Great Divergence Debate

Most ―mainstream accounts of the West-East divergence gain theoretical inspiration from Max Weber and/or Karl Marx, and have therefore traced the ―rise of the West to the unique social processes that apparently fostered capitalism in Europe. Critics have labelled these accounts ―Eurocentric insofar as they imply the inherent superiority of the West over the East,1 and they have offered alternative ―anti-Eurocentric narratives which ostensibly avoid such analytical and normative pitfalls. These critics have succeeded in directing our attention to experiences in the non-European world. However, they have sought to validate these experiences by simply extending (in space and time), rather than transcending, the problematic concepts and assumptions that plagued the ―Eurocentric Weberian and Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism. This paper argues that a truly non-Eurocentric approach requires a definitive break with these assumptions and the adoption of an alternative historical materialist understanding of the origins of capitalism pioneered by Robert Brenner. While not explicitly conceived as non-Eurocentric, Brenner‘s concept of social-property relations offers the surest foundation for understanding ―the great divergence‖ without doing violence to history or succumbing to European triumphalism.

When and where did capitalism begin? This is a question which many scholars of economic history, sociology, and political economy, to name but three disciplines, have grappled with for well over a century. Anivas and Nişancioğlu come to this debate with fresh theoretical tools and an analysis inspired by Marc Bloch's longue durée approach to historical development. The result is a book that ranges over a good thousand years of history, is informed by a rich engagement with theory, and that challenges the received wisdom of capitalist development. In the classic Marxist historiography of the development of the history of capitalism, which Anivas and Nişancioğlu engage with early on, Eric Hobsbawm's 'Age of' series remains the classic history of the development of capitalism.[1] Hobsbawm's analysis, drawing upon Marx's own stages of history model of economic development, located the origins of capitalism in late eighteenth century Europe. For Hobsbawm, the location of capitalism's birth was firmly in the Britain of the 1780s and based upon the cotton textile industry. Meanwhile, the origins of the political institutions that allowed capitalism to come to dominate European, and eventually global society and economy were to be found in the French Revolution. Thus by, say, 1790, capitalism was born; initially it was European capitalism, but during the age of empires it was to become global capitalism. For theoretical resources, Hobsbawm drew upon and modified Lenin and Luxemburg. As European capitalists sought fresh markets and raw materials they drew into capitalist relations the rest of the world, transforming it in their own image, and dislocating and dismantling indigenous forms of social and economic relations it found at the 'frontier'. For Anivas and Nişancioğlu this traditional location of the origins of capitalism in Europe is wholly unsatisfactory. They reject a view of capitalist development that elevates European 'capitalism to a universal stage of development through which all societies must pass in one form or other' (p. 41). For Anivas and Nişancioğlu, the road to capitalism is one best understood through a re-engagement with Trotsky's theory of uneven development. Through the use of this concept, Anivas and Nişancioğlu relocate the origins of capitalism geographically outside of Europe. Their chronology is therefore elongated, tracing the origins of capitalism through the Mongol Empire (chapter 3); the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires of the 'long sixteenth century' (chapter four); the New World of the Americas (chapter 5); and of course, Europe – but, strikingly, the with significant reference to the Dutch empire and, crucially, by noting the reflexivity of Southeast Asian economies upon Europe (chapters 6-7). Chapter Eight's analysis of the Great Divergence in many ways suggests that it was not so much the case that the British conquest of India which allowed the dawn of the capitalist era (with its Indian cotton and Lancashire textile mills) but rather that British control of India resulted in a situation whereby Britain could not help but be capitalist. The broad chronology and densely packed theory of this volume will make it of considerable use to a variety of scholars. The earlier chapters, which deal with the various theories of capitalist development, will be of considerable use to political theorists. Later chapters examining regional case-studies of the development of capitalism will invite scholars of those regions to rethink the role which economies across

''India, Modernity and the Great Divergence is an original and pioneering book about India’s transition towards modernity and the rise of the West. The work examines global entanglements alongside the internal dynamics of 17th to 19th century Mysore and Gujarat in comparison to other regions of Afro-Eurasia. It is an interdisciplinary survey that enriches our historical understanding of South Asia, ranging across the fascinating and intertwined worlds of modernizing rulers, wealthy merchants, curious scholars, utopian poets, industrious peasants and skilled artisans. Bringing together socio-economic and political structures, warfare, techno-scientific innovations, knowledge production and transfer of ideas, this book forces us to rethink the reasons behind the emergence of the modern world.''

In a little over a century from around 1750 to 1850 Britain went from being a largely pastoral, farming population to a country of industrialized cities and factories. This tremendous transition, usually referred to as the Industrial Revolution, marked a big turning point in history as it was the first time a country was able to escape from the Malthusian constraints and experience large continuous economic growth and massively increase productivity. However, while there is great consensus for when the Industrial Revolution took place and that it first occurred in Britain, there is heavy debate over its origins and why Britain was first.

Although, this essay will acknowledge the wide and complex variety of possible explanations, it will focus on institutions as they have played a crucial role as a foundation for the Industrial Revolution to take place in Britain. The British institutions were important in creating a more egalitarian society, supporting economic growth and encouraging technological innovation and the industrialization that eventually occurred around the world significantly explains the great inequality among nations today.

This essay will refer to institutions as sets of informal and formal rules and organizations that impact the distribution of power, and by aggregations of ethics, morals, procedures and guidelines stabilize interaction (Hall, 1986, North, 1990; Peters & Pierre, 1998; Wiens, 2012).

Firstly, this essay will argue that British institutions played an extensive part in decreasing the powers of the executives as education increased and a growing middle class emerged which resulted in a relatively freer and more equal society than elsewhere in the world. Secondly, institutions were imperative for Britain’s economic growth and for the maintenance of comparatively high wages at the time. Thirdly, high wages, as well as institutions such as the patent system, guilds and commons motivated industries and individuals to innovate. Lastly, the great inequality among nations in the world today can be highly explained by the onset of industrialization around the world.

COURSE: 1003GIR Globalization the Asia-Pacific & Australia. 10.09.12

La gran divergencia es una expresión que describe el proceso histórico de separación de los niveles de producción y renta, en fin, de bienestar, de Occidente con respecto a las sociedades no-occidentales. En este puzzle son dos las cuestiones a dilucidar: ¿por qué despegó Europa? y ¿por qué no despegó (o lo hizo menos) la no-Europa? Este curso abierto sólo trata de resolver la segunda cuestión, centrándose en el período anterior a la Revolución industrial. Es decir, la no-Europa antes de 1800.

This seminar paper is an examination of how Ottoman studies has dealt with the so-called Seventeenth Century Crisis and the way that it seems to have irrevocably altered the Empire’s ability to compete with Europe.  The field of Ottoman studies itself represents a veritable minefield of political and economic sensibilities, and I have divided it into three and a half paradigms: The Classicists (and the Neoclassicists), the Revisionists, and the Post-Revisionists.  These schools have examined the same events with differing (if not entirely opposing) interpretations of the way in which the Ottoman state and its economy functioned; the way in which the state was able to deal with the rise of European mercantilism and nurture proto-capitalist responses to it; and the way in which the Ottoman Empire integrated with the larger world economy around it.  I propose that the question around which must Classical and Revisionist scholarship is based—that of, “Why did the Ottoman Empire not industrialize?”—is fundamentally flawed, and that, while the same question is examined by Post-Revisionist scholars it has become a secondary question to “Did the Ottoman empire need to industrialize?” This new wave of scholarship, which includes examinations of geographic and environmental factors that played a role in the Seventeenth Century Crisis and the Empire’s slow recovery from it have finally begun to provide us with a deeper understanding of the Empire’s internal functions and the role of external European factors in determining the eventual fate of the Ottoman state itself.

Proceeding from a critical assessment of two recent books, Prasannan Parthasarathi’s Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did  ot, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong’s Before and Beyond Divergence, this paper takes stock of the present state of the “Great Divergence” debate. It is argued that the discussion needs to be refined to distinguish between levels of economic development, and paths or trends, in the eighteenth century as well as between causes of sustained growth, and of stagnation or decline in the nineteenth century. It is further suggested that the debate needs to be connected to an understanding of the causes of a “Great Convergence” in the early modern world, and how different regions might have reached similar levels of economic complexity, but might nevertheless have been on different paths for future growth. Finally, this paper suggests that the divergence debate also needs to be connected to the debate on the transition to capitalism.

The aim of the essay is to find the answer when the Great Divergence between China and the West take place. In the paper, author makes an attempt to compare two different narratives about the divergence, a traditional one and the narrative of so called "California school".

Traditional explanations of the “rise of the West” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the conjunctural and contingent aspects of Europe’s ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European development, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “West” and “East” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive and multilinear development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. From
this perspective, the article examines the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies’ development over the longue durée and traces how the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism in Europe were fundamentally rooted in and conditioned by extra-European structures and agents. This then sets up our conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britain’s colonization of India.

