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The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. BY KENNETH POMERANZ. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 382 pp. $39.95 (cloth).
This book makes, bar none, the biggest and most important contribution to our new understanding of the causes and mechanisms that brought about "the great divergence" between the West and the rest and China in particular. Other academics and pundits like Samuel Huntington (1996), who coined this phrase, still deal in civilizational differences and clashes, and David Landes (1997) still trots out the same tired old shibboleths about alleged cultural differences to explain The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Pomeranz's colleague Bin Wong draws on European and Chinese evidence properly to reject all this indeed antihistorical Eurocentric nonsense. Although his China Transformed (1997) does so with important new data, he also still confines his analysis to a comparative method that seeks out allegedly crucial differences to explain the great divergence.
Pomeranz instead offers an entirely new and refreshing departure. Although he makes new comparisons between Europe, China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, and India, Pomeranz also connects all these and more in a bold new sweep that should immediately make all previous and most contemporary related work obsolescent. His well-documented comparisons, like some of Wong's also, demonstrate that the respectively most advanced Chinese regions matched or bested European ones in standard of living and especially the most important one, length of life itself; in consumption of calories from grain and even from sugar, as well as of household goods and textiles; in storage, distribution, and availability of grain to counter climatically induced famines; in quantities of long-distance grain shipments that were multiples of those through the Baltic; in textile production and earnings of textile workers; and in commercialization of the economy and especially of agriculture, including markets in land, labor, inputs,...