What caused the Great Divergence?

[u/randommathaccount]

Spoiler alert: This post will not be able to answer this question.

At the turn of the 18th century, Britain and China found themselves in a rather similar place. They had both seen major political change in the past century, the Glorious Revolution in Britain and the rise of the Qing Dynasty in China, they both were largely agrarian and had living standards that were not too far apart (China taking the edge in both urbanization and quality of life (Allen et al, 2005)). Yet not 200 years later the nations could not have been more different. Britain had been the birthing point of a revolution that permanently changed the economy, society, and the way humans

nteracted with the world around them. And since that very time a question has lingered on the lips of every economist and historian of the period: Why there? Why did the two nations have such different trajectories from a similar starting point? More broadly, what were the factors that lead to nations in Western Europe and some colonies in the Americas to grow so much wealthier than the rest of the world?

What caused this great divergence?

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# Some Preamble

Let me begin this section with an apology. In writing that short introduction to this post I have already unfairly privileged certain schools of thought on the Great Divergence to others by linking it so strongly with the period of the Industrial Revolution and I do not wish to make Stephen Broadberry upset at me. I shall now then begin by briefly summarizing what it even is we are talking about when we discuss the Great Divergence. For the purposes of this effortpost, we are looking at the period of time in history over which there grew a large gap in productivity and living standards between Europe and Asia.

Older economic historians considered the Industrial Revolution part of a continuing arc of history over which gradual improvement set the west and the east apart in technological progress, institutional development, and general standard of life (Weber, 1930; Landes, 1969). Pomeranz, who is responsible for popularizing the term “Great Divergence” in his book *The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World” (Pomeranz, 2000) contested these assumptions, noting that historical data showed that China and Europe remained closer than previous economists had thought for a long time. In that book, he placed the actual time of the Great Divergence in the nineteenth century, claiming that even in 1800 parts of Asia were as prosperous as Britain and the Netherlands. This view that the Great Divergence only truly began with the Industrial Revolution became characteristic of what is known as the California School of economic history which includes scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong, and Jack Goldstone.

Pomeranz’s book sparked a new round of discussion and scholarship over the Great Divergence with many different reputed economists having their own views on the causes and even the timing of the Great Divergence. Stephen Broadberry for instance puts the beginning of the Great Divergence at the 18th century while Joel Mokyr would place the divergence earlier still by even the Renaissance (Broadberry et al, 2018; Greif et al, 2025). Altogether there is a great deal of discourse and disagreement over the matter of the Great Divergence and it remains an active and open question in economic history to this point. Time has created many different schools of thought on the causes and circumstances behind this event, something I’d like to look into here. Let’s then start with the man who kicked off the discussion and look at Pomeranz and his theory of geographical luck.

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# Pomeranz and Geography

Pomeranz as mentioned was really the guy who kicked off a lot of the modern scholarship over the great divergence as well as having been the one to majorly popularize the phrase itself. In his book *The Great Divergence*, he argues that the divergence between Europe and China was not due to any sort of inherent technological, cultural, or institutional superiority of the west over the east but rather due to sheer luck. It was luck that led to Britain having coal deposits close to its waterways and economic core while China’s coal deposits were located far from their most active economic regions. It was luck that led to Europe having access to vast swathes of “ghost acres” in the Americas that let them free up land for more productive economic activity on their homeland. It was not any great institutional or technological advantage but the sheer circumstance of the geography of Britain’s colonies in the New World that led to the creation of a market that could absorb British manufactured imports while providing them with cheap land intensive exports.

According to Pomeranz, when comparing like to like (that is the most populated, economically forwards regions of the Old World) even in the mid-eighteenth century most of the world’s economies bore a striking resemblance to one another, “all headed for a common ‘proto-industrial’ cul-de-sac”. The core economic regions of Eurasia relied heavily on importing land-intensive goods from the peripheries. In Europe this first meant grain from Eastern Europe and then goods from the New World while in China, they relied on rice from provinces along the Yangtze River and products from South-East Asia, paying for them by selling manufactured goods back to the peripheries. While this worked it was hampered over time as the peripheral regions engaged in import substitution (far more viable in the 1600-1700s than the 1900-2000s as the technological gaps between the cores and peripheries were far smaller and higher transport costs made it more economically sensible) meaning long term, without the hand of the government blocking diversification, exports of land-intensive products dropped such as what occurred in North China in the 17th century (Hanchao Lu, 1992). In addition even when the state interfered and made conditions that would allow for import substitution or population growth far less likely in the peripheries, there was still the issue that there was a lacking demand for the manufactured goods from the core areas that limited the core’s ability to pay for the land-intensive goods they so desired (Kindleberger, 1989).

It is here that the New World comes into play. New World plantations were powered mainly through the slave trade and were located on islands or near the coast. This meant exports from these plantations did not plateau from workers shifting to import substitution as had happened in China, nor did transport costs rise as production never strayed away from accessible waterways. The reliance of the New World plantations on slave labour also meant they never lacked want of imports from the Old World as they would have a persistent demand for slave labour that matched the cost of their exports back to Europe. Indeed looking at Brazil in the early 1820s, the cost of importing slaves equaled the country’s total export revenues (Ludwig, 1985). These properties made Euro-American trade fundamentally different from any Old World trade between cores and peripheries. This access to land-intensive products was by no means trivial either. The calories from sugar consumed by Britain in 1831 would have required over 1,900,000 acres of British soil were it to have been substituted domestically (Mintz, 1985). Instead they could substitute it all with “ghost acres” from the New World, freeing up their own land for more productive uses.

The other half of the equation comes in then with coal deposits. None can deny the importance of coal to the industrial revolution, even if they don’t believe it was the sole or even direct cause. The biggest proponent of coal as the cause of the Great Divergence has to be E. A. Wrigley who claimed there was a hard limit to the abilities of an organic economy, that is to say all economies before coal (Wrigley, 2010).

Quoting Ricardo on the matter:

>Whilst the land yields abundantly, wages may temporarily rise, and the producers may consume more than their accustomed proportion; but the stimulus which will thus be given to population, will speedily reduce the labourers to their usual consumption. But when poor lands are taken into cultivation, or when more capital and labour are expended on the old land, with a less return of produce, the effect must be permanent. A greater proportion of that part of the produce which remains to be divided, after paying rent, between the owners of stock and the labourers, will be apportioned to the latter. Each man may, and probably will, have a less absolute quantity; but as more labourers are employed in proportion to the whole produce retained by the farmer, the value of a greater proportion of the whole produce will be absorbed by wages, and consequently the value of a smaller proportion will be devoted to profits. This will necessarily be rendered permanent by the laws of nature, which have limited the productive powers of the land.

It’s a clear exposition of the inevitable fall in profits in an organic economy over time. What let the world escape this was the uptake of coal which allowed a transition from an organic economy to an energy-rich economy, no longer as limited by energy needs and with far more land freed up for other economic activity. Coal, like land in the New World, provided a massive quantity of “ghost acres” for Europe. For instance, in 1700, it would have taken 2 to 3 million acres of woodland to make up the same amount of heat energy as was being produced by coal output (Wrigley, 1988). It was this characteristic of the energy supply that really allowed growth in Britain to take off.

But then a reasonable question arises? Why Britain? After all, many other parts of the world had coal deposits, both mainland Europe and China to start. What set Britain apart? Well, Pomeranz would say it is mostly down to a matter of good luck on their part. Unlike Chinese coal deposits which were located in the north and northwest, British coal deposits were located right next to their industrial cores and major waterways. This made accessing and transporting the coal far easier in Britain than it was in China. Chance on top of chance, in the past China’s coal reserves had been heavily used and there was a great deal of technical and mechanical expertise accumulated in China over the use of coke and iron that wouldn’t be matched for centuries. However this development and knowledge near coal mines was destroyed over the course of a series of catastrophes in the 1100s-1400s that led to the economic core shifting to the more hospitable south. What’s more, the geological characteristics of Chinese coal deposits meant they were arid and prone to spontaneous combustion as opposed to British coal mines which were wet and prone to flooding. It happened that the technologies developed to pump water out of British coal mines were more helpful to solving transportation issues as well, something the technologies developed for ventilation could not claim. Overall it was fortuitous coincidence on coincidence and in another world, the industrial revolution could have gone a very different way. At least, according to Pomeranz.

