. Thus, Western Europe escape from the so-called Malthusian trap thanks to this change
in marriage paths over the time. At the opposite, China did not experience this growth because there
were not a change in population behaviour. In this cases Malthus theorized postponement of marriage
in order to reduce fertility and enhance evolution.
The thesis of Karl Marx points out that Capitalism and free trade will concentrate authority and assets
in the hands of few people leading to social division in two classes: workers and capitalists. Marx
highlighted the differences between the capitalist mode of production and that of other countries as for
example the Asiatic mode of production. He concluded that Western Europe was the first area to
experience the transit from feudalism to capitalist economy and those European countries, the more
developed, would have the greatest inequalities.

The California School perspective

 Kenneth Pomeranz broke the shell by proposing his thesis about the Great Divergence in his book
titled “The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy”. The
central question that he tried to answer concerned the main reasons that led Western Europe, especially
Sothern Britain to have such a unique path of economic development. In fact, he focused on regions of
comparable size, population, and economic vitality in Eurasia in order to avoid distortions of scale when
using nation-state as a unit. Furthermore, he decided to focus on income levels and living standards for
demonstrating his thesis.
Pomeranz opines that first, recent research has found well-developed markets and other “capitalist”
institutions back in past, even during the “feudal” period often thought to be the antithesis of capitalism.
A similar sort of revision has occurred in analyses of medieval science and technology, where what was
once disparaged as the “Dark Ages” has now come to be seen as quite creative. This has tended to
reinforce the notion that western Europe was launched on a uniquely promising path well before it
began overseas expansion. Second, the more market dynamics appear even amid supposedly hostile
medieval culture and institutions, the more tempting it has been to make market-driven growth the entire
story of European development, ignoring the messy details and mixed effects of numerous government
policies and local customs. Third, since this ongoing process of commercialization touched much of
preindustrial western Europe, much recent literature treats whatever is left of the Industrial Revolution
as a European phenomenon, rather than, as used to be common, as a British phenomenon spreading
later to the rest of Europe.
Pomeranz disputes Jones notion of European wealth before revolution and opines that in fact there is
little evidence to suggest a quantitative advantage in western Europe’s capital stock before 1800 or a
set of durable circumstances— demographic or otherwise—that gave Europe a significant edge in
capital accumulation. However in comparisons of the technology embodied in the capital stock,
Pomeranz accedes to some important European advantages emerging during the two or three centuries
before the Industrial Revolution. Europe’s disadvantages were concentrated in areas of agriculture, land
management, and the inefficient use of certain land-intensive products especially fuel wood. But even
Europe’s technological leadership in various sectors would not have allowed a breakthrough to self-
sustaining growth without other changes that made it much freer than other societies of its land base.
This was partially a result of catching up in some of the land-saving technologies in which it lagged, a
process that was greatly facilitated by knowledge gained through overseas empire, and partly a matter
of serendipity, which located crucial resources (especially forest-saving coal) in particularly fortunate
places.
In response to the animal power even with relatively few draft animals, late eighteenth-century Chinese
placed considerably more and higher-quality manure on the soil than did their European
contemporaries. It seems very hard to find evidence of a European advantage in transportation. A last
possibility would be that European animals provided a crucial difference by providing power for
industrial activities, such as turning millstones. So if Europe’s animals made a difference, it would not
have been as a “capital good,” but only as an item of consumption: i.e., as a source of protein for which
other areas had no adequate substitute.
Various groups of Asians seem to have lived at least as long as these western Europeans. Chinese
longevity is less impressive but still quite comparable to European longevity. Recent studies of the Qing
imperial lineage—perhaps the best-documented large premodern population anywhere, and not a
universally well to do one present a mixed picture, but one that generally supports the idea that
“Chinese” lived as long as western Europeans. Life expectancies at birth seem low, in part because of
very high rates of infanticide—perhaps as many as 25 percent of female new born were killed, with the
rate peaking in the eighteenth century. However, life expectancies for those who made it to age one
were at or slightly above forty by the late eighteenth century, which makes them quite comparable with
the best-off among the western European populations Most recently, it has become clear that Chinese
families of various classes, and in both good and bad times, employed a variety of strategies to limit
their family size, space their children, and select their genders. The most widely used strategies appear
to have been delaying pregnancy in marriage and then preventing pregnancy after establishing a family;
The result was birth rates per marriage and per woman that were well below those of western Europe
throughout the 1550–1850 period. In sum, it appears that various groups of Asians were at least as able
