The Great Divergence*
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European and Chinese Coinage Before the Age of Steam*
《中國文化研究所學報》 Journal of Chinese Studies No. 55 - July 2012 The Great Money Divergence: European and Chinese Coinage before the Age of Steam* Niv Horesh University of Western Sydney 1. Introduction Economic historians have of late been preoccupied with mapping out and dating the “Great Divergence” between north-western Europe and China. However, relatively few studies have examined the path dependencies of either region insofar as the dynamics monetiza- tion, the spread of fiduciary currency or their implications for financial factor prices and domestic-market integration before the discovery of the New World. This article is de- signed to highlight the need for such a comprehensive scholarly undertaking by tracing the varying modes of coin production and circulation across Eurasia before steam-engines came on stream, and by examining what the implications of this currency divergence might be for our understanding of the early modern English and Chinese economies. “California School” historians often challenge the entrenched notion that European technological or economic superiority over China had become evident long before the * Emeritus Professor Mark Elvin in Oxfordshire, Professor Hans Ulrich Vogel at the University of Tübingen, Professor Michael Schiltz and Professor Akinobu Kuroda 黑田明伸 at Tokyo University have all graciously facilitated the research agenda in comparative monetary his- tory, which informs this study. The author also wishes to thank the five anonymous referees. Ms Dipin Ouyang 歐陽迪頻 and Ms Mayumi Shinozaki 篠崎まゆみ of the National Library of Australia, Ms Bick-har Yeung 楊 碧 霞 of the University of Melbourne, and Mr Darrell Dorrington of the Australian National University have all extended invaluable assistance in obtaining the materials which made my foray into this field of enquiry smoother. -
India and the Great Divergence: Assessing the Efficiency of Grain Markets in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century India ROMAN STUDER
India and the Great Divergence: Assessing the Efficiency of Grain Markets in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century India ROMAN STUDER By analyzing a newly compiled data base of grain prices, this article finds that prior to the nineteenth century the grain trade in India was essentially local, while more distant markets remained fragmented. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that these premodern structures were transformed, and a national grain market had emerged. In the Great Divergence debate, the Cali- fornia School’s claim that early modern “Asia” reached a similar stage of eco- nomic development as early modern Europe is therefore rejected for India. n recent years, the Great Divergence has become one of the most Icontentious issues in economic history. The debate centers on when and why Western Europe pulled ahead of the rest of the world economi- cally; that is, when and why the Great Divergence in economic per- formance happened. Until recently, the widely accepted view has been that Europe’s path of economic development was already unique in early modern times. It had better institutions; a scientific culture, which led to technological progress; superior commercial organization; and more favorable social structures and demographic patterns. As a result, Europe’s economic progress was outstripping that of the rest of the world so that it had become the clear economic leader well before the Industrial Revolution brought about far-reaching structural changes and made Europe’s supremacy even more pronounced.1 The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 68, No. 2 (June 2008). © The Economic History Association. -
The Great Divergence the Princeton Economic History
THE GREAT DIVERGENCE THE PRINCETON ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD Joel Mokyr, Editor Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815, by Philip T. Hoffman The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914, by Timothy W. Guinnane Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory, by Cormac k Gráda The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, by Kenneth Pomeranz THE GREAT DIVERGENCE CHINA, EUROPE, AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD ECONOMY Kenneth Pomeranz PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD COPYRIGHT 2000 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 3 MARKET PLACE, WOODSTOCK, OXFORDSHIRE OX20 1SY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA POMERANZ, KENNETH THE GREAT DIVERGENCE : CHINA, EUROPE, AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD ECONOMY / KENNETH POMERANZ. P. CM. — (THE PRINCETON ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD) INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX. ISBN 0-691-00543-5 (CL : ALK. PAPER) 1. EUROPE—ECONOMIC CONDITIONS—18TH CENTURY. 