The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.

• Author: Anderson, Gary M.
• Position: Book Review

By Kenneth Pomeranz

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. x, 382. $20.00 cloth.

Why did the "Industrial Revolution" occur in northwestern Europe but not in China? This simple question has proven to be nightmarishly difficult to resolve definitively, although many explanations have been advanced. Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence is one such effort and an exhaustively documented one. Does it resolve the question successfully? The answer is a qualified "yes."

Pomeranz is chiefly concerned with the comparison between England and China, but he also devotes a fair amount of attention to the rest of the world. He shows that many of the characteristics often thought to be peculiar to Europe applied to China as well. Thus, many of the institutional features that were important for the breakout into dynamic growth were not uniquely European.

Pomeranz argues that many of the elements of the conventional wisdom about why China did not experience the explosive growth that characterized Europe after 1800 are seriously in error. China was not in the throes of a "Malthusian crisis," heedlessly breeding itself into oblivion. The Chinese state was not the growth-choking anticapitalist machine that it has sometimes been portrayed as having been, and in fact it was probably less of a drag on private markets than were the states of mercantilist Europe. Chinese wage rates and standards of living could not have been too low to sustain the emergence of a robust consumer marketplace because they resembled the rates and standards in Europe. In other words, in many significant dimensions, China and Europe (or at least the core of China and the northwestern portion of Europe) had basically equivalent conditions.

A number of economic historians have argued that the tendency toward late marriage and other fertility-reducing practices in Europe (especially in the northwest) conferred a distinct advantage on the region, at least in terms of economic growth rates. Pomeranz argues that although some aspects of European marriage patterns were distinctive, the slightly different cultural tendencies in China were approximately as effective in achieving reduction in fertility. The Chinese simply were not breeding out to the Malthusian margin. Peculiar to Europe were some of the ways in which fertility rates were kept under control, not the fact of control itself. Hence, the key to understanding China's failure to experience an "industrial revolution"...