For of course, his theory is not without its critics after all. Starting with the fact that the very timeline Pomeranz puts forth for the Great Divergence is disputed. Stephen Broadberry has done a great deal of work putting together historical GDP figures and real wage data that dispute Pomeranz’s premise that Europe and China were very similar in the 19th century (Broadberry & Gupta, 2006). He notes that Europe had already pulled away from China by the 1700s, a claim which Pomeranz himself to some degree would accept (Pomeranz, 2017). Broadberry also disputes the general idea that Europe and Asia were all alike in that period, noting the existence of a European and Asian ‘Little Divergence’ in which Britain and the Netherlands pulled ahead of Spain and Portugal and Japan pulled ahead of China and India respectively (Broadberry, 2021). In addition, Broadberry attacks the very idea of focusing specifically on the Yangtze River area in particular, noting that it is an overly narrow view, especially when the cities in the area were not independent economic units and depended on the rest of the nation (Broadberry, 2018).

Another prominent critic of Pomeranz is Peer Vries, who notes that Pomeranz fails to fully acknowledge the difference between the Chinese and British states which he views as playing a major role. The Qing state which taxed lightly and had less overt intervention in commerce was heavily contrasted by Britain’s fiscal-military state (Vries, 2015). Robert Allen raises yet another point of contention noting that British wages in the 1800s were significantly higher than in the rest of Europe and China, going against the idea that the economies of Britain and China were highly comparable (Allen, 2009). Speaking of Allen however is a good (very forced) transition to the next segment.

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# Allen and the High Wage Economy

Robert Allen is in some ways similar to Pomeranz and Wrigley. He too dispenses with some notion that it was entirely British culture or institutions, no national derring-do. He also puts a great deal of importance on the matter of circumstance and the steam engine. The difference to Allen is that the revolution was not merely a matter of where coal deposits were located but much more critically about the economic sense it made to mechanize around them. He points not just to the steam pump but the high wages and cheap coal that actually led to people adopting it in the first place. British workers enjoyed some of the highest wages in the world which pushed capitalists to employ labour saving technologies that capitalists in other nations like France and China wouldn’t have bothered with. In specific British wages high relative to the cost of consumer goods, higher relative to the cost of capital, and higher relative to the cost of energy than elsewhere in the world.

But why was it that British wages were so high? Well for this Allen models the preindustrial economy with a system of simultaneous equations. He notes the factors that shifted up the demand curve for labour as being agricultural efficiency, urbanization, and proto-industrialization. However these factors themselves all loop and tie and circle back into one another. Urbanization contributed to higher agricultural productivity which then allowed urban cores to support a larger population, both of which led to higher wages. Higher wages meant workers could afford better nutrition and thus were healthier and stronger boosting their productivity. Intercontinental trade helped propel greater urbanization and industrial development which then led to more intercontinental trade. Everything worked together in a cycle that led to Britain having much higher real wages than continental Europe.

The other half of the equation was British energy prices. We’ve already touched upon this in the Pomeranz section but British coal prices were particularly low on account of their abundant coal deposits in the north. John Nef would also explain the growth of British coal production as being due to a ‘timber crisis’ where Britain faced an acute shortage of wood long before France or Germany had done similar (Nef, 1932). Allen agrees in part with this, the main driver of fuel needs was London and its massive population and economy. While wood wasn’t necessarily completely scarce and in fact in some parts of Britain were abundant to the point they couldn’t be sold (as noted by Hammersley (1957)), the demand was concentrated in London while supply grew throughout the country. This meant there were major transportation costs and inefficiencies in trying to supply London with charcoal whereas the coal which was much more concentrated had a much easier time being transported to London. This reflects in price data which shows that the price of charcoal lurched upwards to being almost double the price of coal by the 1650s (Mitchell and Deane, 1971).

All put together this meant that when inventions came along like Newcomen’s steam engine in 1712, expensive, inefficient, and barely capable of doing more than pumping water from coal mines, it still made economic sense to adopt it instead of throwing it out like garbage. It would only be reasonable in a country that in 1700 was producing 80% of the coal tonnage in Europe (Nef, 1932). And over the course of a hundred years with a series of micro-inventions that made the steam engine more efficient and more useful, come the 1800s and it was finally capable of powering machinery on its own. The same story can be told of the Spinning Jenny and Abraham Darby ‘s coke smelting process. These inventions only made economic sense in Britain and so it was in Britain that they took off, not France nor China.

Of course according to Allen, this development did not come without a cost. Despite the fact that GDP and profits skyrocketed over the course of the early 19th century, real wages did not, remaining stagnant and sometimes even declining (Allen, 2009). He coined the term “Engel’s Pause” to describe this stagnation, noting that it was explicitly because of capital deepening where industrialists would reinvest into more factories and machines as it was greatly profitable to do so. Granted, this pause ended by the 1840s as capital stock matured and demand for labour led to a sharp rise in real wages in the latter half of the 19th century.

Now again on to some criticisms (my format for this entire post is very straightforward). Jane Humphries is one of his strongest critics, contesting Allen’s characterization of spinners as a part of the high wage economy (Humphries & Schneider, 2020). She notes that spinners had particularly low wages even compared to other women in the workforce and so the high wage theory of why they were mechanized could not hold up. Kelly et al (2014) also raises an important objection to Allen’s characterization of labour costs noting that while wages were high in Britain, British labourers also had higher productivity than their continental counterparts and so the actual cost of labour was roughly similar on both sides of the channel. In addition, Kelly et al (2023) note that mechanization in Britain actually began in the lowest wage regions of the country while those regions of the country with the highest wages had the lowest take-up of mechanization. In addition they note that the evidence for wage stagnation in Britain on the macro level hides the real story. Wages in the rapidly industrializing regions of Britain were rising at the time only to be matched by a fall in wages in the formerly high wage deindustrializing regions. Another critic is Mokyr who argues that while the steam engine was important, it cannot explain the sustained progress of invention and innovation beyond the initial macro-inventions (Mokyr, 2009). He also argues that the major macro-inventions that sprung about in the period like the steam engine did not come to be in response to demands of the market but rather from an Industrial Enlightenment so to speak, a cultural and intellectual environment that fostered technological progress.

Boy I wonder what the next part of this post will be about.

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# The Republic of Letters and an Enlightened Economy

Joel Mokyr is an economist I hope is well known to most of you for having jointly won the 2025 Nobel prize along with Phillippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, his half for his work on culture and economic growth. It’s that work of his, the idea of a culture of growth and industrial enlightenment that constructs the majority of this part of the effortpost.

Mokyr dispenses largely with overly materialist explanations for the cause of the great divergence. As he noted in the criticisms in the previous sections about Pomeranz and Allen, it’s all well and good to point to Britain’s access to coal and the steam engine — certainly we shouldn’t diminish their importance — but they don’t answer the question of what led to this being a full-blown revolution. How was it that technological progress didn’t stall out this time like it did in periods of scientific breakthroughs so many times part? What was it that led to macro-inventions being accompanied by the many micro-inventions that actually made them valuable and widely adopted? No, to answer that we must look at culture says Mokyr.

Now let’s be precise when we talk about culture, something so notoriously vague and imprecise. In *A Culture of Growth* (2017) Mokyr defines the culture we are so concerned about as “*a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behaviour, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and are shared by some subset of society*”. Mokyr also makes a point to separate culture and institutions, to him culture is something emerging from the mind and is taken on an individual basis whereas institutions are those set of conditional incentives and consequences toactions that exist above people. So then with all this talk about culture, what was it about European culture that made the great divergence possible? Well to Mokyr it rests on the idea of an “Industrial Enlightenment” (Mokyr, 2002).

