Revisiting “the Great Divergence”: Clarifying the Two Major Modes of Agriculture in China and the West

Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong have recently conceded that they had been wrong that “the great divergence” between China and the West occurred only after 1800, but they continue to insist that when it came to agriculture and its labor productivity, their earlier argument still holds. This article summarizes the broad differences between eighteenth-century England’s crops cum animal husbandry agriculture and China’s crops-only agriculture to demonstrate the fundamental differences between the two. It is time we recognize fully how very different the two were and are, and how and why each follows an entirely different pattern to modern development. It is simply wrong to continue to obscure those basic differences by insisting on equivalence between them.