Monograph, 2 Volumes, 830 pages, published in March 2021 with Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna:
https://www.mandelbaum.at/buecher/johannes-preiser-kapeller/die-erste-ernte-und-der-grosse-hunger/
and
https://www.mandelbaum.at/buecher/johannes-preiser-kapeller/der-lange-sommer-und-die-kleine-eiszeit/

Vol. 1: Die erste Ernte und der große Hunger. Klima, Pandemien und der Wandel der Alten Welt bis 500 n. Chr.
Book trailer: https://youtu.be/xmOmGL94taQ

Vol. 2: Der Lange Sommer und die Kleine Eiszeit. Klima, Pandemien und der Wandel der Alten Welt von 500 bis 1500 n. Chr.
Book trailer: https://youtu.be/mg15pkgNxnA

Mit der Debatte um den Klimawandel wächst das Interesse am möglichen Einfluss klimatischer Veränderungen auf Gesellschaften der Vergangenheit. Doch oft werden historische Erkenntnisse missbräuchlich gedeutet-sei es als Beleg, dass das Klima sich ohnehin immer ohne menschliches Zutun ändert, sei es als Katastrophenszenarien. Der Autor spürt auf der Grundlage neuester naturwissenschaftlicher, archäologischer und historischer Daten der Komplexität des Wechselspiels zwischen Klimaveränderungen, Epidemien und der nachfolgenden Reaktion menschlicher Gemeinschaften nach. Dabei wird deutlich, wie sehr der tatsächliche Effekt von klimatischen Krisen und Epidemien auf diese Gesellschaften vom kurz-und langfristigen Handeln der menschlichen Akteure abhing.

Der erste Band beleuchtet in einer Langzeitperspektive die Entwicklungen in Europa, im Nahen Osten und Ostasien von den ersten Großreichen des Altertums in Ägypten und Mesopotamien bis zu den Imperien der Römer und Chinesen und geht auch der Frage des Beitrags von Klima und Seuchen zum "Untergang" dieser Staaten nach.

Der zweite Band beleuchtet in einer Langzeitperspektive das mittelalterliche Jahrtausend zwischen zwei verheerenden Pestpandemien, aber auch die Rolle von Klima und Seuchen bei der Geschichte der Wikinger, der Kreuzzüge und der Mongolen – und schließlich beim Anbruch der europäischen Expansion im 15. Jahrhundert n. Chr.

The nineteenth century witnessed an explosive growth of a gap in per capita incomes (and the level of development in general) between the West and the rest of the world that has become recently known as “the Great Divergence” . In the twentieth
century, the Great Divergence continued until the early 1970s; then, in the late 1980s, some convergence between the First and Third World started to be observed. Though this convergence has been noticed already by a number of researchers, many economists still doubt its presence or importance.

In this book we demonstrate that after the 1980s we deal with a global process of the same scale as the process of the Great Divergence and we propose to designate it as the “the Great Convergence” . Furthermore we show that the Great Convergence is a logical continuation of the Great Divergence, and that certain components of the Great Divergence process were already preparing the onset of the Great Convergence in the period of the former’s peak. What is more, we suggest that the Great Divergence and Great Convergence constitute two phases of a single Global Modernization process being tightly
intertwined with other dimensions of Global Modernization as well as with globalization in all its historical phases.

Contrary to the long-standing idea of a scientific failure in early modern China as compared to Europe, some recent work has emphasized the existence of atradition of ‘evidential’ research in the natural sciences, antiquarianism, and geography, especially during the Sung, Ming, and Qing periods. This article seeks to develop this new perspective by offering a comparative history of the genres of travel writing and ethnography in early modern Europe and Ming/early Qing China. We argue that there were qualitative as well as quantitative differences
in the way that these genres functioned in each cultural area. Even when we find apparent similarities, we note different chronological rhythms and a different position of these genres of travel writing within a wider cultural field— what we might term their ‘cultural relevance’. The specific nature of Chinese
state imperialism—or, conversely, the particular nature of European overseas colonialism—played a role in determining the type of ethnographic approach that came to predominate in each cultural area. These parallels and differences suggest a fresh perspective on the cultural origins of the ‘great divergence’.

