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Great Divergence

Alan Macfarlane

British social anthropologist and historical demographer (b. 1941), professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge (Department of Social Anthropology and King’s College). Trained at Oxford and the LSE; long associated with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. The most distinctive voice in late-20th-century English historical anthropology, and the canonical modern proponent of the “early English divergence” framework — the claim that English social, economic, and cultural exceptionalism stretches back to the medieval period rather than emerging with capitalism, the Reformation, or industrialization.

Intellectual program

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Macfarlane’s career has produced an unusually integrated body of work across English historical anthropology, comparative civilizational history, and the intellectual history of how modern social science came to understand “modernity.” Three principal themes:

The early English divergence (1970s onward). Macfarlane’s signature argument, developed across several books and articles, is that English society was not a typical European peasant society in the sense Marc Bloch or Rodney Hilton meant. From at least the 13th century, England exhibited a distinctive social pattern: individualism (people understood themselves as individuals rather than as members of corporate kin groups); nuclear-family households (not extended joint households); land treated as a marketable commodity (not held in family/lineage trust as the inalienable patrimony of a corporate kindred); a high-mobility labour market; and a substantial role for impersonal market relations even in the rural economy. This pattern, in Macfarlane’s account, is medieval and pre-medieval in origin — possibly Anglo-Saxon, possibly even older — and is the deep substrate of subsequent English economic and political distinctiveness. The argument is articulated most fully in The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and developed in subsequent books.

Comparative Malthusian escape: England and Japan (1990s). The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap (1997) extended the framework comparatively. Both England and Japan, Macfarlane argued, escaped the Malthusian trap that constrained continental European and Asian peasant societies — but through different routes, both involving distinctive demographic and family-system patterns (late marriage and household-formation regulation in England; positive-check controls and lineage organization in Japan). The book is one of the principal modern works of comparative historical demography of the early-modern world.

The intellectual history of modernity (2000s). The Riddle of the Modern World (2000), The Making of the Modern World (2002, on Fukuzawa Yukichi), and several subsequent volumes engage Smith, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, and other classical theorists of modernity, asking what they understood about why English/European/Japanese societies looked different from peasant-traditional ones, and how their frameworks have aged. Macfarlane’s later work has substantial autobiographical and intellectual-biographical content, including extended online video archives of interviews and lectures hosted at Cambridge.

Reception

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Macfarlane’s Origins of English Individualism (1978) was deeply controversial when published. Peasant-historians and Marxists (notably Rodney Hilton) attacked it strongly: the standard view at the time was that English individualism emerged with the development of capitalism in the 16th–18th centuries, and that medieval England was a normal European peasant society. Macfarlane’s claim that English individualism was already there in the 13th century was both empirically and politically against the grain.

Reception has shifted substantially since. Subsequent quantitative economic-history work (the Cambridge Group’s parish-register reconstructions; Robert Allen’s enclosure-and-yeoman work; the Wrigley-Schofield demographic series; the 21st-century institutional-economics literature) is broadly compatible with much of Macfarlane’s empirical case for early English distinctiveness, even where specific claims have been refined. The framework is now the canonical “early English divergence” reference; almost every account of the deep historical roots of English/British exceptionalism engages it.

Macfarlane’s framework is also the direct precursor to Joseph Henrich’s WEIRD argument. Both claim English/European psychological-and-social distinctiveness goes deep; both refuse the view that distinctiveness is a product of late-modern capitalism. They differ on origin: Macfarlane locates English individualism in deep English social structure (possibly Anglo-Saxon, possibly older), without a single causal mechanism; Henrich locates European individualism in the specific medieval Catholic Marriage and Family Program. Henrich’s account is more mechanistically specified; Macfarlane’s is older, more anthropologically textured, and more focused specifically on England rather than on Western Christendom broadly.

Associated positions

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Key works

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  • Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970, his PhD thesis).
  • The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman (1970).
  • The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (1978).
  • The Justice and the Mare’s Ale: Law and Disorder in Seventeenth-Century England (1981).
  • Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840 (1986).
  • The Culture of Capitalism (1987).
  • The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap (1997).
  • The Riddle of the Modern World: Of Liberty, Wealth and Equality (2000).
  • The Making of the Modern World: Visions from the West and East (2002, on Fukuzawa Yukichi).
  • The Invention of the Modern World (2014).
  • Extensive video and oral-history archive at the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology and at his personal website.