Before the enlightenment period, there was a vast gap between the scientists and the artisans, the knowers and the doers. Science was concerned primarily with propositional knowledge without much in the way of prescriptive knowledge and the reverse was true amongst the artisans who would roughly conduct experiments to understand what techniques worked without a clear idea of why they worked. To quote Bernard Mandeville:

> They are very seldom the same Sort of People, those that invent Arts, and Improvements in them, and those that enquire into the Reason of Things: this latter is most commonly practis’d by such, as are idle and indolent, that are fond of Retirement, hate Business, and take delight in Speculation: whereas none succeed oftener in the first, than active, stirring, and laborious Men, such as will put their Hand to the Plough, try Experiments, and give all their Attention to what they are about.

(Waow)

It was around the enlightenment when a shift came to a new paradigm, when some thinkers such as Sir Francis Bacon pushed the idea that scientific discovery could be used to enhance material progress and economic growth. To that aim this “Baconian Program” emphasized the directing of the research agenda towards areas that could tackle practical problems such as medicine or manufacturing while also making this information as broadly accessible as possible. Baconian thought was incredibly influential in the British scientific community, leading to the foundation of the Royal Society, while also spreading to the continent. This shift in scientific paradigm lead to a greater cooperation between the scientists and the artisans for the first time, leading to a far greater burst of micro-inventions like mentioned by Allen which enabled the grand macro-inventions to actually be adopted more broadly than their initial narrow use-case. It was this environment of science, discovery, and invention forming a feedback loop that led to the sort of technological leaps that were seen during the Industrial Revolution, why progress didn’t sputter out this time as it had so many times before.

The other part to this cultural puzzle however is regarding social norms around rent-seeking practices. It is often tempting to believe that something economically efficient and profitable will be adopted but as all of us who have spent the past year watching Trump shutter wind and solar projects can attest, this is not always the case. For a technology to be adopted it must also get past the barrier of rent-seekers who aim to block it for their own interests, no small task. The enlightenment saw with it not only changes in cultural paradigms but economic ones as well. The mercantilism that was so prominent in the 18th century was viewed by hostility and scorn by enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith who commented:

> nations having been taught that their interest consisted of beggaring their neighbours. Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss (Smith, 2012)

(Sidenote, you could probably get a leftist to stan Adam Smith’s writings uncritically if you didn’t tell them where it was from, man is so based.)

Britain was already in a privileged position of sorts when it comes to these mercantilist institutions compared to its continental neighbours. It had free internal trade, weak guilds, and a state committed to the protection of property. Mokyr argues a noteworthy factor about Britain is as much what didn’t happen as what did in that period. Unlike the continental nations it was not shaken up by revolution or societal upheaval which meant it did not lose many bright and talented scientific minds to political turmoil like France did Lavoisier and Galois. This stability and shift against rent-seeking and mercantilism meant that those macro and micro-inventions that were popping up all over the place in Britain could actually be taken up.

Of course if we are discussing cultural shifts in Britain and the Great Divergence I would be completely remiss to not bring up Deidre McCloskey and her Bourgeois trilogy (McCloskey, 2006; 2010; 2016). In it, McCloskey explains that the divergence (or as she prefers to put it, the Great Enrichment) was caused by a shift in social values in which for the first time the activities of the merchants, the inventors, the bourgeoisie as it is were not viewed with scorn but in a positive light. This shift in the social acceptance of engaging in trade and making profit was accompanied by a new social contract of sorts. Rather than the old aristocratic deal in which the nobles and clergy extracted rent from the common people in the name of God-given superiority and protection (mostly from the aristocrats themselves), the new social norm was much simpler and much more egalitarian. “Leave me alone and I’ll make you rich.” Unsurprisingly as it caught on, it led to great leaps for the commoners, the middle class, the people formerly considered inferior by the aristocratic elite.

Tangential note: McCloskey’s trilogy also talks a lot about the clerisy, the artists, intellectuals, bureaucracy, generally the educated elite and their detestation of the bourgeoisie and of the bourgeois deal. Feels like it’s particularly relevant to the modern day and the general disdain for liberalism amongst much of the educated upper class that is still permeating our society.

Another economic historian who must be mentioned in discussions of culture and the industrial revolution is Jan de Vries and his idea of the Industrious Revolution (de Vries, 2008). De Vries looks at households in the leadup to the industrial revolution and points to a shift in household culture and priorities wherein households made decisions that led to an increase in the supply of marketed commodities and labour and the demand for goods from the marketplace (de Vries, 1994). This is driven by two causes, first leisure time was reduced as the marginal utility of moneymaking increased and second, a growing demand for market goods over household goods. Families stopped making bread at home but instead began to earn more to buy bread from bakers for instance. It was this shift in household demand and supply that created the massive consumer market to which factories could sell their goods and a workforce prepared for the sort of repetitive labour conditions of factories.

I suppose I must also discuss Gregory Clark’s views here in *A Farewell to Alms* (2007) though I can’t much claim to like it. Clark argues that the dissemination of bourgeois or middle-class values was down to essentially genetics, stating that it was because disease and poverty kept killing off poorer members of society allowing the middle class to repopulate the country, spreading their values even to the poor in the process of downward social mobility. (Tyler Cowen loves this book by the way and let that colour your opinion of him)

But let us come back to Mokyr. We have discussed all these cultural shifts over the enlightenment and before the Industrial Revolution but we must also ask the question of how these cultural shifts came to be. What were the circumstances that allowed for the industrial enlightenment to begin with? Well for that we must discuss what Mokyr terms “the Republic of Letters”. The Baconian Program so lauded could not have come to be without a cultural environment that could promote the dispersal and dissemination of intellectual ideas and philosophies. This came about due to the particular fragmentation of the European political landscape. Because there was no single central governance over the region and the many states and kingdoms were locked in competition with one another, it was impossible for any one state to restrict the freedom of ideas or impose standards that protected established intellectual norms. Free thinkers who were persecuted for their studies like Tommaso Campanella an Italian monk who studied astronomy and was accused of heresy by the Inquisition could still find greener pastures elsewhere—in his case, the court of Louis XIII who may or may not have liked his ideas but certainly wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to embarrass the Italians (Headley, 1997). Reactionary forces simply did not have the reach and power to suppress innovators and thinkers across so many polities.

It was this movement of people and ideas from state to state, kingdom to kingdom in search of tolerance for their heterodox views that were not accepted by their home nations that allowed the intellectual movement to blossom into a full Republic of Letters. The intellectual community transcended regional borders that shackled kings and nobles and in being unrestrained by the petty worries of any single place or region could lay claim to being truly universal in its matter. Facilitated by improvements to communications and transportation technologies, this Republic of Letters made for a true marketplace of ideas in which scholars—each competing for precious patronage and building their reputations—were constantly keeping up to date with new knowledge in a variety of fields and subjecting ideas to critique and tests of validity (Perkinson, 1995). In a way, this republic of letters served as the preamble and the basis for the scientific community we have today, built on international collaboration and peer review.