2. EUROPE—ECONOMIC CONDITIONS—19TH CENTURY. 3. CHINA— ECONOMIC CONDITIONS—1644–1912. 4. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT—HISTORY. 5. COMPARATIVE ECONOMICS. I. TITLE. II. SERIES. HC240.P5965 2000 337—DC21 99-27681 THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN TIMES ROMAN THE PAPER USED IN THIS PUBLICATION MEETS THE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (PERMANENCE OF PAPER) WWW.PUP.PRINCETON.EDU PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 3579108642 Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. -
The First Great Divergence
Mellon-Sawyer Seminar 2007/8 “The first great divergence: China and Europe, 500-800 CE” Organized by Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel, and Mark Lewis, Departments of Classics and History, Stanford University Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Six hundred years ago China was the most powerful state on earth. The eunuch admiral Zheng He spent 1406 cruising around the Indian Ocean at the head of 30,000 crew in a fleet of giant Chinese “treasure ships,” trading, collecting tribute, and setting up and deposing client kings at will. By 1433, Chinese ships were visiting Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, and probably Australia too. By any reasonable estimate, China seemed set to become the world’s first global power. But that did not happen. Anti-trade Confucian factions won out in struggles at the Ming court, and long-distance voyages were banned. By 1467, most records of Zheng’s voyages were lost or destroyed. Half a millennium later, far from dominating as the world, China seemed – at least to western observers – to be going backward. When a dispute over opium trading escalated uncontrollably in 1839, the British sent a small naval force to claim damages from the governor of Canton. A single ironclad gunboat blasted its way through all the Chinese defenses, and in 1842, with the Grand Canal under British control, Nanjing facing plunder, and famine closing in on Beijing, China conceded British demands for open ports and the right to send missionaries deep into the country. This defeat triggered crises that brought China to the verge of partition. One Hong Xiuquan, a failed civil service candidate who developed his own bizarre version of Christianity out of the teachings of the missionaries at Canton, led the massive Taiping Rebellion to install a Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. -
The Basic Economics of Internet Infrastructure
Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 34, Number 2—Spring 2020—Pages 192–214 The Basic Economics of Internet Infrastructure Shane Greenstein his internet barely existed in a commercial sense 25 years ago. In the mid- 1990s, when the data packets travelled to users over dial-up, the main internet T traffic consisted of email, file transfer, and a few web applications. For such content, users typically could tolerate delays. Of course, the internet today is a vast and interconnected system of software applications and computing devices, which society uses to exchange information and services to support business, shopping, and leisure. Not only does data traffic for streaming, video, and gaming applications comprise the majority of traffic for internet service providers and reach users primarily through broadband lines, but typically those users would not tolerate delays in these applica- tions (for usage statistics, see Nevo, Turner, and Williams 2016; McManus et al. 2018; Huston 2017). In recent years, the rise of smartphones and Wi-Fi access has supported growth of an enormous range of new businesses in the “sharing economy” (like, Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb), in mobile information services (like, social media, ticketing, and messaging), and in many other applications. More than 80 percent of US households own at least one smartphone, rising from virtually zero in 2007 (available at the Pew Research Center 2019 Mobile Fact Sheet). More than 86 percent of homes with access to broadband internet employ some form of Wi-Fi for accessing applications (Internet and Television Association 2018). It seems likely that standard procedures for GDP accounting underestimate the output of the internet, including the output affiliated with “free” goods and the restructuring of economic activity wrought by changes in the composition of firms who use advertising (for discussion, see Nakamura, Samuels, and Soloveichik ■ Shane Greenstein is the Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts. -
Great Divergence of the 18Th Century?
Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution Great Divergence of the 18th Century? Andrey Korotayev1,2, Julia Zinkina3, Denis Zlodeev1 1 National Research University Higher School of Economics 2 Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences 3 Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration Abstract The article suggests that the Great Divergence of the 19th century between “the West” and “the East” was preceded by the Great Divergence in the 18th century between the Global North and the Global South. This may be attributed to a new, much higher level of state efficiency in the Global North. The eastern and western regions of the Global North frequently used different methods to make their state apparatuses more efficient, but achieved strikingly similar results during the 18th century. The Great Divergence of the 19th century, remarkably, occurred within the Global North. Introduction. The Great Divergence One of the major contributions made by Jack Goldstone to the study of social macroevolution is constituted by his founding of the 'California School' in whose framework the Great Divergence theory was developed (Frank 1998; Goldstone 1991, 2002, 2008a, and 2008b; Marks 2002; Pomeranz 2000 and 2002; Vries 2003, 2010, and 2013; Wong 1997). In the 19th century, northwestern Europe saw the birth of capital-intensive and fossil-fuel based manufacturing. Spreading throughout Europe and the United States, these changes triggered explosive growth resulting in the gap in per -
The Industrial Revolution As the Escape from the Malthusian Trap
Komlos, John: The Industrial Revolution as the Escape from the Malthusian Trap Munich Discussion Paper No. 2003-13 Department of Economics University of Munich Volkswirtschaftliche Fakultät Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Online at https://doi.org/10.5282/ubm/epub.57 The Industrial Revolution as the Escape from the Malthusian Trap John Komlos, University of Munich Need one state the obvious, that the Industrial Revolution has surely fascinated as many historians as any other topic in the history of civilization? It was undoubtedly one of the most momentous development, one which continues to have a major impact on virtually all aspects of human experience. It changed the very basis of our existence: not only in the way we produce and consume, but outside of this realm as well, from our social interactions, to our political system. In short, the processes unleashed by the Industrial Revolution are crucial to understanding the primary forces that shaped the 1 modern world. Yet, in spite of the immense outpouring of literature on the topic, there is much confusion regarding appropriate conceptualizations. I review some of the salient conflicting viewpoints, and outline the complexities of change without claiming to do justice to a literature whose enormity prohibits precision within the modest confines of 2 an essay. I conclude by arguing that it is useful to think of the Industrial Revolution as a multidimensional pan-European process with deep roots in the past, intricately intertwined with demographic developments. Paradigms and Controversies There are a multitude of reasons why the debate over the Industrial Revolution is far from moving toward closure. -
Employment Situation of Veterans — 2020
For release 10:00 a.m. (ET) Thursday, March 18, 2021 USDL-21-0438 Technical information: (202) 691-6378 • [email protected] • www.bls.gov/cps Media contact: (202) 691-5902 • [email protected] EMPLOYMENT SITUATION OF VETERANS — 2020 The unemployment rate for veterans who served on active duty in the U.S. Armed Forces at any time since September 2001—a group referred to as Gulf War-era II veterans—rose to 7.3 percent in 2020, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The jobless rate for all veterans increased to 6.5 percent in 2020. These increases reflect the effect of the coronavirus (COVID- 19) pandemic on the labor market. In August 2020, 40 percent of Gulf War-era II veterans had a service-connected disability, compared with 26 percent of all veterans. This information was obtained from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 eligible households that provides data on employment, unemployment, and persons not in the labor force in the United States. Data about veterans are collected monthly in the CPS; these monthly data are the source of the 2020 annual averages presented in this news release. In August 2020, a supplement to the CPS collected additional information about veterans on topics such as service-connected disability and veterans' current or past Reserve or National Guard membership. Information from the supplement is also presented in this news release. The supplement was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Department of Labor's Veterans' Employment and Training Service. -
What Is Unemployment Insurance (Ui)? Am I Eligible? How Do I Apply?
WHAT IS UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE (UI)? Unemployment Insurance is a joint state-federal program that provides cash benefits to eligible workers. Each state administers UI Benefits are Administered by States a separate UI program, but all states follow the same guidelines established by federal law. To find information about your state’s program, including eligibility, benefits, Unemployment insurance payments (benefits) are intended to and application information, visit our provide temporary financial assistance to unemployed workers Unemployment Insurance Service who are unemployed through no fault of their own. Each state Locator. sets its own additional requirements for eligibility, benefit amounts, and length of time benefits can be paid. Generally, benefits are based on a percentage of your earnings over a recent 52-week period, and each state sets a maximum amount. Benefits are subject to federal and most state income taxes and must be reported on your income tax return. You may choose to have the tax withheld from your payment. AM I ELIGIBLE? Each state sets its own guidelines for eligibility for UI benefits, but you usually qualify if you: Are unemployed through no fault of your own. In most states, this means you have to have separated from your last job due to a lack of available work. Meet work and wage requirements. You must meet your state’s requirements for wages earned or time worked during an established period of time referred to as a "base period." (In most states, this is usually the first four out of the last five completed calendar quarters prior to the time that your claim is filed.) Meet any additional state requirements. -
