The Great Divergence Debate

The Great Divergence presents a range of evidence for its contention that, by the eighteenth century, the Yangzi Delta was in no worse a position, in terms of living standards, economic institutions, and the spread of the market, to achieve sustained growth in output and incomes than was England. It followed from this that the ‘Great Divergence’ in economic fortunes across Eurasia since the eighteenth century cannot be explained by conditions that preceded the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of which in northern Europe rather than China must therefore depend on contingent factors that relieved resource limitations in one place but not the other. This argument challenged prevailing interpretations of the causes of industrialisation in terms of a longstanding European ‘superiority’ and led to a substantial reassessment of the path of global economic change from the sixteenth century onwards. However, the work on China of the ‘California School’, following Pomeranz, has been replicated for Japan only to a limited, mainly quantitative, extent and the significance of the Japanese case for the issues that The Great Divergence raised has hardly been considered.