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The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Or, Is It Time to Reconsider the Great Divergence Debate?

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The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Or, Is It Time to Reconsider the Great Divergence Debate? INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR HISTORY, CULTURE AND MODERNITY www.history-culture-modernity.org Published by: Uopen Journals Copyright: © The Author(s). Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence eISSN: 2213-0624 The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Or, Is it Time to Reconsider the Great Divergence Debate? Joshua Allen Sooter HCM 7: 1067–1079 DOI: 10.18352/hcm.598 Books reviewed Roman Studer, The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Europe, India, and the Rise to Global Economic Power (Cambridge, 2015); Kaveh Yazdani, India, Modernity and the Great Divergence: Mysore and Gujarat (17th to 19th C.) (Leiden, 2017); Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2011). Abstract Twenty years ago, Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000) reshaped debates over the historical causes of Europe’s rapid nineteenth- century industrialization and economic growth. By comparing the Yangzi Delta region of China to Britain, Pomeranz asserted that Europe was not exceptionally dynamic before the nineteenth century and that its divergence from Asia owed to colonial exploitation of the Americas and ecological contingencies, namely abundant coal deposits. Some recent studies have sought to refute or refine Pomeranz’s thesis using the Indian subcontinent as an historical case study. This essay reviews three of these works and, in doing so, demonstrates current meth- odological limitations of this debate. Specifically, recent scholarship, although seeking to critique Pomeranz, employs his two-way compara- tive methodology, but in a manner that operates within a Eurocentric teleology and takes the European historical experience as normative. HCM 2019, VOL. 7 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/20211067 10:33:37PM via free access SOOTER Instead, I propose that scholars inquire after the historical connections among societies’ plural-yet-connected historical trajectories. Keywords: development, divergence, eurocentrism, modernity, Pomeranz Introduction1 It has been nearly twenty years since Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World (2000) asked the question ‘Why Europe?’ Pomeranz’s book gave name to debates over the conditions and dynamics that account for Europe’s rapid industrialization and economic growth in the nineteenth century. In brief, by comparing the Yangzi Delta region of China to Britain, Pomeranz argued that Europe was not exceptionally dynamic prior to the nineteenth century and that its divergence from comparable regions in Asia owed to external factors – colonial exploitation of the Americas – and ecological contingencies, namely abundant deposits of coal. Numerous scholars have sought to refine or refute Pomeranz’s thesis, many using the historical example of the Indian subcontinent. Recent works point to the current methodological and archival limita- tions of the Great Divergence Debate, including a paucity of sources from South Asia. I examine several studies that utilize the historical experiences of the Indian subcontinent to counter Pomeranz’s thesis even as they seek to recreate his two-way comparative methodology. Without new methodological approaches that move beyond binaristic comparative frameworks, some based on limited data, the meaningful- ness of the historical conclusions and the intellectual-political stakes of the literature on this debate will diminish. Pomeranz’s Great Divergence argues that Europe did not enjoy socio- economic or institutional advantages over other world centres prior to the nineteenth century. Rather, Europe ‘diverged’ from Asia only after c. 1800 CE. Pomeranz writes in dialogue with other ‘California School’ scholars, such as André Gunder Frank and R. Bin Wong, who also asserted that Europe’s ascent to global power and industrial capital- ism occurred due to historical contingency. These scholars’ aims were revisionist against an older historiography maintaining that Europe’s rise derived from distinct intellectual and cultural traits and dynamics HCM 2019, VOL. 7 1068 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 10:33:37PM via free access THE GREAT DIVERGENCE RECONSIDERED that were internal to Europe.2 This revisionism was not without critics. For instance, David Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor (1998), published in the same year as Frank’s ReOrient, contended, along Weberian lines, that Europe ‘has been the prime mover of development and modernity’ because of an (Protestant) entrepreneurial culture, the uniquely industrious nature of Europeans, a favourable climate, and so forth.3 Utilizing a two-way