The "Great Divergence" is a phrase used by economic historian Kenneth Pomeranz to describe the process by which industry first developed in Western Europe as opposed to China and East Asia. This development had widespread and long-lasting consequences, of course. Pomeranz sees a basic similarity between the two regions--there was seemingly no reason, on the face of it, why things should have happened the way that they did. Some of the cultural, material, and economic...
The "Great Divergence" is a phrase used by economic historian Kenneth Pomeranz to describe the process by which industry first developed in Western Europe as opposed to China and East Asia. This development had widespread and long-lasting consequences, of course. Pomeranz sees a basic similarity between the two regions--there was seemingly no reason, on the face of it, why things should have happened the way that they did. Some of the cultural, material, and economic circumstances often cited as the reasons industry developed in Europe also, according to Pomeranz, in China and Japan in the seventeenth century or so. Pomeranz explains the "Great Divergence" between these two reasons as a consequence of a few factors. One was that Western Europe, especially England, was richer in some of the raw materials needed for industrial growth than East Asia. This was especially true of coal. Europe also had virtually unrestricted access to markets in the Americas for most of the eighteenth century, and this both created an almost constant demand for manufactures, but provided new crops which enabled Europe, in Pomeranz's words, to "escape a long-standing pattern in which all growth placed significant incremental demands on the land." Production of textiles in Asia, in the meantime, were stifled by different patterns in growth, lack of new markets, and especially by the relative lack of energy. Thus the "Great Divergence" occurred, as Europe's ability to produce boomed, and that of East Asia became stagnant in comparison.
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