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goliathonline 's review for:
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
by Kenneth Pomeranz
Well...obviously that took a while, but it was entirely worth it. An extremely intricate, complex look at the different paths of industrialization and development taken by western Europe and east Asia, with particular foci on the Kanto and Kinai regions of Japan, Guangdong and Lingnan in China, and Great Britain and the Netherlands as something all akin to peers around the 17th century. But why did they diverge? Pomeranz makes a fairly airtight case for the bounty of the New World, both in resources and as a means of avoiding labor-intensive agriculture at home, as a key contributor to ultimate British dominance, as well as the accident of geography. British coal's proximity both to its end-users and to means of transporting it (rivers) made it much more cost-effective to extract than China's coal resources, which are mostly confined to the dry interior far from both population centers and transportation networks.
Pomeranz is an economist's economist and gets way down in the data (such as it is), and leaves the reader convinced that but for an act of colonialism, Europe may well have gone the path of China. Not no industrialization, but slower and later. And he further elaborates how the unique economics of chattel slavery enabled Britain's rise. Was it worth it?
Pomeranz is an economist's economist and gets way down in the data (such as it is), and leaves the reader convinced that but for an act of colonialism, Europe may well have gone the path of China. Not no industrialization, but slower and later. And he further elaborates how the unique economics of chattel slavery enabled Britain's rise. Was it worth it?