Years of Poems and Spirits

The Great Divergence, by Kenneth Pomeranz

To understand Pomeranz’s argument in the book, one needs to look no further than at the title, “The Great DIVERGENCE”. It implies a prior “convergence” or “parallelism” that irreversibly separated after a certain point. That is exactly how Pomeranz modeled the development regimes of Western Europe and East Asia around the turn of 19th century.

To establish that the two economic zones were developing in parallel around 1800 (instead of one ahead of the other), Pomeranz spent two-thirds of the book arguing that, the core areas at both ends of Eurasia were comparable in terms of quality of life and per capita wealth. What’s more, he further contested, there was little material difference in their social, economic or institutional makeup to foretell the kind of different outcome as we know today. It seems to me that he aimed his argument mainly against E. L. Jones, who in his book “The European Miracle” claimed Europe had already had a significant lead in productivity and capital accumulation before the boom of oversea colonization. However, Pomeranz was careful not to be distracted by other versions of European Exceptionalism. For example, although he repeatedly discussed women’s role in China, and its negative impact to production and labor migration, he did not elevate the issue to the stratosphere of liberty or equality, as David Lantz did in his book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations”. I found Pomeranz’s arguments relevant and cogent. He certainly listed enough reasons to cause his readers to pause before making a judgment of European uniqueness. If I have to find any fault with his presentation, it is probably that the professor’s approach is more like “destruction” than “de-construction”.

Thankfully, in the last third of the book, he did present his own theory why Europe eventually had “guns, germs and steel” while Asia withered in comparison. That led to the notion of “convergence” prior to industrialization. According to Pomeranz, core areas of both ends of Eurasia were heading to the same ecological “cul de sac” (p207). Using an array of parameters: population growth, subsistence level consumption, level of labor input and ecological deprivation, he contended that, other than the discovery of coal, there was little significant technology breakthrough to mitigate the Malthusian tension that was fast building in the “Old World”.

His view of how China and England responded to this common crisis, in my opinion, is at the same time fascinating and awkward. Fascinating because, if I followed his logic correctly, he treated England’s overseas expansion as a tenuous “suspension bridge” just long enough to lead England pass the abyss of ecological decline and on to the technology-powered industrialization age. Awkward because, despite repeated assurance that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the way China operated in the past, he seemed to suggest that, in the end, China did make a “genetic” choice to go down the path of labor-intensive production.

Both conclusions carry with them refreshing ideas but some questionable assumptions. Orthodox Marxists regard European overseas exploitation as a part of “primitive capital accumulation”. Yet neither Wallerstein nor Pomeranz accept this categorization wholesomely. Colonization did not factor prominently in the early stage of Wallerstein’s World System. Pomeranz valued the New World market more than did its capital. To be precise, in Pomeranz’s model, the silver yield from the Americas mattered more as a link in sustaining global trade, than its direct impact on the level of investment. However, in promoting the importance of the American market for English manufacturers, Pomeranz suppressed that of East European markets. To me, this argument and the underlying data was less than convincing: if the East European economy was big enough to account for a large portion of the English core food supply, how could it be a smaller market than the Americas which provisioned only “drug food”? A few pages later, he attributed the lack of concentrated textile production in China partly to the low technical barrier. As a result, each economy sub-zone in China produced its own proto-industry. Yet he did not give a parallel account of what, then, prevented the colonists in Americas from developing their own indigenous proto-industry, given the same low barrier and the high transportation cost that stopped large-scale labor migration?

Whatever question I had with regard to his theories on European history, I did find those on China very insightful. Not only China expanded inward, as he pointed out, it did so in a “cell-splitting” fashion. With a few exceptions (e.g., the Southeast province of GuangXi became a “rice bowl” of GuangDong (p229)), each economic sub-zone, old or new, all had the same nuclei as a full region (Interestingly enough, the same phenomenon still exists today and is causing the same type of market and capital fragmentation as it did two centuries ago). However, I am intrigued as to whether this model of expansion is unique to China or can be found somewhere else outside of Asia. Pomeranz chose Denmark as a “control group” to demonstrate what type of economy England could have ended up of having, had there no New World expansion. But is there a similar case in Europe that could be used to envision China’s fortune had it adopted the English model? Since France was a relatively unified state, and had its own specialized economic zones (as hinted in Wallerstein’s book), would it be an equally illustrative study for Pomeranz? For example, was there “sprouts of labor-intensive” response to the Malthusian crisis in France? If so, when and how did the French realize the advantage of the English model? How did they respond to that?

Whatever Pomeranz did or did not cover in his book, he succeeded in presenting a fresh new look of the pre-industrialized East and West. Today, it is common sense, among the “initiated” at least, that the East was once more advanced than the West. And now the fortunes have reversed. Plotted on a map of historical time, the trajectories of the two worlds must have crossed each other. Pomeranz’s book is a zoomed-in study of the “cross point”. The rest, as we all learn to say, is history.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS