reading 5 (week 3) Flashcards
Great divergence
- up to the 19th century Europe was not different economically than the rest of the world
= 19th century: Western Europe and part of North Africa had become wealthy, almost everywhere else poor
When did it start? = debated (some saying it really took off around 1800), it’ll probs never be resolved
Karl Marx inventions that ‘‘ushured in bourgeois society’’
!!!were not European inventions: all probably are invented in Europe
- gunpowder
- compass
- printing press
causes great divergence
- 3 alternative explanations
- Cultural Factors / superiority (rejected by other historians) = e.g. Weber, Sowell
- Plundering and pillage of foreign lands (alternative cultural explanation = e.g. Blaut
= debate: Europe as beacon of progress vs as ruthless thief
- non-cultural explanations e.g. Diamond, Mokyr, Acemogly
*Mokyr: causes are ‘‘overdetermined’’: many contributed , no factor was enough to account for the divergence on its own
conclusion Great Divergence
cultural explanations for booms and busts are tempting, but economic history shows that they rarely stand up to scrutiny
- e.g. idea that Greece is lazy and therefore has a relatively weak eco, but OECD shows Greeks work more than most others in rich countries
- e.g. high productivity India ascribed to work ethic, but now eco. falters -> argument out of use
Cultural explanations (superiority) Great Divergence
- Weber: religious factors (Calvinism encouraged Europeans to be thrifty, rational, and concerned with material gain + such values didn’t exist outside of Europe, acc to Weber)
- Thomas Sowell: Britain invented freedom + other countries coppied its eco development
Plundering and pillage of foreign lands (alternative cultural explanation Great Divergence
- James Blaut: 1492 (Columbus in America) = breakpoint different evolutionary epochs (Europe started exploiting + holding back the rest of the world)
non-cultural explanations Great Divergence
- Jared Diamond: environmental factors (domesticable plants and animals + population more immune to diseases -> high productivity + higher population density -> development of institutions (e.g. cities) that contributed to eco. growth
*is criticized for ‘‘environmental determinsim’’ - Joel Mokyr: many different factors played a role : environment, development open science 16th century (spread eco. useful ideas), affection for capitalism, affection for colonialism
he argues: causes are ‘‘overdetermined’’: many contributed , no factor was enough to account for the divergence on its own - Gregory Clark: disease picked off Britain’s poor -> steadily more competent and productive population -> self-sustaining growth of the industrial revo)
- Daron Acemogly + James Robinson: Glorious revolution Britain 1680s -> less power monarch -> more incentive to make money (as monarch couldn’t take it)
*Mokyr: Great Divergence not simply caused by European culture, it emerged because a business-friendly, open and innovative economy was created - mostly by accident
from what point on can we speak about a single, hegemonic European ‘‘core’’
*start article 2: Pomeranz, Kenneth
only after 19th century industrialization was well advanced
before that: resemblances between western Europe and other areas means we cannot understand pre-1800 global conjunctures in terms of a Europe-centered world system, there was a polycentric world with no dominant center
most existing literature either/or framework:
- Europe-centered world system carrying out essential primitive (i.e. only the beginning of large scale accumulation (Marx)) accumulation overseas
- endogenous European growth (exclusively internal focus)
with these 2 options, most scholars go for the second
how has recent scholarship in European economic history generally reinforced an exlusively internal focus?
- 3 ways
- research has found well-developed capitalist institutions further and further back in time (even during feudal period, which is often seen as anti-thesis capitalism)
! this reinforces the idea that Europe’s successful path began before its overseas expansion - the more market dynamics appear in medieval culture and institutions, the more tempting it becomes to make market-driven growth the entire story of European development (ignoring messy details, local customs etc.) -> less attention to coercion overseas (as that’s far from the main story in Europe)
- treating the Industrial Revolution as European phenomenon rather than a British one spreading across Europe (given the finding of an ongoing process of commercialization (see nr. 1))
-> focus on Europe alone + only on the model of free, competing economy
-> shape units of analysis: we use contemporary nation-states, whilst e.g. India and China would be better compared with Europe as a whole
makes it seem that Europe’s overseas expansion is a minor matter + that empire may be explained by (economic) superiority, but has little to do with creating it
looking to Europe as a whole and then how Britain is distinct
- an approach
traditional way of comparing regions by their continental or ‘‘civilizational units’’ is problematic
we should compare scattered core regions that share similar characteristics
by doing this, we can look for absences, accidents, and obstaclees that diverted England from a path that might have made it more like other regions (e.g. Yangzi Delta, the Netherlands, Gujarat)
so don’t look at random units/countries, look at similar ‘‘core units’’
= confront biased comparisons by trying to produce better ones
Wong + Kenneth - approach to comparison/analysis great divergence
= reciprocal comparative method / two-way comparisons
= confront biased comparisons by trying to produce better ones
view both sides of the comparison as ‘‘deviations’’, through the expectations of the other rather than leaving one as always the norm
-> e.g. surprising similarities in agricultural, commercial, and proto-industrial development among various parts of Eurasia as late as 1750 (-> rupture to explain the further growth of western Europe alone in the 19th century) -> not enough to look at differences within Europe
two-way comparisons raises new questions + reconfigures the relationships among the old ones
two clusters of the argument that Europe’s economy was uniquely capable of generating an industrial transformation
16th-18th century Europe had already moved far ahead of the rest of its world in the accumulation of both physical and human capital (central writer = E.L. Jones)
- central tenet:customary checks on fertility (later marriage, celibate clergy etc.) -> more surplus -> Europe could support more non-farmers
- problem = is not unique in Europe (there were also eco booms and busts, that shouldn’t be treated as temporary flowerings)
- European institutions allocated resources in more conducive to long-term self-sustaining growth (Braudel, Wallerstein, Chaudhuri, North)
- common = claim eco. dev. was stifled outside of Europe by a state that was either to strong and hostile to private property, or too weak to protect entrepreneurs
- Brenner: divergent dev. paths in Europe (east and west) as result of class struggles that altered property-rights regimes
- other scholars: more focus on institutions that allowed for accumulation through coercion and collusion
‘the whole world was poor and accumulation minimal until the early modern European breakthrough’
-> emphasis on ‘‘fall of Asia’’ + ‘‘rise of Europe”
- anachronistic in 2 ways
- lends to read too much of 19th+20th century ecological disasters that affected much of Asia back into earlier periods + present 18th century Asian societies as having exhausted all possibilities available to them (overpopulation)
- ! India, Southeast Asia, parts of China still could accommodate more people - internalize extraordinary ecological bounty that Europeans gained from the New World (ignores scale of New World windfall) -> no concern for similarities ecological pressures Europe and core regions Asia
literature tends to oversimplify, to contrast between ecologically played-out Asia, and a Europe with plenty of room to grow (given the New World)
Reality = overall pattern of ecological advantage is quite mixed (some areas in Europe advantage, some in Asia)
Sugihara argues + Kenneth agrees;
- population growth East Asia 1500-1800 shouldn’t be seen as a block for development, but as a miracle (supporting people, creating skills etc.) that can be compared with economic achievement Europe industrialization
- highlights high standard of living 18th century Japan and China + sophistication of institutions (created many benefits of market without same guarantees for property and contract Westerners believe is precondition of markets
- not just diffusion of Western achievements led to high world GDP: combination of Western European and east Asian types of growth
! Kenneth and Sugihara disagree about labor and population influence
- Sugihara: basic difference miracles = Europe was capital-intensive + Asia was labor-intensive as far back as 1500
- Kenneth: Europe could have also ended up on labor-intensive path, it didn’t due to fossil fuels and access to New World resrouces