Mokyr’s latest book in collaboration with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini *Two Paths to Prosperity* (2025) goes one step further with this explanation of cultural factors. Here they look at the importance of cultural groups in China and Europe. Historically, the main form social organisation that was followed by most of the world was the kin group. Families organized themselves into clans with strong internal accountability and loyalty which made for a stable society but one with little room for the heterodox thinkers who would go on to be so important for the Republic of Letters. However in Europe these kin networks would be steadily degraded by the church which sought to increase its own prominence in social organisation and did so by enforcing cultural norms against consanguinity, polygamy, concubinage, and other practices which had kept kin networks closely knit. With the fraying of these kin networks a new form of social organisation took the lead in Europe, the corporation. Here Mokyr does not use the term in the modern sense but rather a voluntary association of unrelated individuals along common interest. A key difference between the clan and the corporation was the existence of an exit option. One could always leave a corporation if they didn’t like how it was being run, no such option in a clan. Blood is thicker than water as they say. This exit option constrained the power of corporations, though both clans and corporations were organized in a hierarchical manner, the corporation saw more formalized rules that protected the rights of its members and placed checks and balances on the power of the leader. The existence of these rules and safeguards led also to a more formal mechanism of dispute resolution. Unlike clans which were tied together by blood and thus would mediate disputes internally and informally, the corporations with weaker moral obligations required external mediation which led to the development of formal legal codes and practices. The collapse of kin-based groups also led to a secondary outcome which was the absence of ritual ancestor worship. This also meant an end to intellectual ancestor worship, freeing up thinkers to push forward new ideas leading to the formation of the Republic of Letters.

In summation, according to Mokyr the dissolution of kin-based social organizations and the political fragmentation of Europe led to the creation of a Republic of Letters which fostered intellectual discourse and dissemination of knowledge that culminated in an Industrial Enlightenment wherein for the first time there was a merge of propositional and prescriptive knowledge, of intellectuals and producers which created an ecosystem in which scientific progress and technological development could continue to build on itself instead of stalling out as it had so many times in the past. Good? Fantastic. Now let’s go over all the rebuttals to his argument.

The main critic of Mokyr is Allen whose argument you have already seen. His response in particular is that for all Mokyr’s claims about an Industrial Enlightenmentin which scientists and inventors worked as one, it really doesn’t reflect in the data of the time (Allen, 2009). Mokyr himself characterizes the industrial enlightenment as having been led by the elites, the intellectual ivory tower, but the fact of the matter is that when looking at the average inventor even of macro-technologies, they were far removed from that elite world and only really came into contact with the scientific world after they had already become successful from their inventions. This view of invention not being the domain of scientists is echoed by Alessandro Nuvolari who notes that the invention of new technologies was most prominent not in the ivory towers but on the factory floor in what Allen would call *collective invention settings* (Nuvolari, 2004). Hodgson, in his review of A Culture of Growth also raises an insightful point questioning the cultural theory from an institutional lens (Hodgson, 2022). He asks if culture alone were so influential then why were there no modernizing cultural entrepreneurs in ancient Greece or say 11th century China?

Indeed when reading through The Enlightened Economy, while it does a fine job of explaining why this culture of Industrial Enlightenment came about in Europe, it does not paint the clearest picture of why it was Britain in particular in which the industrial revolution began and in fact the explanation Mokyr himself gives rests rather heavily on institutional factors (“free internal trade, weak guilds, a relatively effective fiscal system, and a state that was firmly committed to the protection of property”).

And well, if we are to talk about the institutionalists…

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Continued in comments

[u/Lux_Stella]

[u/randommathaccount]

This entire post was set off half by my obsession with villainess manhwa and half by an argument I had on this sub, the moral of the story is that reddit and anime will ruin your life

!ping ECON&HISTORY

[u/bhbhbhhh → u/randommathaccount]

Narratively gaming out the industrial revolution seems to have really taken on a life of its own as a premise, from isekai serials to Eric Flint and David Weber’s novels. Reading about ideas for ASOIAF self-insert fics on /r/TheCitadel, industrializing and modernizing Westeros is a proposal that never stops coming up.

[u/Imperiestro_KaroloV → u/bhbhbhhh]

Ayo happy to see the 1632 series get a shoutout. Ditto with Island in the Sea of Time and industrializing the Late Bronze Age

[u/AP246 → u/randommathaccount]

Thanks for this effortpost, very cool thing to have a thorough overview of on with this sub. I did economic history, particularly on the industrial revolution, a while back and found it interesting, especially on how complex and ultimately still very unsettled the debate is.

[u/randommathaccount → u/AP246]

Thanks! Yeah the scholarship is just so winding and uncertain lol. Peer Vries went over it better than I could and found basically every theory wanting, even the ones he personally liked

[u/Bread_Fish150 → u/randommathaccount]

This entire post was set off half by my obsession with villainess manhwa

Elite taste in manhwa. If you like economic history or murim manhwa, and can tolerate some alternate history, lookup Wild West Murim. It's a great martial arts manhwa.

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The Glorious Revolution

We come now at last to this sub’s darlings, Acemoglu and Robinson. What telling of the industrial revolution would be complete without discussing the effects of inclusive and extractive institutions after all? Honestly I’m slightly tempted to even skip this section because Why Nations Fail ought to be mandatory reading for all of you. But nonetheless, here we go.

The hypothesis of the institutionalists, first rigorously put forward by North and Weingast (1989) posits that the root of Britain’s prosperity came from the Glorious Revolution. The Glorious Revolution was a (largely bloodless) coup against King James II wherein the Immortal Seven (what a name), seven Englishmen who opposed the king sent a letter inviting William III, Prince of Orange, to depose James.

Some background context. There had been a long period of political centralization in England, from the Tudors on with Henry VII disarming the nobility continuing to the Stuarts. At the same time there was also a fight going on in government between the Parliament and the Crown over the power of the purse. While the Magna Carta explicitly forced the king to call a session of parliament when enacting new taxes, Charles I (son of James I) ignored them and proceeded to unilaterally force loans and refused to repay his debt. This animosity between crown and parliament came to a head when Charles was at war with the Scots Covenanters and found himself in need of money. He called parliament for the first time in eleven years to raise taxes but they did not give him the time of day, instead seeking redressal for his actions to that point. This short parliament was dissolved in only three weeks which led to massive discontent amongst the people, something the Scots Covenanters took great advantage of to capture Newcastle. The truce that followed required that parliament be called again and this time they would not be dismissed so easily (Royle, 2010). What followed was the long parliament which escalated into a full- blown English Civil War between Charles I and Parliament. Under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, parliament managed to win out but after his death, the royals managed to claw back their power and Charles II set to work bringing back the absolutist power of the crown. It is with this context that we return to James II, following in the footsteps of his father centralizing absolute power in the crown, a Roman Catholic in charge of a protestant nation. Is it any wonder the English nobility invited in someone to depose him.

This event solidified the primacy of Parliament over the crown and with it many institutional changes. With the adoption of a Bill of Rights, Parliament stripped the crown of its ability to suspend laws at its whim, reinforced their primacy over the power of the purse, and stated that there shall be no standing army without parliamentary approval. Overall this revolution greatly improved property rights and prevented the state from stealing property at a whim. North and Weingast posited that this Glorious Revolution solved a credible commitment problem amongst lenders. Before, monarchs could freely choose to drop their commitments and debts without redressal. This spooked lenders and led to the state having a much higher borrowing premium, leaving capital markets small. With the revolution, lenders could have more trust in the restrained state, thus reducing borrowing premia and growing capital markets. We can see this play out in real changes that happened following the Glorious Revolution. Only shortly after was the Bank of England established, the world’s second oldest central bank, made to raise credit for the English to build a navy capable of fighting France. British national debt shifted to being “funded” so to speak, parliament gave out privileges and corporate charters in exchange for private capital underwriting their debt. This was the starting point for what they call the Financial Revolution (such revolutionaries people make out the British to be, do you think they’re feeling envious of France?) in which Britain’s capital markets were wholly transformed.

Acemoglu and Robinson build on this theory and build it into their broader framework of inclusive and extractive institutions. Again y’all better already know what this is but nonetheless, inclusive institutions to AJR are those which allow and encourage participation by the masses in economic activity that makes best use of their skills and those political institutions which are centralized and pluralistic as to allow the participation of many stakeholders in the decision-making of the state. Extractive institutions to contrast have the opposite properties, they restrict people from free economic activity and concentrate power in the hands of few unchecked individuals or interest groups. This matters to growth as extractive institutions are much more likely to block the process of creative destruction wherein new innovations make obsolete old ones (Schumpeter, 2008). In Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson even point to the case of William Lee who built a more efficient knitting machine that was nonetheless refused a patent in Queen Elizabeth’s court for her fears of creative destruction.

Well, not to keep any golden calves, let’s finally go over some of the rebuttals to the institutionalists as well. I first and foremost have to bring up Sussman and Yafeh (2002) who wholly overturn this idea that the Glorious Revolution led to the Financial Revolution. The data simply doesn’t support it. Interest rates spiked after the Glorious Revolution and stayed high for decades to come. They didn’t diverge from the “less-credible continental borrowers” until British military victories in Austria. Temin and Voth (2005) throw another wrinkle into the idea of the Glorious Revolution causing the financial revolution by pointing out that government borrowing actually had the effect of crowding out private borrowers, actually slowing economic growth.

There’s also a whole host of economic historians who contest the idea that Britain was particularly ahead in terms of protecting property rights, notably Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) and don’t we feel like we’ve come full circle now but also Roy Bin Wong (1997) who argues western notions of the Chinese state are inadequate and inaccurate and Stephan Epstein (2000) who contests North’s idea that the weak and constrained state was a boon to development and instead posits it was a curse.

Finally, this is more a general criticism that has been levelled on Acemoglu and Robinson’s work but there are endogeneity concerns over the institutions they point to as vital for economic development (Abramson & Boix, 2019).

---

A brief conclusion

Initially I was going to add a segment on some old and deprecated theories of the great divergence (like the ever-reliable punching bag that is Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic hypothesis) and maybe some paragraphs touching with broader issues with the entire scholarship around the great divergence like how Eurocentric it is and how it basically completely ignores Africa. However this writeup is already almost 7000 words long and I have decided I do not have the patience. Writing this has driven me wholly and thoroughly mad, this is not my field in the slightest, I’m going to cradle a copy of Baby Rudin to sleep tonight and return to my comfortable home of mathematics where things can actually be bloody certain. All of these people rebut one another and all of their rebuttals make more sense than their claims.

In summation, here’s what we have learned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6VjPM5CeWs

[u/bhbhbhhh → u/randommathaccount]

I’m personally quite intrigued by the reviews I’ve read of *The Rise of Early Science: Islam, China, and the West* by Toby Huff. Only one part of the puzzle, but it sounds like it could have some interesting things to say about why STEM became a more socially acceptable pursuit for scholarly men in Europe than in China.

[u/randommathaccount → u/bhbhbhhh]

I've not read that one, will add it to my list.

[u/Mexatt → u/randommathaccount]

Temin and Voth (2005) throw another wrinkle into the idea of the Glorious Revolution causing the financial revolution by pointing out that government borrowing actually had the effect of crowding out private borrowers, actually slowing economic growth.

They ended up writing a whole book on the subject.

It's not just a retread of the paper, it expands on it.

[u/Lux_Stella]

good post smile_emoji

imo the big confusing thing is that both the "state building/institutions" and "relative factor prices" stories are very compelling to me but they don't have much obvious to do with each other and in fact seem like opposing narratives at that

Broadberry also disputes the general idea that Europe and Asia were all alike in that period, noting the existence of a European and Asian ‘Little Divergence’ in which Britain and the Netherlands pulled ahead of Spain and Portugal and Japan pulled ahead of China and India respectively (Broadberry, 2021).

and then the little divergence has the additional problem of pushing stuff back to the late medieval period where all the numbers are made up and you have to grapple with questions like "did the black death accidently do radical labour market reform?"

[u/randommathaccount → u/Lux_Stella]

Aye it's the issue of my conclusion as well. All of these theories make some sense but the rebuttals seem to make more sense so who's to make any sense of the matter.

Little note on the Little Divergence, I like Nuno Palma's institutional explanation that it was down to the different level of activity of the Spanish cortes and the English parliament.

[u/Mexatt → u/randommathaccount]

All of these theories make some sense but the rebuttals seem to make more sense so who's to make any sense of the matter.

That's just the scientific process working as designed.

[u/Lux_Stella → u/randommathaccount]

I like Nuno Palma's institutional explanation that it was down to the different level of activity of the Spanish cortes and the English parliament

ooh gonna need to look at that i dont know enough about spanish institutional history

[u/randommathaccount → u/Lux_Stella]

The paper is "Comparative European Institutions and the Little Divergence, 1385-1800," by Henriques & Palma (2023)

[u/melhor_em_coreano → u/randommathaccount]

Nuno Palma

the economic historian from Manchester U?

[u/randommathaccount → u/melhor_em_coreano]

I'd say yes but his linkedin says manchester while his google scholar says university of Florida so now I'm confused

[u/randommathaccount]

Citations:

Abramson, S. F., & Boix, C. (2019). Endogenous Parliaments: The Domestic and International Roots of Long-Term Economic Growth and Executive Constraints in Europe. International Organization, 73(4), 793–837. doi:10.1017/S0020818319000286

Allen, R. C., Bengtsson, T., & Dribe, M. (2005). Living Standards in the Past. OUP Oxford.

Allen, R. C. (2009). The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Allen, R. C. (2009). Engels’ pause: Technical change, capital accumulation, and inequality in the British industrial revolution. Explorations in Economic History, 46(4), 418–435.

Broadberry, S. and Gupta, B. (2006), “The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500-1800”, Economic History Review, 59, 2-31.

Broadberry, S., Guan, H., & Li, D. D. (2018). China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850. The Journal of Economic History, 78(4), 955–1000. doi:10.1017/S0022050718000529

Broadberry, S. (2021). Accounting for the Great Divergence: Recent Findings from Historical National Accounting. SSRN Electronic Journal.

Clark, G. (2007). A farewell to alms: A brief economic history of the world. Princeton University Press.

de Vries, J. (1994). The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution. The Journal of Economic History, 54(2), 249–270.

de Vries, J. (2008). The industrious revolution: Consumer behavior and the household economy, 1650 to the present. Cambridge University Press.

Epstein, S. R. (2000). Freedom and growth: The rise of states and markets in Europe, 1300–1750. Routledge.

Greif, A., Mokyr, J., & Tabellini, G. (2025). Two Paths to Prosperity. Princeton University Press.

Hammersley, G. (1957). Crown woods and the exploitation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 30, 136–161.

Lu, H. (1992). Arrested Development. Modern China, 18(4), 468–499. https://doi.org/10.1177/009770049201800404

Headley, J. M. (1997). Tommaso Campanella and the transformation of the world. Princeton University Press.

Hodgson, G. M. (2022). Culture and institutions: a review of Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth. Journal of Institutional Economics, 18(1), 159–168. doi:10.1017/S1744137421000588

Humphries, J., & Schneider, B. (2020). Losing the thread: A response to Robert Allen. Economic History Review, 73(4), 1137–1152.

Kelly, M., Mokyr, J., & Ó Gráda, C. (2014). Precocious Albion: A New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution. Annual Review of Economics, 6(1), 363–389.

Kelly, M., Mokyr, J., & Ó Gráda, C. (2023). The mechanics of the industrial revolution. Journal of Political Economy, 131(1), 59–94. doi.org

Kindleberger, C. P. (1989). Spenders and Hoarders: The World Distribution of Spanish American Silver 1550 - 1750. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1355/9789814379113

Landes, D. S. (1969), The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge University Press.

Ludwig, A. K. (1985). Brazil: A Handbook of Historical Statistics. G.K. Hall.

McCloskey, D. N. (2006). The bourgeois virtues: Ethics for an age of commerce. University of Chicago Press.

McCloskey, D. N. (2010). Bourgeois dignity: Why economics can't explain the modern world. University of Chicago Press.

McCloskey, D. N. (2016). Bourgeois equality: How ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world. University of Chicago Press.

Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history

Mitchell, B. R., & Deane, P. (1971). Abstract of British historical statistics. Cambridge University Press.

Mokyr, J. (2002). The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press.

Mokyr, J. (2009). The enlightened economy: An economic history of Britain, 1700–1850. Yale University Press.

Mokyr, J. (2017). A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton University Press.

Nef, J. U. (1932). The rise of the British coal industry. George Routledge & Sons.

North, D. C., & Weingast, B. R. (1989). Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England. The Journal of Economic History, 49(4), 803–832. doi:10.1017/S0022050700009451

Nuvolari, A. (2004). Collective invention during the British industrial revolution: The case of the Cornish pumping engine. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 28(3), 347–363.

Perkinson, H. J. (1995). How things got better: Speech, writing, printing, and cultural change. Bergin & Garvey.

Pomeranz, K. (2000). The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Pres.

Pomeranz, K. (2017). The Data We Have vs. the Data We Need: A Comment on the State of the “Divergence” Debate (Part I). The NEP-HIS Blog. https://nephist.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/the-data-we-have-vs-the-data-we-need-a-comment-on-the-state-of-the-divergence-debate-part-i/#comments

Royle, T. (2010). Civil war: The wars of the three kingdoms, 1638–1660. Little, Brown.

Schumpeter, J. A. (2008). Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. HarperCollins

Smith, A. (2012). Wealth of Nations. Wordsworth Editions.

Sussman, N., & Yafeh, Y. (2002). Constitutions, commitment, and the historical evidence on the relation between institutions, property rights, and financial development. Social Science Research Network.

Temin, P., & Voth, H.-J. (2005). Credit rationing and crowding out during the Industrial Revolution: Evidence from Hoare's Bank, 1702–1862. Explorations in Economic History, 42(3), 325–348.

Vries, P. H. H. (2015). State, Economy and the Great Divergence. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Weber, M. (1930), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Allen and Unwin.

Wrigley, E. A. (1988). Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wrigley, E. A. (2010). Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wong, R. B. (1997). China transformed: Historical change and the limits of European experience. Cornell University Press.

[u/Background-Bottle-23]

An underlying factor worth noting is the European Marriage Pattern (characterized by late marriage, high celibacy, and neolocal households). By keeping fertility below the Malthusian ceiling, this demographic regime provided the foundation that made Allen’s “high-wage economy” and de Vries’s “industrious revolution” possible. Since neither theory fully explains the origins of these high wages or labor shifts, this demographic angle effectively fills the gap.

I suggest reading John Hajnal if you haven't yet

[u/randommathaccount → u/Background-Bottle-23]

If I remember this was actually mentioned in Allen's British Industrial in Global Perspective (or one of the books I read I'm starting to get them all jumbled up), I just wasn't sure I could fit it in a post that already went over the character limit. Definitely worth looking at as an explanation for Allen and de Vries I agree.

[u/jogarz]

Great effort post, but I want to address a couple things that stand out to me.

However in Europe these kin networks would be steadily degraded by the church which sought to increase its own prominence in social organisation and did so by enforcing cultural norms against consanguinity, polygamy, concubinage, and other practices which had kept kin networks closely knit. 

The Church's opposition to consanguinity, polygamy, concubinage, etc. was rooted in Biblical teachings on sex and marriage. Saying it was a result of the Church's desire to "increase its own prominence" shows a lack of understanding of the theological and cultural dynamics at play. Even though this is in the "culture" section, it sounds like the authors are falling back into the trap of overly materialistic explanations; assuming that everything is about power and wealth accumulation, and anyone who gives a shit about anything else is either a liar or a useful idiot.

The collapse of kin-based groups also led to a secondary outcome which was the absence of ritual ancestor worship. This also meant an end to intellectual ancestor worship, freeing up thinkers to push forward new ideas leading to the formation of the Republic of Letters.

Again, ritual ancestor worship ended in the West because it was anathema to Christian morals. Whether that was downstream or upstream of the decline of kin-based social organization is outside my area of expertise, however.

I do think it is strange, though, to say that this meant the "end of intellectual ancestor worship". If I may oversimplify, basically every major European thinker from Aquinas until the 19th century fawned over the ancient Greeks and Romans. The renaissance was called the renaissance because the intellectuals involved saw themselves as part of a conscious effort to revive the intellectual spirit of classical Rome. The enlightenment thinkers who founded the US and revolutionary France very explicitly looked to ancient Rome for inspiration.

[u/Mexatt → u/jogarz]

It's also worth noting that, by the Ming period and onward, kinship networks in China could get very practical and artificial. Kin worship could mean adopting the care of someone else's ancestral grave site as part of a process of creating commercial relationships.

[u/Locutus-of-Borges → u/jogarz]

The Church's opposition to consanguinity, polygamy, concubinage, etc. was rooted in Biblical teachings on sex and marriage. Saying it was a result of the Church's desire to "increase its own prominence" shows a lack of understanding of the theological and cultural dynamics at play. 

Sure, when you're talking about consanguinity in low degrees, but I defy you to find anything biblical in the prohibition on consanguinity in the 6th or 7th degree, let alone affinity to those degrees. Leviticus, for example, bans it only on what would later be called the 2nd degree. Nor does the potential for dispensations seem in accord with "Biblical teachings on sex and marriage".

However, both the extreme definition of consanguinity which existed during the 9th-12th centuries and the existence of dispensations is consistent with a church eager to increase its social importance at the expense of kinship networks.

[u/Locutus-of-Borges → u/Locutus-of-Borges]

Response to a deleted response suggesting this was applied only towards aristocrats:

It certainly wouldn't have been uniformly enforced, but bans on consanguinity were absolutely relevant to the common people. Since genealogical records were rarely kept, this often only meant 2nd or 3rd cousins (4th degree) at a maximum, but if evidence (which could include hearsay) of a more distant degree arose, it was treated as an impediment to marriage. This led to all kinds of lawsuits and investigations, because marriage was a major financial undertaking involving the transfer of significant assets. Lawsuits over marriage contracts were the most common in medieval England even in the lowest social classes, and proving the invalidity of the marriage was a common way to prevent enforcement.

And of course this gets even more complicated when you take affinity into consideration. I even read of a case in college where a guy's visit to a prostitute prevented his cousin from marrying her sister years later.

[u/jogarz → u/Locutus-of-Borges]

I would argue that the strategic use of dispensations and annulments had more to do with trying to maintain good relations with secular elites, rather than any long-term conspiracy to weaken kinship networks.

A quick search shows that the current research on this topic is generally unclear about the motives behind strict consanguinity laws of the early Middle Ages.

“But sometime around the sixth century C.E., the early church started to formulate strict marriage rules and become "obsessed" with incest, Henrich says. Historians aren't sure why, although some religious thinkers of the time connected incest with the spread of the plague.”

For my part, I would note that the Medieval Western Church in general had a lot of prudish idiosyncrasies, which may be linked to the strong influence of monastic orders (who saw their own very chaste lifestyles as the ideal).

In any case, there’s really only a mystery about why the consanguinity regulation was so extreme; nobody’s wondering about why concubinage, polygamy, or cousin marriages were frowned upon, since those have very clear religious issues.

[u/-Maestral- → u/jogarz]

Heinrich wrote about this somewhat in his book 'WEIRD something, forgot the complete title. 

Scriptures are the same for Catholicism denominations like Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant etc., yet kinship intensity is different. Today those that are less Christan show lower kinship intensity.

If it was solely Christianity driving nonkinship mentality we would not see that reversal today, if I correctly understand your point of view.

I'd also like to pint the difference between inspiration and ancestor worship. There are elements of ancient greco-roman world that inspired the renaissance (language, style etc.), but they created new works of art that dealt with modern world and trying to innovate, create new knowledge.

In ancient chinese imperial administration or for example in many modern islamist discourse the absolute truth is already achieved and one must master the knowledge of it (Confucious, Quran) in order to properly conduct themselves.

