Book Review: The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, by Kenneth Pomeranz
\nThis book does a good job of criticizing many Anglo-centric explanations of why Europeans industrialized first by providing detailed evidence that the area near the Yangzi river delta was mostly as advanced as England when England started the industrial revolution.
\nIt does a less convincing job of arguing that coal and new world land were the main reasons for England’s success. I’m tempted to believe that American sugar provided desperately needed calories to break out of a Malthusian trap, but the evidence doesn’t show that became significant until the industrial revolution had already started.
\nConveniently located coal undoubtedly gave England a boost, but not a big enough boost that there is a practical way to decide it was more important than the numerous cultural differences which might have given England the edge it needed.
\nThe book makes a serious effort to dismiss those cultural explanations, but is not thorough enough. In particular, I’m disappointed with the cryptic way that it dismisses the relevance of the ideas in Helmut Schoeck’s book Envy.
\nThe style is often deadening, with lengthy descriptions of details whose relevance is unobvious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Book Review: The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, by Kenneth Pomeranz This book does a good job of criticizing many Anglo-centric explanations of why Europeans industrialized first by providing detailed evidence that the area near the Yangzi river delta was mostly as advanced as England when England started […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,16],"tags":[50,98],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-econ","tag-history","tag-industrial-revolution"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-1B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":434,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}