730666 MIL0010.1177/0305829817730666Millennium: Journal of International StudiesReview Article book-review2017 Review Article Review Article: The Great Divergence Millennium: Journal of International Studies 1–8 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817730666 DOI: 10.1177/0305829817730666 journals.sagepub.com/home/mil Michael Mann University of California, Los Angeles, USA Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev, Great Divergence and Great Convergence: A Global Perspective (Switzerland: Springer, 2015, 264 pp., £72.00, pbk). Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule (London: Pluto Press, 2015, 400 pp., £22.44, pbk). Kaveh Yazdani, India, Modernity and the Great Divergence: Mysore and Gujarat (17th to 19th C.) (Leiden: Brill, 2017, 648 pp., £178.40, hbk). How the West came to briefly dominate the world has been a major debate within the human sciences ever since the writings of 19th century luminaries like Marx and Weber. The question remains controversial. In recent decades the debate raged over two main issues. First, between those who give answers primarily in terms of developments within Europe itself – labelled Eurocentrics by their opponents – and those who prefer a more global explanation. Linked to this is the second issue, a debate over the relative level of development through time of Europe vis-à-vis the major civilisations of Asia, especially China. Attention has focussed on a relatively unimportant issue: when was the ‘moment’ of overtaking by Europe, more specifically by Britain. The ‘California School’ say this initiation of the ‘Great Divergence’ happened after 1800 and rather accidentally; the Europeanists put it earlier and see it as a long-term process deeply rooted in European social structure. Of course, we have to be Eurocentric in terms of the immediate consequence, since it was Western Europe that pioneered the greatest revolution ever in human experience, comparable to the Neolithic Revolution but far, far swifter. But its causes are up for debate. Nowadays, however, the debate has softened. Both schools recognise some of their own weaknesses and some of the strengths of the other. For a few, the polemic endures. Anievas and Nişancıoğlu repeatedly accuse ‘Eurocentrics’ of presenting ‘hermetically sealed’, ‘internalist’, and ‘methodologically insulated’ explanations. They are flogging a dying horse. I myself recognised long ago that I had previously neglected the influences on Europe coming from China and the Arab world. Conversely, members of ‘the California School’ recognise that ‘accidents’ need supplementing with structures, and one of them, Jack Goldstone, has recognised the role of longer term European dynamism. The result, apart from a few traditionalists, has been a proliferation of overlapping 2 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) multi-factor explanations, some more ‘internalist’ than others, all highly empirical but theoretically not very exciting. So it is nice to report that two scholars have made a path-breaking contribution to this old debate. Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev are Russian scholars from a school of inter-disciplinary historical sociology associated especially with the high-quality Russian journal Social Evolution and History (published in English). They see ‘divergence’ and ‘convergence’ occurring successively through history. One region or civilisation develops further than others (I would add that this is in terms of some combination of economic, ideological, military, and political power) leading to a Great Divergence between itself and others. Then other regions or civilisations, partly in interaction with the leader, adapt its practices and develop in a period of what they call ‘catch up convergence’. If they overtake the former leader, another Great Divergence begins. Thus parts of Asia led the world for a millennium, sitting astride a Great Divergence, then parts of Europe played catch up and achieved first a Great Convergence and then a Great Divergence, led by Britain, then diffusing to the West as a whole. But then parts of the rest of the world began to play catch up, and this is today reaching into another Great Convergence. This is interesting, but what is truly path-breaking is the authors’ step by step analysis of these historical phases based on new empirical data. This has also impressed Jack Goldstone, who has written a generous Preface to the book. The usual economic measures of gross domestic product (GDP), wage levels, and trade figures are flourished, along with attempts to assert military inferiority and superiority, etc. But the core supporting data are rates through time of technological innovations in Europe and elsewhere, first collected by Hellemans and Busch1 and then supplemented by numerous others. These data are presented mainly in graph form in two statistical appendices occupying 40 pages at the end of the book. It should be understood that this is not an argument of technological determinism but simply a measurement of inventiveness through the ages whose trends then have to be explained. But it is the best indicator found so far for measuring the dynamism or stagnation of Europe and China. On the basis of such data Grinin and Korotayev are able to periodise the development of European inventiveness. Overall, they see the whole period from 1100 to 1830 as a period of innovation and productivity increase, even though it started from a very low base. In the first ‘preparatory’ phase, up to 1450, came inventions such as clocks, spectacles, mechanisation of water wheels, and horse-powered drilling machines, while the emergence of free labour and capitalist relations enabled rational profit-seeking peaking in Italian luxury manufactures, accountancy, and Renaissance artistic and scientific achievements. But Europe was still well behind China in terms of the overall level of power development. Then from 1450 European innovations in science and technology abruptly shot up above China’s rate of innovation – a very early date indicating relative dynamism, although not dominance. China was still easily leading but not now being as inventive as Europe. Now Europe was moving from a primarily cyclical pattern of scientific and technological growth typical of agrarian societies to modern, constantly accelerating 1. Alexander Hellemans and Bryan Bunch, The Timetables of Science (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). Review Article 3 scientific and technical knowledge. In the period 1450 to 1660 the innovations included open sea navigation, more highly-organised warfare, windmills, water power, and commercialised agriculture. Europeans began to sail the world, embrace a mechanical view of Nature, and at the very end of this period defeat the armed forces of other civilisations. The leaders in this phase were Portugal and Spain, but with offshoots in Germany and the Netherlands. From the mid 17th century to around 1760, the Netherlands and then England led the way with constitutional political regimes, a Protestantism encouraging mass literacy (to read the Bible), the rationalisation of state finances and banks, largescale mechanised shipyards, global trading companies, and dominance in naval warfare. The two authors suggest that if we want to identify a moment of ‘overtaking’ of China and India it would be about 1760, which was the beginning of the 70 years of the true Industrial Revolution based on machinery, fossil fuels, steam power, chemical processes, and revolutionised transport. So arrived the Great Divergence. But, say our authors, this was only the final phase of an industrial revolution which had begun in Europe in the late 15th century, and in England well before 1600. This last phase was the only period truly dominated by Britain. However, the authors argue that if not in Britain, industrialisation would have emerged elsewhere in Western Europe (perhaps first in Belgium) because of the general inventiveness of the region. Thereafter other Western nations imitated, adapted, and shared the dominance. This is a narrative of continuous European innovation over a 400 year period, though its centre kept shifting. Grinin and Korotayev see this as a continuous competitive diffusion of knowledge across different regions of the continent. Some knowledge came from other civilisations (especially China and the Middle East) some came from Europe’s impact on the world (especially colonialism) but most came from elsewhere in Europe, where they stress region to region interaction. Thus Europe was not sufficiently unitary to allow an ‘internalist’ explanation in the first place. The causes they adduce for each phase are varied, sensible, and mostly already advanced by others. But their main contribution is to show the underlying dynamism of European civilisation over a long period of time. Thus the Great Divergence was no accident, although there were a few conjunctures along the way, nor was it as recent as the California School used to argue. Its apogee, they add, was to be the Informational Revolution of the second half of the 20th century. But their coda is to reveal through the whole 20th century the beginnings of ‘catch up’ by different regions in the rest of the world, coming to fruition in the 21st century in another Great Convergence. They lack contemporary data on technological innovations and have to fall back on GDP data. But they construct a model based on human capital (education) population growth, and regional productivity, which they say explains both the Great Divergence and the current Great Convergence as different phases of one underlying process of global modernisation. Some will quibble about their methods, some may feel the model is overblown, some will disagree with some of their explanations. But the breadth of scope offers a breath of fresh air to what had become a rather stagnant debate. And above all, I think they have demolished the California School’s argument that the Great Divergence was sudden. It was the culmination of centuries of dynamism, driven by a mixture of extra- and intraEuropean influences, with their own emphasis being on the intra-European influences. 