and determined as any Europeans to keep birth rates down for the sake of maintaining or improving
their standards of living. There seems, then, little reason to think that most Europeans even northwest
Europeans were uniquely well-off, even as late as 1750.
In concern to the technological advancement Pomeranz opines that by 1850 northwest Europe already
had a marked technological advantage over the rest of the Old World, and this cannot be entirely a
nineteenth century creation. Much of the credit for both the accelerated diffusion of best practices after
1750 and the burst of new innovations sprouted quite elements of the “scientific culture”. Increased
literacy and printing, the spread of scientific societies, relatively accessible public lectures were some
of the activities which were response to the situation. Pomeranz feels that “behind these phenomena
stood a strong sense that the investigation of a mechanical nature was to be encouraged, because it
offered both material benefits to the individual and a society”.
Chinese interest in the physical sciences and mathematics increased markedly in the seventeenth
century, especially after the Manchu conquest in 1644-68 and that publishers found that medical books
were a particularly good way to sell lots of books, full-fill a commitment to improve the world through
their work, and steer clear of the post-conquest minefields of political controversy. Irrigation was
perhaps the most obvious and in many other agricultural technologies, too, Europe lagged behind China,
India, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia. In many areas of textile weaving and dyeing, western
Europeans were still working on imitating Indian and Chinese processes. Pomeranz opines that rather
than searching for reasons why Chinese science and technology “stagnated” in general which they did
not a clear survey to look at why the paths on which they continued to progress did not revolutionize
the Chinese economy.
Pomeranz focuses on the application of coal and steam power to all sorts of processes which eventually
led to enormous labour savings, but the eighteenth-century innovations that made coal usable in making
iron, glass, beer, and so on were aimed at saving money on fuel (coal was cheaper than wood), not at
saving labour and the steam engines that pumped water out of coal mines did not substitute for men
doing the same work so much as they simply made it possible to exploit certain mines that no number
of men could otherwise have used. Pomeranz argues for the importance of two factors causing the Great
Divergence, essentially exogenous “shocks” outside the price system that had important effects on the
economy: the distribution of energy-generating resources and the accident that Europe discovered the
New World, whereas China did not. Conventionally believed, “Geology is destiny”, and in fact the site
and the availability of coal deposits determined the viability of industrialization. Coal was the driven
factor, the main cause of Industrial Revolution as evidences accedes. In the European context, Britain
was the sole to present a large availability of coal and the lowest transportation costs, the ready
availability of efficient water transport proved a boon to the British fortune. At the opposite, Chinese
coal miners were situated in the northwest that was far away from the manufacturing and populated
centres of the southeast. It means that mining was more expansive than it was in Britain. Overall, the
North and Northwest China as opines Pomeranz probably had China’s most serious ecological
problems. Lack of water may have been developing into a serious problem by 1800 in parts of late
eighteenth-century North China which was another significant hindrance to industrial aid. Thus, Britain
was actually geologically advanced than China.
The second cause concerns the New World. Again, it was a fortuitous case, for Europe, the discovery
of the Americas and China could not rely on such similar and huge advantage. For instance, this led
Europe to access to cheap raw materials, the use of slave workforce and an inflow of precious metals
rather than other products such as cotton, sugar, timber, and tobacco. Briefly, it help to break that land-
labour constraint that China did not do. Pomeranz adds the New World in to a new periphery which
according to him yielded both “real resources” and precious metals. The plantation areas of the New
World were a new kind of periphery: one that would import enough to keep its trade with the core fairly
balanced. Moreover, its imports and exports stimulated each other as more sugar exports consistently
led to more slave imports, more food and clothing imports. Pomeranz attributes three factor which led
to the creation of a periphery that was an ever-expanding source of raw materials in an era before most
production required expensive capital goods, which includes: - Demographic catastrophe, colonial
legislation, and slavery combined.
The flow of silver probably did the least to ease pressures on Europe’s land as opines Pomeranz. It went
to densely populated, heavily commercialized parts of Asia, where it was used as a medium for
transactions involving every class in society and in return, various consumer goods flowed to Europe
and to the Americas themselves. Pomeranz also pointed out that though the flow of silver was less in
china but nevertheless it was prevalent but the only difference was in the nature of its investment. Here
silver was clearly a good, not residual wealth used to settle unbalanced accounts as familiar to West.
Pomeranz attributes the trans-shipment of New World metals which allowed western Europe to expand
its imports of real resources far beyond what it could have obtained otherwise. Another advantage which
Europe had was the control over Egyptian and Indian Cotton which yielded the inflow of raw materials
and colonies in turn opened markets.

