Taylor H Lunsford

Starting sometime since 1500, Europe and its colonies began to pull far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of income, technological progress, and global power, in a process that scholars call “the Great Divergence.” But why exactly did the Great Divergence happen? What caused the West to pull ahead? Thinkers around the world have grappled with this question for centuries. It’s one of the biggest questions in human history, and the conclusions we draw from it have profound implications for humanity’s future course.

Today, there are two main schools of thought battling over the Great Divergence. There is the “culture first” school, which argues that Western civilization had unique ideas, values, or institutions that made Europe more inventive and competitive than other civilizations. They argue that the rise of Western wealth and power in the modern era was the long-run result of deep cultural and intellectual advantages dating back to the Renaissance or even earlier.

This is challenged by an “economics first” school that sees key European advantages in geography, natural resources, and historical timing rather than in institutions or culture. They view the Great Divergence as something that rose out of specific circumstances in the early modern era, not the inevitable outcome of Western exceptionalism- on the contrary, they argue that Chinese, Indian, and other civilizations were still ahead of Europe in some important areas until the Great Divergence was well underway.

For a representative example of modern “culture first” arguments, we can look to Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest (2010). In this book, Ferguson argues that Western civilization was uniquely capable of launching the Industrial Revolution and carving out global empires because of “killer apps” like ‘competition’ and the ‘Protestant work ethic.’ He uses anecdotes from Chinese, Indian, or Ottoman history to argue that non-Western civilizations lacked these “killer apps” and had to learn them the hard way to compete in the modern era.

Scholars who argue for “culture first” models of the Great Divergence tend to know a lot more about the West than they do about other civilizations, and Ferguson is no exception (his work as a historian has been overwhelmingly focused on Britain and the United States). When drawing comparisons, “culture first” advocates tend to first look at whatever Western countries (or, at least, the most advanced ones) were doing at the time, decide which of those things must have been essential for Western progress, then scan China or India or the Middle East for similar things. Wherever the other civilization is found operating differently from the leading Western powers, they may point and say “there! That’s the thing that kept them from industrializing!”

The “economics first” models, in contrast, tend to be more data-driven and more willing to put different cultures and regions on an equal footing. One of the most compelling “economics first” arguments comes from Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000). This book makes the case that pre-industrial Asian civilizations, particularly China, were much wealthier and more successful than the “culture first” arguments would give them credit for, and that the Great Divergence- breakthrough in the West, stagnation everywhere else- was driven by differences in geography and natural resources, not in culture.

Pomeranz’s approach differs from Ferguson’s in that, instead of comparing civilization-sized blocs over the course of half a millenium, Pomeranz focuses in on specific “core” regions and compares them during the crucial two hundred years or so before and during the Industrial Revolution. Instead of comparing all of Europe to all of China, he zooms in on the most prosperous and developed parts of each- England and the Netherlands in Europe and the coastal Jiangnan and Lingnan regions in China- along with similarly rich areas in other parts of Eurasia like Bengal (manufacturing and trading hub of South Asia) and Kinai (the mercantile center of Japan).

The key advantage of focusing on a handful of specific regions instead of taking on the entire globe in civilization-sized chunks is that it allows much closer comparisons. Pomeranz collected a mountain of data for each of his regions, covering everything from wages to caloric intake to shipping costs, to paint each of them in vivid detail. A richer understanding of what economic life was really like in these places makes it possible to draw much clearer and more specific comparisons between them. By comparison, the arguments of the “culture first” school can seem vague and hand-wavey.

Having amassed all this data on each of the Old World’s richest pre-industrial centers, Pomeranz found that they had a great deal in common. In each of them, general prosperity was driven by “proto-industrial” handicraft industries like textiles, shipbuilding, and metalworking, combined with services like banking and shipping. Each drew in raw materials from a vast area to feed and clothe their city-dwelling workers and merchants, and each sold their highest-quality goods on an intercontinental scale.

Pomeranz finds that many of Ferguson’s “killer apps,” like competition and consumerism, seem every bit as present in Jiangnan, Bengal, or Kinai as in England or the Netherlands- a major challenge to “culture first” claims of Western uniqueness- and that each core region maintained a similar level of overall wealth and development well into the 18th or even 19th century, when the data finally shows a distinct rise of Britain and stagnation or even decline in the Asian cores.

He concludes that the rise of Britain in particular, and Europe in general, hinged on real-world economic factors rather than on intangible Western cultural advantages. By the 16th century or so, Pomeranz argues, each of the core areas were pushing up against the limits of what was possible in an economy driven by muscle power and burning wood. Good land was a limited resource- clearing forests to grow more food or fiber crops meant less and less wood to heat homes, cook meals, construct buildings and ships, or smelt metals. More intense farming methods either depleted the soil faster, required much more labor per unit of land, or both. Deforestation and soil erosion was becoming serious in all the most prosperous regions of the Old World, causing droughts, floods, and famines. In short, every part of Eurasia was running desperately low on two key things: land and fuel.

Pomeranz makes a case that these ecological problems were often worse in Europe than in Asia, and that Europeans had the greatest need of new lands and fueld sources. The accidental discovery of the Americas solved Europe’s land scarcity problem, offering up huge sources of timber and a vast new frontier for land-intensive, labor-saving farming. This gave Europe- especially Atlantic Europe- enough ecological “slack” to stave off disaster until the next big breakthrough: a large-scale shift from wood to coal as the fuel of choice.

In Britain, huge coal deposits lay just beneath important ports and manufacturing centers, making the early coal mines immediately profitable. The more coal was used, and the clearer it became that Britain had a lot of it available, the more technological advancements were made in mining, transporting, and using coal. Unleashing this massive new energy source in the early 19th century made that era’s huge industrial, military, medical, and scientific advances possible for Europe and its settler colonies first. The rest, as they say, is history.

Other civilizations knew of coal and made some use of it. Other proto-industrial cores like Jiangnan and Kinai had high fuel costs (driving demand for coal) along with skilled labor and plentiful capital (necessary for using coal to its full potential). But only in England did a rich, fuel-starved economic core sit right on top of large coal deposits. In the space of a few decades, England was completely transformed, western Europe and North America were following close behind, and the rest of the world was left scrambling to figure out what had happened.

On balance, I find Pomeranz’s case to be more persuasive than Ferguson’s, and I think that the “economics first” school of thought gets more right than the “culture first” school does overall. There certainly are cultural differences between civilizations, and those differences sometimes have economic effects. But as Pomeranz shows, one civilization can include many different kinds of economies. Western civilization included rich, industrial England as well as poor, agrarian Poland, and everything in between. “Core” regions in different civilizations often had more in common with each other than they did with undeveloped areas in their own backyards. This makes “economics first” explanations more compelling to me, especially when they’re backed by good methodology and lots of data. The debate over the causes of the Great Divergence is still far from settled, but economic historians will continue to dig up new evidence and build stronger theories.