4 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) Anievas and Nişancıoğlu are very different authors, also ambitious but stressing external influences and attacking almost everybody, not just liberal or Weberian Eurocentrics but also Marxists, like Robert Brenner, Immanuel Wallerstein, and political Marxists. In the Marxian sections the book is difficult to read if one is not an aficionado of the sectarian disputes. However, the authors put Trotsky’s concept of combined and unequal development at the core of their explanation, and this at least is easy to follow. Societies with very different cultures and practices of social reproduction interact with each other culturally, economically, politically, and militarily and these different combinations produce social change. Who could argue with this? It sounds very Weberian. However, the hard part is to discern which kinds of interaction really matter? Moreover, the model can be applied to relations between different European regions – as Grinin and Korotayev do – as well as between the whole continents referred to by Anievas and Nişancıoğlu. In such interactions they identify ‘privileges of backwardness’ in Europe against the ‘penalty of progressiveness’ of the more advanced tributary empires of Asia (or, I would add, Germany versus Britain in Europe). They have also proceeded beyond the normal Marxian focus on the economy to include as determinants all four sources of social power, although the main dependent variables remain various ‘assemblages constitutive of capitalism’. I had some difficulty in understanding what they mean by capitalism. They emphasise external causes of European development, like the Californians, although unlike them they also emphasise the deep historical roots of the European rise. In seeking to abolish the binary of East versus West, they go back a long way into very early history of pastoralists and agriculturalists, and this culminates in a whole chapter on the legacy of the Mongol Empire. They draw from recent revisionist history of the Mongols which sees them as rather nice people who left major legacies for the world. There is some truth in this. The most important legacy is said here to be their protection of the Silk Road from China to the Black Sea through which Asian-European trade could flourish. Yes, but Mongol protection only lasted about 50 years, 1285–1335, when a disputed Mongol succession led to civil war, brigandage, and a decline of trade along the Silk Road. Even in that 50 year period not much could be carried over such great distances by horses, camels, or oxen travelling 20 miles a day maximum. However this limited trade was important in two particular respects. First, the import of Chinese silks led to imitation and import substitution by the Europeans. Second, as revealed by John Hobson2 but not mentioned here, the Road enabled Europeans to buy or steal plans and models of Chinese machines, which the Europeans then adapted and improved. But overall the Silk Road was less important than trade coming mainly by sea from China, India, and the Islamic world around the Mediterranean. Our authors say little about such influences on Europe, though they were considerable. They say nothing about the negative effect of Mongol devastation of the cities and regions that resisted them. Yazdani says that this set back what he calls the ‘semi-modernity’ of China and Western Asia. But they do stress another Mongol negative influence: it was probably through the Mongol Empire that the bacterium we know as the Black Death reached Europe. It has long been argued that by reducing the European population 2. John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Review Article 5 by about a third, this plague produced serious labour shortages and raised workers’ wages, which in turn produced incentives to substitute machines for human labour, leading toward the Industrial Revolution. This is also stressed by Grinin and Korotayev. Anievas and Nişancıoğlu also emphasise the negative impact of the Ottoman Empire in blocking the Middle Eastern route to the Indies, giving Europeans incentives to develop ocean-going ships for an alternative route around the coast of Africa. Again, this is not a new argument, but in both the Mongol and Ottoman cases the negatives are seen as becoming incentives to develop positives, which is quite acute. They also argue that the engagement of the Habsburgs in struggle with the Ottomans released the North West of Europe, especially the Netherlands, from the imperial yoke and from the drain of major warfare, so encouraging the development of the first capitalist states. They produce little evidence for these assertions, and it is difficult to see any reduction in warfare anywhere in Western Europe in the early modern period. They do give wars their due in their overall explanation, but they attack neo-Weberians and IR Realists, who they say reify geopolitics and warfare as universal features of society floating above real historical social structures. Their structural explanation of European warfare is that lords had an interest in extracting the maximum possible surplus from peasants either by increasing coercion over them – which they found difficult given labour shortages – or by seizing the demesnes of other lords. This is for them an uncharacteristic economic reductionism reducing warfare to class relations between lords and peasants. Yet it is not clear why lords would want to risk war which might bring their own death in battle, and indeed wars are in most regions fairly rare. But there were structural reasons why European states stayed exceptionally warlike. There was a three-phase history of what we might call intra-European imperialism. In phase 1 after