The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
Опубликовано на портале: 06-11-2007
Изд-во:
Princeton University Press, 2000, cерия "Princeton Economic History of the Western World", 392 с.
Тематические разделы:
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The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history:
Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising
similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows,
as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high
in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of
households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and
Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout
the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive
products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.
Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes
much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's
failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth
in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do
with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of
needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest
Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and
remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields.
Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive,
labor-saving paths.
Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after
1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral
regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a
result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth
did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could
have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground
and overseas.
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Introduction. Comparisons, Connections, and Narratives of European Economic Development
PART ONE: A WORLD OF SURPRISING RESEMBLANCES
1. Europe before Asia? Population, Capital Accumulation, and Technology in Explanations of European Development
2. Market Economies in Europe and Asia
PART TWO: FROM NEW ETHOS TO NEW ECONOMY? CONSUMPTION, INVESTMENT, AND
CAPITALISM
Introduction
3. Luxury Consumption and the Rise of Capitalism
PART THREE: BEYOND SMITH AND MALTHUS: FROM ECOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS TO SUSTAINED
INDUSTRIAL GROWTH
5. Shared Constraints: Ecological Strain in Western Europe and East Asia
6. Abolishing the Land Constraint: The Americas as a New Kind of Periphery
Appendix A. Comparative Estimates of Land Transport Capacity per Person: Germany
and North India, circa 1800
Appendix B. Estimates of Manure Applied to North China and European Farms in the
Late Eighteenth Century, and a Comparison of Resulting Nitrogen Fluxes
Appendix C. Forest Cover and Fuel-Supply Estimates for France, Lingnan, and a Portion of North China, 1700-1850
Appendix D. Estimates of "Ghost Acreage" Provided by Various Imports to Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Appendix E.Estimates of Earning Power of Rural Textile Workers in the Lower Yangzi Region of China, 1750-1840
Appendix F. Estimates of Cotton and Silk Production, Lower Yangzi and China as
a Whole, 1750 and Later--With Comparisons to United Kingdom, France, and Germany
Bibliography
Index
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