This working paper seeks to integrate the role of entrepreneurship and firms into debates on why the Rest was slow to catch up with the West following the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern economic growth. It was been suggested that poor human capital development and deficient institutions are important, but not sufficient, explanations. The emphasis on national-level institutions seems
particularly unhelpful given strong regional variations in business activities between countries. The impact of institutions on the allocation of entrepreneurship between productive and
redistributive activities takes the analysis to a deeper level, without entirely solving the problem, as the slow development of modern business in colonial India, and its skewed ownership,
indicates. Entrepreneurs were also actors and not simply responders to institutions and resource endowments. They could train their own workers and they introduce investor protection into
their own byelaws. It is evident that once the process of modern economic growth had started catch-up was
surprisingly difficult in much of the Rest, if less so neighboring regions of the original North Sea industrializers. The societal and cultural embeddedness of new technologies posed significant
entrepreneurial challenges in the Rest. The best equipped to overcome these challenges were often entrepreneurs based in minorities who held significant advantages in capital-raising and
trust levels. They often also benefitted from a greater willingness to engage with Western firms and colonial governments. Generally, as the first global economy got underway, MNEs proved
important facilitators of globalization, but they were a disappointing diffuser of organizational skills and information to the Rest, and had limited importance in relieving the institutional,
human capital or other constraints faced by many local entrepreneurs.
By the interwar years there is considerable evidence of productive modern entrepreneurship and business enterprise emerging across Asia, Latin America and even Africa.
Japan was a spectacular case of a more general process. This generation of entrepreneurs were sometimes facilitated by nationalistic governments and sentiments, and in China and elsewhere
they were quite effective combining local and Western practices to produce hybrid forms of business enterprise. However many governmental policies after 1945 designed to facilitate catchup
ended up crippling emergent business enterprises without putting an effective alternatives in place. They were too inward looking, and too inclined to incentivize inefficiency and corruption
rather than innovation. Many policy regimes ended up favouring redistributive rather than productive entrepreneurship, although it was noteworthy that they also provided some shelter for
local firms to develop without being crippled by competition from the West. Individual businesses had the agency either to invest in managerial and technological competences in this
era, or alternatively focus on rent-seeking, but the rules of the game often made the first path the easier one.
The second global economy provided more opportunities for catch up from the Rest.
Firms from emerging markets had the opportunity to access the global networks which, in part, replaced large integrated firms. There were new ways for firms in the Rest to access knowledge
and capital, including returning diaspora, business schools and management consultancies. Smart
state capitalism was a far greater source of international competitive advantage than the state
intervention of the past, even if many government policies were not smart and continued to offer
incentives for rent-seeking.
The rapid international growth of MNEs based in emerging markets was a striking
departure from the past. However global capitalism also remained a system which rewarded
winners, and facilitated clustering in favoured locations. Innovation remained heavily clustered
in the advanced countries, especially the United States. Western and Japanese firms have
powerful incumbency advantages. Falling tariff and other barriers meant that a new generation of
firms based in the Rest might even find it harder to reach scale than their predecessors who could
grow in the much-derided era of import substitution.

The article suggests that the Great Divergence of the 19th century between “the West” and “the East” was preceded by the Great Divergence in the 18th century between the Global North and the Global South. This may be attributed to a new, much higher level of state efficiency in the Global North. The eastern and western regions of the Global North frequently used different methods to make their
state apparatuses more efficient, but achieved strikingly similar results during the 18th century. The Great Divergence of the 19th century, remarkably, occurred within the Global North.

The Ottoman Empire has thus far remained at the margin of the ‘Great Divergence’ debate. Relatedly, no systematic attempt has been made to overcome Eurocentric views about the early modern Ottoman Empire. This paper seeks to fill this gap by problematizing and re-historicizing arguably the core concept of the Great Divergence debate, i.e. capitalism. Drawing from the theory of social-property relations, the paper reconsiders the question of the origin of capitalism, and by doing so, provides not only new comparative insights on the early modern Ottoman Empire, but also the preliminary outlines of an alternative non-Eurocentric reading of world historical development.

The content and tone of Richard Hodges’ review of my recent book Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity in the 2021 issue of the Journal of Roman Archaeology invites reflections on strategies of scholarly research and on policies of academic publishing. I discuss matters of perspective, method, substance and professional responsibility.