the barbarian invasions, the Frankish core of relatively well-organised states seized the lands of weaker, more decentralised or stateless peoples. In phase 2, with Europe almost full of states, the bigger states swallowed up weaker, smaller ones. The incentive to swallow up the smaller ones was reinforced by land-hungry younger sons deprived of inheritance rights by primogeniture. In these two phases the rationality of war seemed evident to the aggressors. Then, in phase 3, these states were able to expand their rivalry into the rest of the world, all of them creating colonies at relatively low cost. The aggressors in all three phases were waging war against weaker foes, with less risk to themselves, and so the incentives to make war continued. So it was particular features of geopolitics in this context that produced more general outcomes. War boosted capitalism through the profits of colonialism and as states became betterfinanced, with closer links to financial and merchant capital. War also encouraged the development of the iron, steel, and chemical industries, later the engineering heart of the Industrial Revolution. With ever-improving military capability on land and sea Europeans were finally capable of seizing the profits of colonialism outside their own continent, as Yazdani will show us, and as I have demonstrated elsewhere.3 I suspect that Anievas and Nişancıoğlu might agree with much of this. 3. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 3: Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17–57. 6 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) The final external influence they consider is the impact of European colonialism back home in Europe. They stress the negative impact of colonialism abroad – slavery, exploitation, militarism, racism – but see its effects on Europe as very positive. They mean Northwestern Europe (not Iberia) since they say that colonial production and trade gave a major boost to the Dutch and especially British economies. This argument has recently received increasing support from historians. Loot from the Americas, especially silver, enabled substantial trade with Asia. Grinin and Korotayev argue that the silver trade was actually less important than trade in American plants for which there was an enormous demand in Asia, but this only reinforces the general argument. The colonies significantly boosted the globalisation of capitalism. Our authors give a date of 1757, the Battle of Plassey in which Britain defeated France and her Indian allies, as ensuring British dominance in South Asia and the onset of the Great Divergence – almost the same date as that of Grinin and Korotayev. This is an ambitious and very interesting book, making a case for a predominantly externalist explanation of the Great Divergence, sometimes in novel ways. It is well worth reading, even though I find the internal/external divide too rigid, and the external emphasis too strong. The book by Kaveh Yazdani is very different. It is a focussed study of two Indian kingdoms at the receiving end of Western imperialism. Mysore and Gujarat flourished after the collapse of the Mughal Empire and they survived European pressure until just after 1800. I knew nothing about Mysore and Gujarat before I read this magisterial book. I now know a lot. The central issue for Yazdani is how close to capitalism, industrialism, and the modern state the two became before and during the period of intense European pressure. Yazdani uses the notion of modernity and its sub-categories and labels the two countries as being in a ‘transitional phase’ of ‘semi-modernity’ having mixed modes of production, with some capitalist and industrial elements spread unevenly across their territories alongside other very traditional sectors. But Yazdani ranges right across all sources of power and spends much time on state administrations and ways of thought, scientific and otherwise. Mysore had a strong, centralised state whose two main rulers, Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, when threatened by other Indian states and the British East Indian Company built up a strong military and economic étatization. The state directed an economic development project centred on textiles and a military-industrial complex. The military was modelled on European practices with the help of European mercenary officers, and its army (not its navy) was quite capable of inflicting defeats on European forces. That is why it survived longer. Mysore’s main technological invention of its own was the military rocket. This did such damage to British troops that they promptly copied and used it against both France and the United States. The Star-Spangled Banner describes the British attack on New Orleans in 1812 and includes the famous words ‘And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there’. Mysore was to blame! Its semi-modern iron and steel industry also employed many Europeans, and all of its industries received financial assistance from the rulers who were deeply conscious of the need for economic development for their own survival. They were prepared to adapt whatever Western models seemed useful. This might have resulted in a Japanese or German type of state-centred late development project but Japan and Germany were left alone for a long period