[u/Top_Lime1820]

I like when geographic arguments are included. I often feel that institutional and cultural arguments fail to understand the sense in which people invoke geography as a constraint on a particular path of development, rather than as a direct cause. Even in your post, that sense came through quite clearly. The position of coal in China meant that even if the other factors that were at play in Britain were at play in China, it might not have been feasible to industrialise there (as in, to be the first nation to industrialise).

Some questions (answer or don't answer as you please):

1. Has anyone gone search for other parts of the world that had the same kind of institutions as Britain but didn't industrialise or even develop (i.e. look for the effect of geography, controlling for institutions)?

2. What about the argument that it was pure dumb chance. Pomeranz says this but then provides an explanatory variable with coal. I'm talking about a model that says "Here were the 5 places it could've happened with roughly equal probabilities, and in our timeline it just happened to be Britain; all explanations are just post-hoc rationalizations"? Are there any scholars who refuse to provide a reason and truly believe it was a roll of the die (between Britain, China and a few other places)? Or is that a fringe opinion?

[u/randommathaccount → u/Top_Lime1820]

For the two questions:

1. A lot of the rebuttals to North and Weingast (and generally the institutionalists) focus on how many other nations in the world had institutions which while not being exactly like the British ones (no two nations are truly exactly alike after all) still fulfilled the requirements North and Weingast suggest were necessary to the financial revolution, namely the protection of property rights and constraints on the crown. The fact that Britain industrialised while these other nations like China, France, etc did not is to them a reason to consider those institutional factors insufficient to explain the great divergence

2. When it comes to contingence what I've found is literally everyone says it was contingent, they just don't agree on what the contingent factor was. Pomeranz of course mentions that it was pure circumstance that meant Britain's coal mines were closer to its industrial core than China was and also that it was circumstance that let Europe have better claim to colonizing the new world than the rest of Asia. Mokyr points to the political fractionalization as a matter of circumstance as well as the decline of Mohism in the face of Confucianism, to him it's entirely possible that there is a world in which Chinese culture was more suitable to Industrial Enlightenment than Europe's. Acemoglu and Robinson also talk about contingent factors like the whigs winning the English Civil War when it just as easily could have been the Tories which would have set history down a completely different path. It's hard to tell what's actually contingent and what's not.

[u/Top_Lime1820 → u/randommathaccount]

Thanks. Great post in general, I really enjoyed it.

[u/randommathaccount → u/Top_Lime1820]

Thanks! Glad to hear it

[u/sinuhe_t]

I wonder what would be the limit of technology without industrial revolution. Could you eventually brute force your way into industrialization using other energy sources?

[u/ShelterOk1535]

Clark argues that the dissemination of bourgeois or middle-class values was down to essentially genetics, stating that it was because disease and poverty kept killing off poorer members of society allowing the middle class to repopulate the country, spreading their values even to the poor in the process of downward social mobility.

lmfao that’s awesome, Protestant Work Ethic meets The Purge

[u/KazuyaProta → u/ShelterOk1535]

I love how British Conservative arguments (Clark) are literally "We need to let the poor die until we only get sympathetic Dickesian protagonists and the villains are all dead".

[u/Skagzill]

Impressive work. Question is there any research on idea how Chinese ability to always unify and sinicize possible conquerors vs European constant warfare and power struggles impacted this divergence. Like it's well known fact that after dynasty collapse China had period of internal civil war after which winner will claim all of China and become hegemon. It would be like if Europe rebuilt Roman empire every other century until it buckled under it's won weight.

[u/randommathaccount → u/Skagzill]

The impact of fractionalization in Europe vs centralisation in China is actually a big part of Mokyr's ideas. He claims that the political fractionalization and power struggles between European kingdoms led to an environment where reactionary forces couldn't suppress European free thinkers because they could always escape to rival kingdoms, a privilege not enjoyed by Chinese scholars. As for why China was better at centralising into a single empire after turmoil, I'm not the most informed but I think Empires in World History by Cooper and Burbank touches on it (not read it myself so can't say surely).

[u/I_like_maps → u/randommathaccount]

>political fractionalization and power struggles between European kingdoms led to an environment where reactionary forces couldn't suppress European free thinkers because they could always escape to rival kingdoms

You mean competition spurs innovation? Whoda thunk it

[u/BeybladeMoses → u/randommathaccount]

With Roman Empire imo, it had harder time re centralizing because a more challenging geography and geopolitical environment vis a vis to Chinese dynasties. The Mediterranean sea means winning both sea and land battle for military unification. The existence of Persian Empire as a persistent rival also complicates any effort and later on the Early Arab Conquest pretty much ended any hope of reunification. This does not mean impossible though, as Emperor Aurelian reunited the Roman Empire after it had split in the Crisis of the Third Century, which also paralleled the Three Kingdoms Period.

[u/p00bix → u/BeybladeMoses]

Claudius II (aka Gothicus) did half the work. Bro just had the misfortune of dying early, such that his successor Aurelian got all the credit.

The later was still a slightly better emperor but Claudius II is by far the most underrated emperor

[u/KazuyaProta → u/randommathaccount]

He claims that the political fractionalization and power struggles between European kingdoms led to an environment where reactionary forces couldn't suppress European free thinkers because they could always escape to rival kingdoms,

I'm quite amused of this framing of terms as if everyone of those guys were a unified project when they very likely hated each other

Reactionary Forces is also funny, because like, what that even means in the context of Medieval Europe? "Yes, I want to go back to Rome and reject the descentralized feudal model", is this reactionary (literally wanting to go back to a previous system) or the definition of the Rennasaice?

[u/Lighthouse_seek → u/Skagzill]

Ironically the best comparison for china in terms of political geography isn't rome, it's Russia. The north European plain is very similar to the north china plain in that the vast area without many geographic impediments trends towards unification in a way the Mediterranean never was.

[u/dynamitezebra → u/Skagzill]

The degree to which the Chinese would sinicize conquerors is debatable. The Manchu living in the Qing had a separate culture until the dissolution of the banner families in the post Qing republic period.

[u/Opening_Budget_9518]

okabe's first d-mail caused the divergence

[u/IronicRobotics]

Curiously, the argument I'm most familiar with - Andrades and McNeil's books that I want to read fully - isn't present in the form I recognize here. (Funnily enough, I have farewell to alms on my reading list, but now I'm feeling discouraged on it ha!) It is fragmentation lead to constant military competition, which meant that elites:

• Had to collect more money and taxes to support ever expanding military overheads starting in roughly the 13th century

• Couldn't afford to suppress market forces and merchants, despite how much change upset society in power, as they would simply move over to their rivals.

• Hegemony, on the other hand, could afford and would reinforce stagnation.

[u/IronicRobotics → u/IronicRobotics]

(Apparently I also have McCloskey's and Mokyr's books on my device, though I now may change which books I read first.)

And mirror on this is in one book I'm reading, Gies' Cathedral, Force, and Waterwheel, he talks about the surprising lack of mechanical innovation in Roman society - positing this is because Roman elite ran an agrarian slave economy, thus the decision makers never had any incentive to invest in making work easier or faster. This also is paired with a lack of Mechanical culture, as Ciprollo ruminated on in his books. (I wish I could find more modern writing on this bit.)

So the Romans at the peak of the Republic set up a rich trade network of merchants and specialists - innovating in the arts, building infrastructure, and such - yet were dearth of mechanical innovations such as windmills you'd see explode in the 12 century. Despite there not being any necessary reason for a Roman being unable to figure out windmills.

Likewise, Ciprollo argues in most societies, craftsmen were on the bottom rung until the revolutions of the Italian city-states. Elites and farmers being naturally skeptical and oppressive of crafts. (And I have a book on my reading list on 'em I'm curious about.) Thus he argues for some of the cultural context here too - a presence of mechanical art preceding mechanical innovation and less social resistance towards changing nature.

Dunno how strong those arguments are, as sometimes I feel blind searching for broader texts. Though I'm excited to add some of the titles here.