Seiyoshikennkyuukai-Symposium: Medieval Empires and their Networks, 17 November 2019
Tachikawa Memorial Hall, Ikebukuro Campus, Rikkyo University
Johannes Preiser-Kapeller (Austrian Academy of Sciences; Johannes.Preiser-Kapeller@oeaw.ac.at)

Outline of the presentation and main questions and arguments:
• 1) Ideal and realities of imperial rule in 10th-11th century “Christendom”: emperors and the “dominant coalition”: Can the parallel crisis of the Roman (“Byzantine”) Empire of the East and the (“Holy”) Roman Empire of the West in mid-late 11th century CE be interpreted as a “decline” from the “apex” of these empires at the turn of the 1st Millennium CE or as the “poisoned heritage” of “autocratic” rulers (namely, Basil II [976-1025 CE] in Byzantium and Henry III [1039-1056 CE] in the German Kingdom? Both imperial offices were based on the election by and consultation “with those persons and groups of people without whom it was impossible to rule”, i. e. members of the secular and ecclesiastical elites; these groups and networks have been identified as “dominant coalition” of pre-modern states in works of institutional economics (North/Wallis/Weingast 2009). Both in Byzantium and in the Holy Roman Emperor, authors of the time diagnose a “deviation” from these patterns of rule by consultation by Henry III respectively Basil II. Furthermore, the fragility, but also flexibility of these power arrangements in both empires became especially visible during times of minority of heirs to the throne or of female claimants (in the Byzantine case). The beginnings of the climax of crisis in Germany and in Byzantium can be linked to such periods (Henry IV in the West, 1056-1066; Michael VII, 1067-1071, in the East).
• 2) The crisis of the 11th century in the (Holy) Roman Empire and Byzantium: The “usual” fragility of power arrangements or new socio-economic dynamics? Based on these findings regarding the potential instability of political framework in both empires, one could ask if the crises of the 11th century were only periods of intensification of the system inherent risks of imperial rule or if they can be connected with underlying new socio-economic dynamics.
For the Holy Roman Empire and entire Western Europe, the 10th-12th centuries have been identified as period of economic and demographic growth, favoured by the environmental conditions of the so-called “Medieval Climate Optimum”. The growth in the number of settlements and areas under cultivation, however, was also entangled with an intensification of secular and ecclesiastical lordship, often in competition with each other or with older rights on the use of the landscape. Furthermore, new “elites of function” (in the form of the servientes/ministeriales) and growing urban communities equally challenged the power and influence of the old-established nobilities. The conflict between King Henry IV and the nobility and peasants of Saxony due to the expansion of royal rights in the economically and strategically important Harz region thus can be understood as time of “crystallization” of these persistent changes of the socio-political framework. The entanglement of this conflict with the so-called “Investiture Controversy” with Pope Gregory VII (culminating in Canossa 1077) lead to the outbreak of full-scale civil war and the rise of Anti-Kings during the reign of Henry IV until his deposition by his son Henry V in 1106 CE. 
Also for the Byzantine Empire, research in the last decades has identified the 10th-12th centuries as time of demographic and economic growth. Already before, scholarship has observed the growth of the economic and political power of the “aristocratic” great families at the cost of the free peasantry (Ostrogorsky 1954 wrote about a “feudalisation” of Byzantium). In any case, similar to the Western Empire, new social mobilities and new urban educated and commercial elites become more visible during the 11th century, especially in the “mega-city” of Constantinople (for which there existed no counterpart in the West). Most recently, however, Anthony Kaldellis (2017) has put into question the “traditional” scenario of the conflict between landowning “magnates” and the imperial centre; he on the contrast claims, “the emperors were threatened not by landowners but by army officers. Some were no doubt landowners, but there is no evidence that they were dangerous because of their property. (…) Instead, they were dangerous because they could subvert the loyalty of the armies.” (p. 15). Kaldellis thus interprets the crisis of the 11th century as “systemic crisis” of the usual power arrangement of emperor, army and state apparatus. A close reading of the same sources as used by Kaldellis, however, allows us to illustrate the interplay between the traditional allocation of rank and wealth within the army and administration and the growth of landed property and their transmission within increasingly powerful noble clans. At the same time, the fragility of (non-hereditary) elite status in Byzantium may have aggravated during the 11th century both the competition over the access to the imperial office as well as tendencies toward alienation from the centre and autonomous power formation. Both trends then interlocked with the advance of Seljuk and other Turkish groups into Asia Minor before and after the Battle of Manzikert (1071 CE), leading to the loss of large areas within this former core region of the empire.
In this regard, Byzantium also differed from the Holy Roman Empire in the West, whose territorial integrity despite the weakening of royal/imperial power was never threatened by the strengthened position of the leading princes, who regarded themselves “as the pillars of the empire and the guardians of its unity” (Borgolte 2002, p. 45).
• 3) Geopolitical, environmental and socio-economic change across Afro-Eurasia: societies in trouble? These different outcomes of the 11th century crises in the Holy Roman Empire and Byzantium are of course equally connected to the different geopolitical positions of both polities. While the Western Empire faced a serious contender only at its margins with the Normans in Southern Italy and Sicily, who also several times intervened in the conflict between Henry IV and the Papacy, the Byzantine Empire was attacked not only by the Normans, but also by nomadic groups from the Steppes at the Danube (Pechenegs) and in the East (Seljuks and other Turkish formations). Ronnie Ellenblum in his monograph on the “Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean” (2012) has connected these migration movements with environmental changes in Central Asia, most recently. He also claims, that at the same time climate-induced stress weakened the “sedentary” polities of the Middle East such as Byzantium, the Fatimid Caliphate and the Būyid dynasty, leading to their eventual downfall or almost-collapse. Based on proxy data and other evidence, however (see Preiser-Kapeller 2015), one can demonstrate a high regional diversity across the Eastern Mediterranean, with symptoms of economic growth both in Byzantine provinces and in Fatimid Egypt. The latter, however, was affected by a series of low Nile floods, which contributed to severe socio-political crises, but not necessarily as single or even prime factor. Furthermore, Ellenblum´ s claims have been refuted recently in three independent studies on Eastern Iran and Central Asia (Paul 2016; Tor 2018; Frenkel 2019).
Ellenblum, on the contrast, has expanded his scenario to the Liao-Empire in Manchuria, Northern China and Mongolia (Li/Shelach-Lavi/Ellenblum 2019). While comments of experts on this study have to be awaited, data for the adjacent Northern Song-Empire even more than for Western Europe indicates a period of demographic and economic growth, although punctuated by natural calamities such as catastrophic floods of the Yellow River (Zhang 2016). Equally, for 11th century Japan studies such as Totman (2014) identify indicators for population and economic growth, however equally intertwined with increased competition over access to (shōen) land and to imperial power as in the German Kingdom, for instance.
These “strange parallels” may lead us to identify the 11th century across Afro-Eurasia as a period of “crises of growth” of otherwise and despite environmental calamities increasingly affluent societies, as Thomas N. Bisson (2009) has done for Western Europe. This, however, can be also one starting point for discussion during the symposium.

