The great divergence

topic

Pomeranz argues that Europe and East Asia’s most advanced regions were similar until about 1750-1800, and Europe broke through only because of contingent, coercive luck: accessible coal and the land and labor of the New World.

Central Argument:

Europe’s breakthrough was not the product of long-standing internal superiority. It came from contingent, external, and often coercive circumstances layered on an economy not fundamentally different from East Asia’s. Until about 1750-1800, the advanced cores were similar and faced the same land and energy limits. Two discontinuities broke Europe through: coal and the New World (colonization, epidemics, slavery).

• Coal: England had large, accessible coal deposits close to where industry was developing. Coal, and later steam power, supplied energy that didn’t depend on using more land. This was largely geographic luck.

• The New World: Colonization, epidemics, and slavery gave Europe what Pomeranz calls “ghost acres,” land far away producing sugar, cotton, timber, and food for European consumption. Epidemics devastated Indigenous populations, freeing up land, and enslaved labor worked it. This relieved the land constraint that Europe’s neighbors in Asia still faced.

Central Argument: Eurocentric narratives

Pomeranz argues that Eurocentric narratives, which explain Europe’s industrial lead through lasting internal superiority in things like institutions, rationality, or culture, are wrong, because Europe and East Asia’s advanced regions were similar until about 1750-1800 and Europe’s breakthrough came from luck and circumstances that could easily have gone differently.

Central Argument: Colonialism’s role

Overseas exploitation mattered about as much as coal for Britain, but through relieving land and energy scarcity, not profits.

Central Argument: Inevitability of industrial breakthrough?

Pomeranz argues that Europe’s industrial breakthrough was not inevitable or the result of lasting European superiority, since until about 1750-1800 the most advanced regions of Europe and East Asia were similar and faced the same land and energy limits. Europe broke through because of two contingent circumstances: accessible coal near England’s industrial centers, and the land, resources, and enslaved labor of the Americas, gained through colonization, epidemics, and slavery.

Central Argument: Units of comparison

Compare similarly sized core regions, not nations, continents, or “civilizations.”

Central Argument: The “fall of Asia”

Pomeranz argues that 18th-century Asian economies still had room to grow and Europe was closer to the same ecological limits than usually assumed, so Asia’s “fall” came after 1800, driven by Europe’s contingent escape via coal and the New World rather than by Asia’s earlier failure.

Evidence and Methodology: Reciprocal comparison

“Why wasn’t England the Yangzi Delta?” using regional cores of similar scale

Evidence and Methodology: Yangzi Delta case

The Yangzi Delta matched Britain in markets, cloth production, and ecological limits, but it didn’t industrialize because its trading partners within China were also proto-industrializing (developing rural, household-based manufacturing), which made it harder to sell cloth and import food and timber, and it lacked an Atlantic-style source of cheap resources.

Historical Context: Eurasian similiarity before 1800

Comparable markets, living standards, and demography. This makes the divergence a late rupture, not a slow-growing gap.

Historical Context: Ecological constraint

Shortages of fuel, timber, fiber, and soil. Capital and labor could barely substitute for land, so capital-rich places like Holland didn’t industrialize first.

Historical Context: Proto-industrialization and its limits

Built skills and a “pseudo-surplus labor” pool, but also falling piece rates and land pressure. In China, peripheries grew and proto-industrialized, leaving less surplus for the core. Making goods at home for sale gave families useful skills, but it also lowered what they earned per piece and strained the land, and in China, when regions near the Yangzi Delta started making their own cloth, the Delta lost customers and lost its supply of food and timber.

Historical Context: Coal

England’s conveniently located deposits (geographic luck) broke dependence on land-based energy.

Historical Context: New World and the ghost acres

Pomeranz argues that the Americas, through conquest, epidemics, and slave labor, gave Europe “ghost acres” of cheap land producing sugar, cotton, and timber, which relieved its land shortage and fed Atlantic trade in a way Asia had no equivalent for.

Historical Context: Distribution of population growth

Let Europe specialize in manufactures. It also tapped slack from institutional blockages (serfdom in the east, post-revolutionary reforms in France and Germany).

Historical Context: Interstate rivalry and joint stock companies

Pomeranz grants Europe one institutional edge: rival states like Britain, the Dutch Republic, France, Spain, and Portugal fought constantly and borrowed heavily to fund wars and navies, and they chartered armed joint-stock companies (the English and Dutch East India Companies) that pooled investor money and held state-backed monopolies. These institutions were well suited to seizing and defending overseas trade routes and colonies, such as the Americas, but they did not make Europe’s domestic economy more efficient than Asia’s.

Historical Context: 19th-century industrialization

Only then does a single dominant European core appear.

Key Concepts: Great divergence

The 19th-century split between western Europe and East Asia, which happened late (around 1800).

Key Concepts: Deviation comparison

Each side a “deviation” from the other. Pomeranz’s move: rejecting Europe as the norm

The older approach treated Europe as the standard path and asked why everyone else deviated from it (why China “failed” to industrialize, why Asia was “stagnant”). Pomeranz flips this in two steps:

1. East Asia isn’t a deviation from Europe. The Yangzi Delta and other advanced cores were commercialized, productive, and had comparable living standards. Their development wasn’t a failed or blocked version of the European path. It was a normal path for an advanced organic economy.

2. Europe is the deviation. Until about 1750-1800, Europe looked like East Asia and faced the same land and energy limits. What made it different was an unusual break: coal and the New World. So Europe is the outlier that escaped the common constraint, not the model everyone else failed to follow.

Key Concepts: Polycentric world

No single dominant core before 1800.

Key Concepts: “Fully populated” vs. “densely populated”

Pomeranz distinguishes “densely populated” (many people per acre) from “fully populated” (pressing against ecological limits), arguing that Asian density didn’t mean exhaustion and that Europe was closer to the same limits than its lower density suggests.