during which they Review Article 7 could assemble it. British military pressure on Mysore was continuous. Three AngloMysore Wars – victory, followed by draw, followed by defeat – weakened Mysore and undermined its modernisation project. By 1810, Mysore had lost its independence and by 1820, British textiles and iron products were flooding its markets. Gujarat offered a different form of semi-modernity. With the decay of the Mughal Empire, political power became very dispersed. Though the Marathas were in principle the rulers of this region, they had very little influence in the more advanced coastal areas of Gujarat, where the cities were run by aristocratic merchant oligarchies. Gujarat had long contained major ports, and the biggest, Surat, was South Asia’s most important entrepot for international trade. Gujarat had a powerful mercantile class, was better equipped with capital, and was more globally competitive in dyes, textiles, and shipping than most European countries. Its semi-modernity was rooted in a vibrant commercialised society, whereas Mysore’s was more of a state-imposed structure existing ‘above’ society. This might in Gujarat have offered the base for modern capitalism and industrialism. But the absence of any effective state brought disorder, and especially piracy at sea. Many local lords fitted out their own ships to prey on merchant shipping, while the European East India companies were also essentially privateers. Their activities brought insecurity and enormous economic inefficiency. Then in 1759 the British East India Company seized and ruled Surat, although Gujarat as a whole was still divided between the British, the Marathas, aristocratic merchants, and countless local lords. Gujarat was held back from modernity, and its capitalist accumulation, its commerce, and the security of property was retarded, says Yazdani, by a mixture of administrative and military weakness and a lack of incentives to industrialise given abundant labour and wood, climatic conditions (monsoon interruptions of trade), and its existing leadership in textile production. But the coup de grace came from the British who made it their mission to destroy by force industries which competed with their own products. Yazdani remains ultimately uncertain as to the level of modernity achieved by these two regions because the necessary statistics are lacking. He is also not sure what would have happened if they had received European influences without European invasions. There were modern sectors whose indigenous roots were strengthened by the adaptation of European models. Yet the spheres of science, philosophy, education, law, gender relations, and the caste system remained more traditional, and were obstacles to modernity. But this attempt at convergence did not die of its own contradictions, it was stifled by the combination of British military and economic power. We can generalise from these two Indian sequences to explain why only Europeans initially pioneered the triad of industrialism/capitalism/the modern state. Except at the edge of their logistical reach, in China and Japan, they could use their military power, honed over the centuries, to enforce unequal treaties or actual destruction of the economies and states of other civilisations. That is not an explanation of how the Europeans got to such powers, but it does explain why no-one else did for a century. Yazdani has demonstrated why in India. However, Indian indigenous commerce persisted while colonialism proved not to be all bad. The Indian route to modernity just took longer. Most post-colonialists would not like Yazdani’s belief that Western science, education, and law were simply more advanced than India’s, but I think he proves his case. 8 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 00(0) I identified two major controversies at the beginning of this review. The first one – internal or external causes – remains somewhat debated, with different authors placing different emphases on the two, although both were clearly important. The most interesting development on this issue is the importance of inter-regional interactions ‘within’ what we call Western Europe, but which during most of this period had only a rather weak collective identity given principally by Western Christendom. This questions the usefulness of the dualism of the debate over internal versus external. On the second issue of how old was the European dynamic, the answer is probably three to four centuries – continuity of scientific and technological innovation at a higher rate than China’s. Now it might still be that this continuity masks a series of fortuitous conjunctures – the discovery of the American continent, the emergence of Protestantism at a time when North West Europe wanted to be autonomous of the Papacy and the Habsburg Empire, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the discovery of steam pumps just when deep coal mines in British industrial areas were flooding, etc. On the other hand these might all be cases where there were strong incentives for such activities. Perhaps someone might construct a complete list of such conjunctures and of the incentives which might have accompanied them in order to get closer to resolution. But one thing is for sure. The rise of Europe was not sudden or accidental.