Tirthankar Roy’s recent synthesis on the economic history of early modern India claims to provide a new, overarching narrative placing this period within the broader sweep of the history of what Roy defines as ‘capitalism’ in India in the very long term. This paper provides a detailed critique of Roy’s monograph, suggesting that it suffers from some serious methodological deficits, arising not least from a future-oriented paradigm that imposes anachronistic concepts on this period, including the very notion of ‘India’. Furthermore, his view of the economy as being fundamentally driven forward by the rise of a coastal polity expanding inwards from Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, sits awkwardly with his repeated claim that colonialism was of little significance for Indian economic history. Finally, the present paper suggests that this period might be more fruitfully approached not only by abandoning the telos of what we know of India’s future, but also by adopting both regionally-focused and comparative approaches, turning away from long-distance trade as the primary lens through which to view the economy, and instead examining endogenous factors in the economies of individual regions and enriching our understanding of them by reference to studies of other world regions with comparable patterns of development in the same period. More nuanced ways of approaching economic change in the very long run, including the importance of developments in modes of consumption and market- and profit-oriented economic behaviour, are suggested as a better means of understanding both the economies of the late pre-colonial centuries in the Indian subcontinent, and the development of capitalism, which should also be understood in a more specific manner than Roy allows.

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? Therefore, this research paper firstly tries to analyze whether culture and religion really matter in this process as Eurocentric scholars argue and do they have any impacts over the “Great Divergence” and then seeks to investigate what historical events caused Europe to gain a technological and economic privileges over rest of world, while making a brief journey to the economic history of the world.

This working paper integrates a business history perspective into debates about the Great Divergence between the West and the Rest, and the more recent Great Convergence. It argues that business historians should provide more micro- evidence about the causes of the Great Divergence, while reviewing the considerable research they have already undertaken on why the development of modern business enterprise in the Rest lagged. It points to the multiple challenges entrepreneurs faced in terms of capital-raising, trust levels, and the societal and cultural embeddedness of new technologies. By the interwar years, there is evidence of emergent modern entrepreneurship and business enterprise in Asia, Latin America and Africa, many governmental policies after 1945 crippled such emergent business enterprises. The second wave of globalization from the 1980s provided more opportunities for catch up from the Rest. Firms from emerging markets had the opportunity to access the global supply networks. There were also new ways for firms in the Rest to access knowledge and capital, and governments in a number of countries proved effective supporters of corporate catch-ups. Business historians have an enormous opportunity to contribute to understanding these processes.

