User:FloNight/Great Divergence

The Great Divergence is the period beginning in the 16th century in which the "West" (Western Europe and the areas in which after the 16th century its people became the dominant populations) clearly emerged as the most powerful world civilization, eclipsing the Islamic empires (the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India), Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. (The prevailing view has been that the West surpassed the East in technological creativity by the time the Portuguese arrived in Macao in 1557. At that point, China and Japan were sophisticated but stagnant economies. The greater technological creativity of the West, home grown, led to Europe’s domination of the world economy. Bold text is directly taken from Clark's review and is a copyright violation and/or plagiarism as now appears in this text.)

This process of western expansion begun in the 16th Century, along with the emergence of global culture, and can be considered to have its terminus in the 20th and 21st centuries with the re-assumption of leading roles by China and India as well as the emergence of new actors created by western expansion such as the United States. Western Europe ceased to be the unipolar center as it was in the 18 and 19th centuries of the western epoch.

Overview

In the early 1500s, many believe, Western Europe and East Asia enjoyed broadly similar levels of material prosperity and economic development. For most of the early modern period, both confronted Malthusian constraints (population exceeding food supply) which inhibited further growth. Due in part to the technological advances that took place in the urban centers of Western Europe (including the invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen), the subsequent mechanization of many European industries, however, the locus of global wealth and power began to slowly shift from Asia to Western Europe (specifically to Britain).

Researchers offer competing explanations for this phenomenon. Some scholars believe the destruction caused by the barbarian invasions in the later half of the Song Dynasty aborted a "modern age" which was emerging in China , while others attribute to the divergence to the policies of the Manchu Qing Dynasty (1683-1911). Kenneth Pomeranz, in The Great Divergence, emphasizes the role of "geographic accidents" such as the proximity of coal deposits to early British centers of industrial production and the easily exploitable natural resources of the Americas.

Pomeranz's argument accords in certain respects with the conclusions of Jared Diamond, who in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, argued that Europe's geographical placement, especially its east-west axis and its proximity to the Americas, was the overarching factor in its global dominance. In contrast, according to Diamond, China's layout allowed it to become precociously united which removed a major incentive for technological advancement and intra-national competition. In A Farewell to Alms Gregory Clark argues that it was cultural and genetic factors – successful tradesmen leaving behind more children – that allowed Britain to increase economic sophistication while others fell behind.

However, in recent years numerous researchers have claimed that the Great Divergence was, in fact, already well underway before the 19th century; these scholars claim that although wages paid in grain were equal in Northwest Europe and prosperous parts of Asias such as Southern China, wages paid in silver were substantially lower in Asia. However, silver was much more valuable in China and the East than in Europe. The use of grain wages (by Pomeranz and Parthasarathi in their papers on Indian and Chinese development respectively) is heavily criticized as a method of determining the level of development of a country, with silver wages much more representative of the overall development level. This leads both Allen and Broadberry & Gupta to state that "unambiguously" The Great Divergence was already established in the 16th Century.