The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Or, Is it Time to Reconsider the Great Divergence Debate?

Abstract

Twenty years ago, Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000) reshaped debates over the historical causes of Europe’s rapid nineteenthcentury industrialization and economic growth. By comparing the Yangzi Delta region of China to Britain, Pomeranz asserted that Europe was not exceptionally dynamic before the nineteenth century and that its divergence from Asia owed to colonial exploitation of the Americas and ecological contingencies, namely abundant coal deposits. Some recent studies have sought to refute or refine Pomeranz’s thesis using the Indian subcontinent as an historical case study. This essay reviews three of these works and, in doing so, demonstrates current methodological limitations of this debate. Specifically, recent scholarship, although seeking to critique Pomeranz, employs his two-way comparative methodology, but in a manner that operates within a Eurocentric teleology and takes the European historical experience as normative. Instead, I propose that scholars inquire after the historical connections among societies’ plural-yet-connected historical trajectories.