Skip to content
Great Divergence

Kenneth Pomeranz

American historian of China (b. 1958), University Professor at the University of Chicago (previously at UC Irvine, where the “California School” took its name). PhD Yale 1988 under Jonathan Spence; trained as a Chinese social-and-economic historian working in primary Chinese-language sources, not as a comparative-Europeanist who became interested in China.

Intellectual program

Section titled “Intellectual program”

Pomeranz’s career-defining intervention is The Great Divergence (2000), which reset the comparative framework of global economic history by insisting on three moves the field had not made before, in combination:

  1. The right comparison is regional, not civilizational. “Europe” was too coarse a unit; the meaningful comparator to NW European economic dynamism is the most-advanced parts of China (specifically the Lower Yangzi delta), and these regions need to be compared on their own terms rather than against a Eurocentric default.
  2. Symmetry of evidence. Demand the same standards for documenting “European advantage” as for documenting “Asian backwardness.” Most “Europe was ahead” claims of the older literature, when subjected to symmetric evidentiary tests, do not hold up for the period before ~1750.
  3. Contingent rather than structural divergence. The European industrial breakthrough is not the inevitable working-out of a deep institutional or cultural superiority but a late and contingent event, driven by two specific gifts (accessible coal close to navigable water, and the “ghost acres” of New World land worked by coerced labor) without which the Yangzi and England would have hit the organic-economy ceiling in parallel.

These moves became known as the “California School” (with Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone, Andre Gunder Frank, James Lee, and others). The framework reshaped not just Great Divergence and Industrial Revolution debates but the broader fields of global history, world-systems analysis, and comparative economic history.

Reception and contestation

Section titled “Reception and contestation”

The Great Divergence is the most-cited single book in the contemporary IR/GD literature; almost no serious account proceeds without engaging it. The Pomeranz framing has been consensual on its methodological points — the Yangzi-vs-England comparison is now standard, and “ghost acres” is part of the working vocabulary. Its specific empirical claims, particularly the 1750 parity argument, have been progressively eroded by:

  • Broadberry, Guan & Li 2018 (source): Chinese GDP per capita reconstructions back to 980 CE, showing Chinese per-capita income peaking in the Northern Song around 1080 and declining through the Ming and Qing — substantially below European levels by 1700.
  • Allen et al. 2011 wage data: Yangzi wages were not at parity with English in efficiency-units terms.
  • Broadberry-Gupta Indian reconstructions: similar story.

The strong-form Pomeranz claim (full 1750 parity) is no longer broadly defended; the weaker-form claim (the Yangzi-England comparison is the right framework, and coal+colonies were load-bearing for the British acceleration) is now consensus. This is, in some ways, the highest form of academic success — your specific numbers get revised, but your framework becomes the field’s default.

Pomeranz’s broader scholarly program is in Chinese economic and environmental history. The Making of a Hinterland (1993) is the foundational study of late-Qing inland North China’s regional economy. The World That Trade Created (with Steven Topik, 1999, multiple editions) is a widely-assigned global economic-history textbook. He has served as president of the American Historical Association (2013–14).

Associated positions

Section titled “Associated positions”

Key works

Section titled “Key works”
  • The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (1993).
  • With Steven Topik: The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (1999; 4th ed. 2018).
  • The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000).
  • “Without Coal? Colonies? Calculus? Counterfactuals about Europe, China, and the Industrial Revolution” (response in Journal of Asian Studies, 2002 and elsewhere).
  • Co-edited (with Steven Topik): The Pacific in the Age of Early Industrialization (2009).