comparative model that examines both Asian and European economic paths as variations, Pomeranz does not assume the European historical experience to be normative nor does he assume the existence of a litany of self-evidently advantageous cultural traits. He constructs his comparative framework in light of two key insights. First, he distinguishes between the rapid industrialization of parts of Western Europe and the less dramatic and slower development of the whole of the European continent. Second, he utilizes analogous geo- graphical regions as his units of analysis and comparison. Specifically, he compares Britain to China’s Yangzi Delta region. He does so to avoid misleading or unhelpful comparisons between unalike macro regions. Pomeranz subsequently asserts that the socio-economic conditions that led to capitalist industrialization in Western Europe that other scholars have understood as being exclusive to Europe, such as long life expec- tancies, strong banking institutions, efficient corporations and trade- friendly state policies, were roughly coterminous in some of the most developed regions of Asia. His aim is ‘to look for absences, accidents, and obstacles that diverted England from a path that might have made it more like the Yangzi Delta or Gujarat’.4 Pomeranz locates the factors for western Europe’s nineteenth-cen- tury transformation as external to the continent. The procurement of foodstuffs from the colonial exploitation of the Americas, he claims, reduced the necessity of relegating European labour to sustainable subsistence agriculture. This decreased the need to maximize agricul- tural production on western European land, thereby diverting labour to non-subsistence related industries, a process also facilitated by the exploitation of rich fossil fuel deposits, specifically coal. The ensuing ‘ecological breakthrough’ stimulated industry and manufacturing, ena- bling Europeans’ supremacy over global markets and eventual political and social hegemony. This argument frames Europe’s divergence as an eighteenth and nineteenth-century departure from the developmental HCM 2019, VOL. 7 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/20211069 10:33:37PM via free access SOOTER course shared by societies world-wide: ‘we cannot understand pre- 1800 global conjunctures in terms of a Europe-centered world system; we have instead a polycentric world with no dominant center. Global conjunctures often worked to western Europe’s advantage, but not nec- essarily because Europeans created or imposed them’.5 This contrasts with holding the European historical case as universal and normative; a measuring stick by which all other historical experiences fall short due to the ‘lack’ of some crucial economic-sociocultural-geographic- technological factors or determinants. Recent Revisions to the Great Divergence: Re-Centring Europe? Recently, some scholars have used the Indian subcontinent to chal- lenge the narrative that Europe’s divergence was relatively late and resulted from relative ecological and geographical happenstance. Two representative works are Roman Studer’s The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Europe, India, and the Rise to Global Economic Power and Kaveh Yazdani’s India, Modernity and the Great Divergence: Mysore and Gujarat (17th to 19th C.). These contend that Europe’s ascendance resulted from longstanding divergent trajectories and pre- ceded the nineteenth century due, respectively, to market integration dynamics within the European continent and to sociocultural and scien- tific innovations. Both seek to refute aspects of Pomeranz’s thesis using the historical case of India. Although their theoretical frameworks and causal explanations differ, both try to mirror Pomeranz’s two-way com- parison even as they refute central aspects of his argument. Studer’s The Great Divergence Reconsidered uses a methodology based in economics in an attempt to address the questions, ‘Why was it Western Europe that led the economic development in the world and industrialised first? ... And why did it start in the late eighteenth cen- tury?’ He begins by outlining the ‘web’ of overlapping and ‘mutually influencing’ factors that may have contributed to the ‘rise of Europe’ that economic historians and economists have identified.6 These include favourable geography; agricultural, social, scientific and technological factors; colonialism and imperialist ventures; as well as commercial activities and trade. The last of these constitutes Studer’s raison d’être. HCM 2019, VOL. 7 1070 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 10:33:37PM via free access THE GREAT DIVERGENCE RECONSIDERED His aim is to provide quantitative evidence that Europe featured supe- rior internal ‘market integration’ in comparison to Asia and that this was a causal factor in the Great Divergence. Studer’s goal is to ‘improve’ the ‘empirical evidence’ supporting the Smithian
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