Kenneth Pomeranz Notes

Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy (2000)
Background
From Columbus to coal,

REWORDKen Pomeranz's book confronts a theme ever-old and ever-new: why, in the final phase of
advanced premodern economies using mainly animate power for production and transport, did late-
imperial China and early modernizing north-western Europe follow such different paths?REWORD –
this is the question asked, answer and thesis: until 18 th cent (and Indust. Rev.), no clear differences
between the Chinese and European living standards, and studying economics highlights how one of
the primary causes of a great divergence was through Europe’s discovery and management of the
New World.
IMPORTANT FACTOR NOT MENTIONED

One important factor that I didn’t see Pomeranz mention – the Atlantic is much narrower
than the Pacific! China was building ships as advanced as that of the European Golden Age
of Navigation as early as the 15th century, and in huge numbers far exceeding the capacity
of any single European state. Navigation itself wasn’t a problem either (note that it was
China that invented the compass, topographic maps, etc). But it didn’t practice overseas
slave-trading, and those Chinese that settled new lands – be they in Taiwan, or the inner
provinces – tended to develop their own proto-industrial economies, which in the presence
of conditions of free trade and free markets for labor and products
eventually undermined the volume of trade.
Comparatively REWORDdeconstructs the various materialist explanations that have been advanced
by economic historians to explain this great divergenceREWORD – his analysis draws on Chinese,
Japanese and Indian economic sources to conclude that _
The Great Divergence is presented in three parts, of which the first two are devoted to an
examination of living standards, consumption and nutrition data, and land, labor, produce, and
livestock markets in the Yangtze and in northwestern Europe. Pomeranz contends that these
indicators of economic development suggest that China was on a par with the most developed parts
of Europe.
But the contours of the story may not exactly show the parallels he proposes. For example, in
chapter 3 he argues that Chinese levels of consumption of sugar and tea were as high as those to be
found in Western Europe, developing this argument by totaling the acreage under cultivation for
these cash crops in China.
Part 3 of The Great Divergence examines ecological constraints, including soil depletion and timber
shortages, which Pomeranz argues affected both Western Europe and China by the end of the
eighteenth century. He suggests that England was able to escape the Malthusian trap of resource
scarcity and launch the industrial revolution because of two factors: the ready availability of coal
and “geographic good luck” (p. 66) in the form of proximity to the Americas, which provided it with
raw materials and a market for its finished goods.
Significant studies into the economics of the Yangtze region in China have become standard
information for Chinese studies
The Malthusian trap is a condition whereby excess population would stop growing due to shortage
of food supply leading to starvationREWORD - Industrialization was significant moment of escaping
this
closer to the details of micro dynamism favored by economic historians, (like Fernand Braudel,
Immanuel Wallerstein and Ken Pomeranz) is to construct narratives built around the array of
imports that Europeans transhipped from the New World and Asia back into their famous
maritime ports
Revisionists make the most of a not unconvincing case for symbiotic linkages between the
luxurious, exotic, addictive and desirable characteristics embodied in imports from Asia and the
Americas to: the industrious revolution; the maintenance of European commitments to
intercontinental trade; the enslavement of Africans; and flows of investment into colonization
and plantations in the New World. Pomeranz advanced this category by proposing that the
deviation between Europe and China’s economies occurred later than previously thought in the
globalized eighteenth century
the Great Divergence and the Industrial Revolution form part of an interconnected narrative and
the degree of divergence in labor productivities and real incomes between Europe in China, that
had so clearly appeared by 1914, looks inconceivable without the massive supplies of basic
foodstuffs and raw materials imported from the Americas and other primary producers.
environmental pressures were more severe than he believes, and, contrary to his argument, were
indeed worse in many parts of China than in Europe at this time. Bets are hedged, however, on
pages 239 and 283 where only England and the Netherlands are said to have been seriously affected.
How then does one deal with the fact that France up to the Revolution probably did as well
economically as England, according to Crouzet
work is an effort at global economic demographic explanation – similar to Andre Frank’s l Economy
in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998) coming out only two years before Pomeranz
No conclusion section (“Last Comparisons”) before 80 pages of appendices
Quotes
Methodology: by moving away from the traditional oversimplified comparative approach, which
conceived both China and Europe as uniform entities, toward an approach that compares instead
“selected key areas of China and Europe” (12).
Despite consistently utilizing quantitative analysis, surprisingly maintains that “France remained
‘stuck’ for over two centuries [the seventeenth and eighteenth] at an apparent population ceiling,
suffering recurrent subsistence crises – not Ladurie analysis even though quoted (know from prev
studies) 76
REWORDIt is not adequate to say, as he does on page 264, that "western Europe was able to escape
the proto-industrial cul-de-sac ... as the technology became available”  does not mention why
China could not follow
The "divergence" here was real but perhaps more subtle than the book allows for. it eventually came
about that "the need for food land prevented cash-crop output from continuing indefinitely" (p. 125)
A somewhat separate but interesting section of The Great Divergence refutes Sombart's thesis that
the generalization in society of some measure of "luxury" consumption was a driving force of
economic transformation in Europe. Pomeranz argues that luxury demand "was at least as dispersed
among various classes of Chinese ... as it was among Europeans” 165
comparison between irrigation and agriculture in northwestern Europe and in China = that Europe
lagged behind the more efficient agricultural set up in Asia particularly in the comparison with less
yield per acre between European crops and rice (suggested repeatedly). P 45-6 this forms a
significant part of Pomeranz’s intentional revisionist approach to European-centered understandings
of technological superiority concerning the eighteenth century.
“already in the very beginning of the book he also stresses the fact that, in any case until about
1850, it was only Britain that industrialized and not” pp6-7
Subscribes to Adam Smith’s/Smithian view of capitalism where buyers and sellers cannot control
prices and so to see that - REWORD“coersion and collusion in the sense of interference in, and
distortion of, the market mechanism were much more widespread in Europe than they were in
China”REWORD indicates the _ p. 80
Uses his “Comparisons and Calculations: What Do the Numbers Mean?” chapter at the end of the
book to posit that “relatively small differences can create large historical divergences” 279
Chinese went there in significant numbers, but South East Asia never became for coastal China what
the New World was for western Europe” (p. 200). Why? Because unlike Europe’s New World
empires, “the Chinese merchants . . . established themselves in South East Asia without state
backing” (p.200).
In terms of their population controls, technological levels, capital accumulation, and functioning
Smithian markets, Pomeranz argues that "the most developed parts of western Europe seem to have
shared crucial economic features... with other densely populated core areas in Eurasia" (107) - with
access to coal being the major diverging factor

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Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World

From Columbus to coal,

IMPORTANT FACTOR NOT MENTIONED

No conclusion section (“Last Comparisons”) before 80 pages of appendices

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