Pomeranz (2000) — The Great Divergence

Citation. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press, 2000.

Summary

The founding work of the “California School” of comparative economic history. Pomeranz argues that as late as 1750, the most advanced regions of China (the Yangzi delta) were at rough parity with the most advanced regions of Europe (England, the Netherlands) across a wide range of indicators — agricultural productivity, life expectancy, real wages, market integration, commercial sophistication, proto-industrial output. The subsequent European (and specifically English) divergence was not an expression of long-baked institutional or cultural advantages but the result of two contingent factors: accessible coal in the right places and “ghost acres” of New World land worked by coerced labor, which together relaxed the Malthusian constraints on energy and on land-intensive raw materials.

The book reset the comparative framework for the field. Even scholars who reject the strong 1750-parity claim now argue within the Pomeranz frame: any account of the Great Divergence has to engage his China-Europe comparisons and his emphasis on coal and colonies.

Key claims

• The Yangzi delta and England were at comparable economic sophistication circa 1750; divergence is a late, contingent phenomenon.
• Europe’s escape from the Malthusian trap required two geographic gifts — domestic coal and New World resource-and-labor extensions — and neither alone would have been sufficient.
• China’s coal was in the wrong place (Shanxi, far from the Yangzi markets); its “ghost acres” (the interior Chinese frontier) were domestic and already incorporated, producing diminishing rather than offsetting returns.
• Institutional, cultural, and technological explanations of the divergence that ignore geography and contingent resource endowments are inadequate.