В статье показано, что кондратьевская волновая динамика темпов роста глобального ВВП в последние десятилетия, десятилетия Великой конвергенции генерируется именно развивающимися странами, в то время как в предшествующую эпоху Великой дивергенции кондратьевская волновая динамика генерировалась прежде всего наиболее экономически развитыми странами «первого мира». При этом, в ярком контрасте с развитыми
странами, развивающимся государствам на пике Пятой кондратьевской волны удалось не просто достичь очень высоких значений темпов роста ВВП на душу населения,
какие они демонстрировали на пике предшествующей волны, но даже их заметно превзойти. Показано, что важную роль в процессах перерастания Великой дивергенции в Великую конвергенцию играла динамика доли инвестиций в ВВП. Еще в 1960-е годы
между развитыми и развивающимися странами наблюдался очень значительный раз-рыв по доле инвестиций в ВВП в пользу развитых стран, что безусловно вносило свой вклад в продолжение процесса Великой дивергенции. К середине 1970-х годов эти доли сравнялись, в 1990-е годы доля развивающихся стран стала заметно превышать долю развитых, а в 2000-е годы разрыв между развивающимися и развитыми странами (в пользу развивающихся) достиг огромных размеров.

Статья посвящена изучению динамики сближения экономических систем стран с разным уровнем развития. Показано, что в последние годы особо быстрыми темпами сокращается разрыв между высоко-и среднеразвитыми странами. При этом достаточ-но устойчиво растет разрыв между средне-и слаборазвитыми странами, в результате чего в настоящее время разрыв между средне-и слаборазвитыми странами практи-чески такой же, как и между высоко-и среднеразвитыми обществами, что говорит о том, что за последние 30 лет произошла очень значительная (и при этом достаточно нетривиальная) реконфигурация Мир-Системы. The article studies the dynamics of convergence of national economies with different levels of development. It demonstrates that in recent years, we have been observing a particularly fast decrease of the gap between high-income and middle-income countries. In the meantime one can observe a rather steady growth of the gap between middle-income and low-income countries, at the present time, the gap between the middle-income and low-income countries is almost the same as that between the high-income and middle-income nations, which suggests that over the last 30 years we have seen a very significant (and quite nontrivial) reconfiguration of the World System.

This article draws on the theory of uneven and combined development (U&CD) to construct a non-Eurocentric and ‘internationalist’ analysis of the transition to capitalism. In doing so, we seek to respond to and rethink two challenges: exposures of Eurocentric notions of the ‘Rise of the West’ on the one hand; and recent critiques of Eurocentric assumptions in the theory of U&CD on the other. Beginning with an assessment of Robert Brenner’s Anglo-centric theorisation of capitalism’s origins, we argue Brenner’s efforts are hamstrung by an omission of international determinations and conditions. In turn, we retrace these missing international factors through an analysis of the Mongol invasions of the 13th/14th centuries, Ottoman imperial expansion in the 15th/16th centuries and the contemporaneous discovery and colonisation of the New World. We argue that each case demonstrates the historically specific forms of U&CD that fed into – and ultimately determined – the developmental trajectory of capitalism in north-western Europe.

This essay argues that the primary socioeconomic formations of premodern Japan were formed in the Bronze Age via processes of ancient globalization across Eurasia. Multi-crop cereal agriculture combining rice, millet, wheat and barley with a minor contribution from domesticated animals spread from Bronze Age Korea to Japan at the beginning of the 1 st millennium BC. This agricultural system gradually expanded through the archipelago while engendering new economic niches centred on trade, raiding and specialized fishing. From the 5 th century AD the horse became widely used for warfare, transport and overseas trade. While alluvial rice farming provided staple finance for the early state, it is argued here that the concept of the 'maritime mode of production' better explains economic processes in the nonstate spaces of Japan until the early 17 th century. Despite this diversity in socioeconomic formations, the post-Bronze Age globalization of food in Japan appears to have been delayed compared to many other regions of Eurasia and to have been less impacted by elite consumption. Further research is required to confirm this suggestion , and the essay outlines several areas where archaeological research could contribute to debates over the 'Great Divergence' and the economic development of the modern world.