Criticism of Pomeranz

Robert Brenner and Christopher Isett threw considerable light through their book titled “England’s
Divergence from China’s Yangzi Delta: Property Relations, Microeconomics, and Patterns of
Development”. They started by criticizing the thesis of Pomeranz, especially about the possible starting
point of the Great Divergence. According to the authors, England began to have such a unique path of
economic development different from both the rest of Europe and the Yangzi delta from the early
modern period around 1500-1750. Finally, this existing divergence can really explain the Great
Divergence. From that point, the Yangzi delta experienced a Malthusian patter while Britain
experienced a sort of virtuous cycle of growth, the so-called Smithian pattern. The authors suggested
that China undertook the Malthusian path because there were strong peasant farmers and weak capitalist
farmers. This led to the decline of agricultural labour productivity and living standards, as shown by
the dropping long-term trend in real wages. At the opposite, Britain experienced the Smithian path
because there were weak peasant farmers and strong capitalist farmers. This, in turn, led to many
enclosure and farming innovations that permit a rapid agricultural growth making increase the total
wealth. Finally, this increase in wealth led to the Great Divergence.
Robert C Allen critiquing the thesis of Pomeranz suggested that his own thesis, in his book titled “The
Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War”. His
aim was to define the trend of prices and wages in Europe from the fourteenth century to the First World
War. He tried to explain four main points in his paper, which were about the consumer revolution (the
shift to marketable goods), the history of heights, the origin of mid-nineteenth century income gap and
the implications of the standard of living debate in the international and long-term context. In other
words, origins and causes of the Great Divergence through empirical analysis. Allen suggested that this
divergence has been originated during the pre-Industrial epoch, between 1500 and 1750. However, he
found that English wages did not increase over the time but they remain stables while they fell in most
European cities. In fact, real wages started to rose above medieval levels only after 1870. He showed
that the process of enclosure and the consequent replacement of small-scale farmers by those larger had
quite influence to the English economic success. In fact, enclosures and large farms enriched
landowners without positive effects toward consumers, workers or farmers. Thus, small-scale farmers
were largely responsible for the productivity growth.

Alternative Perspective
Shamkal Abilov critiques on the Eurocentric nature of the interpretation that Chinese Religion and
culture acted as hindrance on significant development for Industrial Revolution. Abilov points out three
factors which impelled England to reach Industrial Revolution in the second half of the eighteenth
century and gain industrial and technological superiority over the rest of world. The factors includes: -
1) Colonialism or access to Atlantic trade- by what England gained an immense wealth, 2) Institutional
changes -that inspired by overseas trade and pushed by merchants in order to get efficient institutions
that guaranty the property rights and provide freedom and trust, 3) Existence of the natural resources
(coal)- next to the industrial center of the British Empire. Abilov concludes his observations by acceding
the fact that It was not an “exceptionalist” European culture or, as Abu Talib, an Indian Muslim visitor
to Britain in late eighteenth century writes, any particular endowment of “the British” with a natural
passion for technical innovation.

Conclusion

A few centuries ago it would have been difficult to tell Europe apart from the rest of the World in
economic terms. Indeed half a millennium ago Europe might justly have been considered a laggard.
The three innovations which, in word of Marxist writer -Karl Marx, “ Ushered in Bourgeois society”
were not invented in Europe. Gunpowder, the Compass and the Printing Press were probably all
invented in China. The wake of 19 century brought decisive change in terms of economy in Western
th

Europe and parts of North America. Max Weber in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism” argued that religious factors were crucial for spurring European Economic growth.
Weber attributed to the Clavinistic spirit which induced the spirit of Capitalism was unique to Europe.
However, the point is clear that until 1800 China as an economy was not any way less than Europe as
several evidences with statistics has been provided at the initial Chapters of Pomeranz. Certain
limitations had pulled China down the ladder despite China having unified political system created by
dynastic empire. There has been no rise of significant market which was crucial for Industrial
commerce. Thus , the fact cant be rejected that Divergence did not occur but at the very same time a
clear historiographical analysis is apt to deal with the question of the factors which pulled Europe up
the ladder out of convincible similar conditions shared with the Orient.

Bibliography

• Pomeranz, Kenneth -The Great Divergence: the making of China , Europe and the
Modern World Economy;
• Abilov, Shamkhal – The Great Divergence Between China And England: Why
Industrial Revolution Happened In Europe;
• Weber, Max- The Protestant Ethics and The Spirit Of Capitalism;
• Online Reference