A Glossary of Fiscal Terms & Acronyms
AUGUST7,1998VOLUME13,NO .VII A Publication of the House Fiscal Analysis Department on Government Finance Issues A GLOSSARY OF FISCAL TERMS & ACRONYMS 1998 Revised Edition Abstract. This issue of Money Matters is a resource document containing terms and acronyms commonly used by and in legislative fiscal committees and in the discussion of state budget and tax issues. The first section contains terms and abbreviations used in all fiscal committees and divisions. The remaining sections contain terms for particular budget categories and accounts, organized according to fiscal subject areas. This edition has new sections containing economic development, family and early childhood, and housing terms and acronyms. The other sections are revised and updated to reflect changes in terminology, particularly the human services section. For further information, contact the Chief Fiscal Analyst or the fiscal analyst assigned to the respective House fiscal committee or division. A directory of House Fiscal Analysis Department personnel and their committee/division assignments for the 1998 legislative session appears on the next page. Originally issued January 1997 Revised August 1998 House Fiscal Analysis Department Staff Assignments — 1998 Session Committee/Division Fiscal Analyst Telephone Room Chief Fiscal Analyst Bill Marx 296-7176 373 Capital Investment John Walz 296-8236 376 EDIT— Economic Development Finance CJ Eisenbarth Hager 296-5813 428 EDIT— Housing Finance Cynthia Coronado 296-5384 361 Environment & Natural Resources Finance Jim Reinholdz 296-4119 370 Education — Higher Education Finance Doug Berg 296-5346 372 K-12 Education Finance Greg Crowe 296-7165 378 Family & Early Childhood Finance Cynthia Coronado 296-5384 361 Health & Human Services Finance Joe Flores 296-5483 385 Judiciary Finance Gary Karger 296-4181 383 State Government Finance Helen Roberts 296-4117 374 Transportation Finance John Walz 296-8236 376 Taxes — Income, sales, misc. -
Analysis of the Great Divergence Under a Unified Endogenous
ANNALS OF ECONOMICS AND FINANCE 13-2, 317{353 (2012) Analysis of the Great Divergence under a Unified Endogenous Growth Model* Kunting Chen Business School, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China, 315211 E-mail: [email protected] Recently published research that attempts to explain the Great Divergence mainly focuses on geography, technological progress, and international trade. However, we do not believe these are its only | or even the most basic | causes. Instead, we submit that the `social culture' of a country or a region is the most fundamental reason and incorporates these other causes, thereby pro- viding a reasonable unified explanation. This paper is mainly based on a very simple two-sector benchmark model that simulates the economic characteris- tics of England and the Yangzi Delta of China during 1400-1850. It explores aspects of this transition period, and obtains many meaningful results that are consistent with Unified Growth theory, which is usually based on very complex models. Key Words: The industrial revolution; The great divergence; Difference of cul- ture and systems. JEL Classification Numbers: O10, O40. 1. INTRODUCTION In the long history of human development, the world's production and population increased very gradually prior to the nineteenth century. Fur- ther, the differences in living standards between countries were very small. However, from 1900 on, the story was different. In some countries, both population and production began exploding in a way that had never be- fore been seen in human history. At the same time, the ratio of the GDP per capita between the richest and poorest regions of the world widened * The paper is supported by the National Natural Science Fund of China (71273146), the Natural Science Fund of Zhejiang Province of China (Z12G030008), the Ministry of Education Social Science Fund of China (10YJA790019), the Natural Science Fund of Shandong Province of China (Z2008H02), and the Soft Science Fund of Shandong Province of China (2008RKB059). -
Globalization and the European Economy: Medieval Origins to the Industrial Revolution
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Columbia University Academic Commons Columbia University Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series Globalization and the European Economy: Medieval Origins to the Industrial Revolution Ronald Findlay Discussion Paper #:0102-28 Department of Economics Columbia University New York, NY 10027 March 2002 1. Introduction Any consideration of “The Europeanization of the Globe and the Globalization of Europe” must confront the problem of how to specify the spatio-temporal coordinates of the concept of Europe. When does “Europe” begin as a meaningful cultural, social and political expression and how far east from the shores of the Atlantic and the North Sea does it extend? In this paper I will begin with Charlemagne, which is to say around 800. It is at about this time that that the designations of Europe and European first begin to be used. Denys Hay (1966:25) cites an eighth-century Spanish chronicler who refers to the forces of Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, at the celebrated Battle of Poitiers in 732 as Europeenses or Europeans, rather than as Christians, and their opponents as Arabs, rather than as Muslims, a nice example of ethnic as opposed to religious identification of “ourselves” and “the other.” In terms of space I will go not too much further east than the limits of the Carolingian Empire at its peak, which is conveniently depicted in the map provided by Jacques Boussard (1976:40-41). In this map it is remarkable to see how closely the empire coincides with the area covered by the “Inner Six” of the European Common Market, with the addition of Austria and Hungary.