This volume explores the policy dynamics, economic commitments and social impacts of the fast evolving Sino-LAC relations. China’s engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean has entered into an era of strategic transition. While China is committed to strengthening its economic and political ties with Latin America and the Caribbean, Latin America as a bloc is enthusiastically echoing China’s endeavor by diverting their focus toward the other side of the ocean. The transitional aspect of China-LAC ties is phenomenal, and is manifested not only in the accelerating momentum of trade, investment, and loan but also in the China-CELAC Forum mechanism that maps out an institutional framework for decades beyond. While Latin America is redefined as an emerging priority to the leadership in Beijing, what are the responses from Latin America and the United States? In this sense, experts from four continents provide local answers to this global question.

要約
この十年の間、グローバル史の分野において、様々な地理・文化的なアジアやヨーロッパの地域に関する比較分析調査とその方法論上の新たな進展があった。こうした研究は、かつてはDavid Landes、A. Gunder Frank、 Angus Maddison もしくは Kenneth Pomeranzらが取り組んできたものである。こうしたタイプの研究においては、テーマが一新された。特に、経済成長のモデルや消費者の行動に関するテーマがより一層の注目を集めている。しかし、こうした欧州とアジアの比較を実施する多くの研究の分析対象は、その年代や地理上の定義が十分になされておらず、不確かであいまいなものとなってしまうことが多かった。本稿では、中国と欧州間の認識と対話を地政学上の戦略拠点であった地域の分析を通じて検証する。こうした地域により、中国と欧州間の商業、国際関係、そして、社会経済ネットワークが促進された。特に重点的に分析の対象となるのがマカオである。マカオの港は中国の南部、マニラ・アカプルコガレオン貿易のルートに接する。本稿の分析ではマカオは西洋と東洋の市場を統合する新たなグローバル化の中軸として位置づけられる。一方、もう一つの分析対象としてマルセイユがある。この都市は地中海における東洋との商業ルートに繋がる港を持った飛び地としてとらえられる。このような具体的な比較検討は、実際のケースの分析を通じ、地理、年代上の情報を限定することなくアジアと欧州の差異を分析した研究が扱うことのできなかった空白を埋めるための一助となる。
キーワード：グローバル史、マカオ、マルセイユ、商業ネットワーク、多様性

In India, Modernity and the Great Divergence, Kaveh Yazdani presents a compelling argument that with regard to certain technologies, agricultural productivity, financial systems and the rise of a merchant class, and even aspects of scientific culture, two regions of pre-colonial South Asia-Mysore and Gujarat-experienced what Yazdani terms 'middle modernity' (14 th to 18 th century) in a manner comparable to other Eurasian regions. However, because certain specific aspects of modernity were less highly evolved than in Europe, and because of colonial intervention, there was a divergence between (parts of) Europe and these South Asian regions. While lauding Yazdani's achievement, I argue that crucial aspects of the transition to capitalism as well as the Great Divergence are lacking in his, as in most studies: the significance of a capitalist ideology and the rise of consumerism.

In this paper I argue that the problem of historicist Eurocentrism has been largely solved by Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe and is implicitly being put into practice in the Great Divergence Debate. However, Eurocentrism in a non-historicist way is resurfacing, challenging academia to reconsider its strong anti-Eurocentric stances.

This article uses a new set of estimates of GDP per capita for Canada during the seventeenth and eighteenth century to argue that our quantitative understanding of living standards in the New World is flawed. Thanks to rich and newly uncovered Canadian data, income-based rather than wage-based comparisons have become feasible. These reveal that New World economies were poorer relative to Old World economies than the previous methods have suggested. It also emerges that the colonial economy was subject to frequent growth reversals generated by war shocks, monetary experiments and harvest failures.

This book explores the roles played by entrepreneurship and multinational corporations in the development of the modern world. It shows how multinationals drove globalization through the transfer of innovation and cultural values, as well as exploring the outcomes, both positive and negative.

The Great Divergence and, to a lesser extent, the Great Convergence phenomena have attracted considerable scholarly attention. However, the existing attempts at explaining these phenomena and their background share two significant drawbacks: first, no model (to the best of our knowledge) has managed to account for both the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence so as to explain the timing of the trend change (around 1970s). Second, most existing models concentrate heavily on the economic forces, frequently neglecting the demographic factor. We offer an approach to overcome these drawbacks, revealing a close coupling between phases of global demographic transition and phases of the Great Divergence and Great Convergence. As we account for the crucial role of the demographic component in these processes, we show that the timing of the trend change was not coincidental. Our findings suggest that the dynamics of global population growth and the Great Divergence and Great Convergence therefore may be considered so closely coupled as to be two sides of the same coin. On the other hand, they also suggest that the Great Divergence and Great Convergence should be treated as a single process, as two phases of the global modernization.