I enjoyed the review on Pomeranz. And I read almost everything you put on the H-Diplo and H- War lists.
-- ???? (mcdemo@csum.edu), May 04, 2000.
My teaching of the history of Islamic Civilization has impressed me by the near-collapse of regions with a long history of economic and cultural importance -- notably Persia, but Egypt's not a bad example, either.
You talk about cultural or institutional coherence. What about China?
De Long reviewed Pomeranz's _The Great Divergence_ recently on EH.RES, and at .
The question put forth is why European countries quickly industrialized, when the rest of Eurasia did not.
Diamond presented a unification argument: that China, due to lack of geographic barriers, has been far more politically centralized than Europe, and hence risk-averse political choices could stunt growth.
I'm not sure that explains India, though: my impression is that the British were able to expand throughout the subcontinent so easily because it was as fragmented as Europe. One would think that the British would have even been a great argument for industrialization; the superiority of European troops should have spurred the native princes to an industrialization program such as the Prussian.
Perhaps the answer lies more in an argument which Stewart has made here on FoRK: labor saving is a process which feeds upon itself. If Europe was not in conditions as Malthusian as China or India (and the Black Death and a few religious wars may have gone a long way towards keeping it out of them), then there would have been an impetus to find ways to increase labor productivity, but such increase not only threw people out of old work, but also created new work in which they could engage. "The capitalist devil..."
-- Dave Long (dl@silcom.com), May 04, 2000.
-- Tom (ThosStew@aol.com), May 04, 2000.
I enjoyed your review of Pomeranz in EH.net. Aside from being extremely erudite and thoughtful, you're right, I'd say -- it's not New World resources that matter. Politics, and a culture of scientific innovation, are crucial; although I'd say the distinctively powerful empirical science only arises in the 17th century, and only in Britain. Other scientific advances are either "catch-up" with the Arab world or China, or to a degree that most people underestimate, peter out or are suppressed. In a series of recent papers, I argue that it was science and technology, PLUS coal, PLUS an open and entrepreneurial society (Temin) that had to converge to produce the IR as it happened. All three elements were crucial, and the combination was found nowhere outside of UK.
I sympathize with your desire to have something better than Wallerstein or Goody to give students, and Ken's book is good on the "what" of the divergence, if weaker on the "why."
Maybe one of these [my] papers will work better for students (plus they're not book length). The first opens the question of the traditional narrative by pointing to "The Problem of the 'Early Modern' World." (This appeared in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient in 1998). The second asks more pointedly: "The Rise of the West -- or Not?" This essay is forthcoming in Sociological Theory, and takes off from Landes, Frank, Pomeranz, Wong, Flynn, and others who I think are developing a new approach.
-- Jack Goldstone (jagoldstone@ucdavis.edu), May 04, 2000.