Economic History:

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.
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.
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 was 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 helped 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.
Prasanann Parthasarathi points to the existence of plural paths of change, which were the
products of the pressures and needs that, the dynamic and diverse economies of Europe and
Asia faced. Since pressures and needs, as well as the political response to them, varied
systematically across this vast geographical space, it is not surprising that in the eighteenth
century there was no single path of development. Britain diverged from Asia, as well as other
parts of Europe, not because it possessed rationality, science, markets, capitalism or anything
else in greater abundance, but because the pressures and needs it faced – in combination with
its state policies – produced a revolutionary response. Two pressures were critical in generating
British divergence. The first was the competitive challenge of Indian cotton textiles, which in the
eighteenth century were the most important manufactured good in world trade and were
consumed from the Americas to Japan. British efforts to imitate Indian cloth propelled a search
for new techniques of production, which culminated in the great breakthroughs in spinning of
the late eighteenth century. These new technologies transformed the world economy and
shifted the center of global manufacturing from Asia to Europe. The second was shortages of
wood, a consequence of deforestation. The British response was the substitution of coal for
wood, which sparked the development of the steam engine, new techniques for the smelting of
iron and eventually new means of transport, including the railway and steamship. Neither of
these pressures – shortages of wood and competition from global trade – was found in
eighteenth-century India. From this perspective, British advances in cotton and coal were
solutions to problems that did not exist in the Indian subcontinent. Only one, ecological
problems due to deforestation and dwindling supplies of wood, operated in large parts of
China. Although coal was being used on an expanding scale in a number of Chinese regions in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the Middle and Lower Yangzi, coal alone
was not a sufficient solution to what were complex ecological problems. Far more radical action
was required. In China, as in India, British technological breakthroughs in cotton and coal, while
revolutionary, did not address major needs. Therefore, the British path of change was either
unnecessary or inadequate for the pressing social, political and economic needs of the
advanced parts of Asia in the eighteenth century. Parthasarathi argues that the breakthroughs
in spinning, which were the most significant textile inventions of the eighteenth century,
emerged in Britain out of competition with Indian cottons. Since the early nineteenth century,
the Indian dimension has been relegated to the background and replaced with stories of supply
and demand for yarn, which was a revision of the history of innovation brought on by a
theoretical commitment to Smithian political economy.
Antipathy to Indian cottons was not the only response of European textile manufacturers,
however. From the late seventeenth century, opposition to Indian goods was accompanied by
efforts to imitate them. In Western, Southern and Central Europe, cloth printers set up shop
with linen cloth from Europe or plain white calicoes from India and attempted to reproduce the
chintzes that were so characteristic of the subcontinent. The growing demand for cotton fabrics
led spinners and weavers to work with the unfamiliar fiber of the cotton plant to create the
wide variety of plain, striped and checked cloths that were so desired in Europe, West Africa
and the Americas. At times, the silk and wool opponents of Indian imports turned their fury
upon local manufacturers who from the eighteenth century were slowly taking over markets
with their new cotton goods. European attempts to imitate Indian goods began with calico
printing and the first European cotton printing works were established in Marseilles in the
1640s. Dyeing and printing cloth with designs had long been practiced in Europe. Since at least
medieval times, linen had been printed with oil-based stains, but the colors were not fast and
the coloring agents often gave off a disagreeable smell. These defects made such materials
unsuitable for clothing or furnishings. Imitating Indian goods then required expanding the
repertoire of dyestuffs and discovering methods by which these colors could be made fast. It
also required the application of these techniques to cotton, a material that Europeans had little
experience with or knowledge of. Several early calico printers received technical assistance
from knowledgeable dyers and printers from the eastern Mediterranean where the art of
cotton cloth printing had been taken from its home in the Indian subcontinent. Technical details
on dyeing and printing cotton cloth may have also been transmitted to Europeans by traders
and travelers to Europeans by traders and travelers to the subcontinent who produced
descriptions of Indian methods. The calico printers of Britain faced two challenges in the
eighteenth century. In addition to perfecting methods of dyeing and fixing the color, they had
to find a suitable substitute for the all-cotton cloths of India. For much of the eighteenth
century, these European imitations found a limited market in Africa because they did not match
the Indian goods in either quality or price. Because of the lack of knowledge on dyeing cotton
and linen, some British manufacturers resorted to making checked cloth for the African market
with dyed worsted yarn, which was mixed with either cotton or linen. Another shortcoming of
the European imitations was that very few of them were manufactured purely from cotton.
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 19th century brought decisive change in
terms of economy in Western 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 Calvinistic 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 can’t 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.