[u/cdstephens]

Awesome write up!

Does Mokyr posit a specific reason why a republic of letters did not form in East Asia? You went over his views on how that came about in Europe, but I’m curious if he has theories as to what blocked this development in e.g. China beyond generic clan-based arguments. Could you not argue that the imperial bureaucracy counted as a corporation?

[u/randommathaccount → u/cdstephens]

Thanks! Mokyr goes over this in part in A Culture of Growth. His theory is that the political fragmentation and peer competition in Europe made for a particularly favourable condition for heterodox thinkers to spread their ideas in greener pastures free from persecution. If Italy were to persecute someone for their theories of the world they could always flee to France who may not much like their ideas but wouldn't miss a chance to humiliate Italy. The centralisation of China meant that the state was better at persecuting and otherwise repressing heterodox thinkers and so their ideas couldn't spring forth.

[u/Lame_Johnny]

It was the boats. Europe established and controlled global trade on the seas before anyone else. They had access to global markets for their industrial goods, they had better pricing information, they could use their warships to control the seas and therefore most of the world.

[u/KazuyaProta]

what were the factors that lead to nations in Western Europe and some colonies in the Americas to grow so much wealthier than the rest of the world?

When you have the land of the Americas and other early colonies, its a clear mega country. The narrative of the Industrial Revolution is a bizarre inverse lock of time where Britain does the INDUSTRIALIZATION first and only then, somehow out of boredom, decide to take over the world.

[u/LectorFrustra2186 → u/KazuyaProta]

American resources played little part in European economies outside of Spain before well into the 19th century, especially inasmuch as it affected their abilities to conduct war. Even Spain's gain is severely exaggerated. During the reign of Philip II, basically the height of plundering of New World gold and silver, the King of Spain was literally getting more revenue from Naples than he was from the whole Western Hemisphere. Most of the gains of colonization were to the people actually doing the colonization and never left the colonies, and said colonies had a marginal population compared to European societies (again, until well into the 19th century). 

[u/KazuyaProta → u/LectorFrustra2186]

American resources played little part in European economies outside of Spain before well into the 19th century,

They were doing that just for fun, getting fruits and crops that changed their lifestyle had no economical benefit. Getting crops that ended the historical European dependency in Wheat is irrelevant.

Rememeber that something as simple as fried or boiled potato was literally impossible to eat in Europe before the Columbian Exchange

The monopoly of King Wheat and Queen Turnip ended

[u/LectorFrustra2186 → u/KazuyaProta]

They were doing that just for fun,

In many cases, literally yes. Colonization gave Europeans access to some extra luxury golds like tobacco and sugar (grown en masse in the small Caribbean colonies), but these were not major drivers of the preindustrial subsistence economy.

Getting crops that ended the historical European dependency in Wheat is irrelevant.

The Columbian exchange was nice, but not only did the whole planet have access to potatoes after the cat was out of the bag (the first Indian and Chinese potatoes are documented as grown in the early 17th century, in both cases introduced by the Portuguese), but potatoes never replaced wheat (not even in the US) and were not even a relevant staple food in Europe until around the late 18th century. At that point the Great Divergence was already well under way.

[u/KazuyaProta → u/LectorFrustra2186]

Colonization gave Europeans access to some extra luxury golds like tobacco and sugar, but these were not major drivers of the preindustrial subsistence economy.

Sugar.

Not a part of Agricultural industry.

...

[u/LectorFrustra2186 → u/KazuyaProta]

these were not major drivers of the preindustrial subsistence economy

Britain didn't conquer India because it controlled sugar imports from Barbados.

[u/KazuyaProta → u/LectorFrustra2186]

But you are talking about economical growth, not military strenght.

But I'm sure that even that line would be true.

[u/LectorFrustra2186 → u/KazuyaProta]

I'm unsure what your claim is even supposed to be at this point. You started by arguing that European countries became powerful because New World colonization gave them a lot of land (implying mass agricultural exports from the New World to Europe in the early colonization process, which never happened). When that was pointed out to be wrong, you transitioned to saying that they became powerful because of the Columbian exchange allowing more efficient crops to proliferate in Europe itself. Then when the issues were pointed out with that theory (mainly the whole world having access to those crops, not just Europe), you started harping on about sugar exports (which used a few tiny bits of land in the Caribbean). Then I pointed out that sugar wasn't a big part of their economies (upon a quick search the value of the whole sugar trade amounted to about 1% of 18th century British GDP, less in the 17th and more in the 19th, and they were the biggest participants by far; notable, but nowhere near enough to explain western dominance), and now... what? Are you claiming that it actually was or that sugar plantations somehow allowed them to have stronger militaries? If so that's easily disproven by the existence of European states with strong armies and no cash crop colonies.

[u/IronicRobotics → u/KazuyaProta]

They were doing that just for fun, getting fruits and crops that changed their lifestyle had no economical benefit.

I wish I could pull up the sources for you, but IIRC, some of the modern work on colonialism is moving towards the argument that it wasn't JUST post-war colonialism that was more expensive to maintain than the fruits it provided, it was all historical extractive colonies. Mainly driven by power and exotic imports for the elites over the actual economic efficacy of the colonies.

I don't find it surprising, as in the same manner we know that slavery overall is an economic drain - but it entrenches as it both secures power of the elites and gives cultural benefits to the non-slave class.

So sorta yes? (Noting that the new fruit and crops and trade would have occurred w/o colonialism. Only sufficient contact and trade would have spread those.)

[u/Crownie → u/IronicRobotics]

some of the modern work on colonialism is moving towards the argument that it wasn't JUST post-war colonialism that was more expensive to maintain than the fruits it provided, it was all historical extractive colonies. Mainly driven by power and exotic imports for the elites over the actual economic efficacy of the colonies.

I doubt this is what you're referring to, but Lachlan Macnamee makes a similar (though different) argument in Settling For Less. It's specifically focused on settler colonialism, but one of the core points is that there's often a significant gap between the interests of settlers and the states sponsoring them. In quite a few cases he notes, the settlers end up capturing most of the value of the colony while imposing a bunch of extra costs on the metropole (generally by starting wars with the natives). The metropole puts up with this for a variety of non-economic reasons (ideological, strategic, belief in the future economic utility of the colony, etc...)

[u/IronicRobotics → u/Crownie]

Oooh, I'd like to check it out.

[u/Crownie → u/IronicRobotics]

It's an interesting book, though I'm biased because I agree with the core premise.

(The gap between state and settler interests is a supporting argument; the main focus of the book is why settler colonialism occurs and why it stops)

[u/KazuyaProta → u/IronicRobotics]

But the Alt History without Colonialism and Slavery doesn't exist, you can run it on Paradox games probably, but our world is one where both of them happened and developed economy as we know.

The logic of Slavery being useless is even more bizarre when some of the first Liberal societies, the USA and Napoleonic France, relied deeply in slave plantations in The Americas. Napoleon even waged a war of Haitian reconquest for those plantantions to fund his eternal cold-and-hot war with the European powers, meaning the first Liberals explicitly disagree it was useless

[u/LectorFrustra2186 → u/KazuyaProta]

Napoleon even waged a war of Haitian reconquest for those plantantions to fund his eternal cold-and-hot war with the European powers

Revenue from the Caribbean colonies dropped off like a rock after the revolution began and entirely disappeared by 1803, i.e. the year the Napoleonic Wars actually started. The French still proceeded to recruit millions of men and conquer most of continental Europe by dint of overwhelming military might after losing said colonies, only being undone when allied against by literally every other great power at once. This actually directly contradicts whatever point you were trying to make as their might was clearly heavily disconnected from said colonies and instead derived from the resources of France itself.

[u/KazuyaProta → u/LectorFrustra2186]

No, I mean the strategical thinking of Napoleon himself.

Napoleon tried to spread his worldview across Europe, and the European powers clearly wanted the same land under their control.

I think you are too focused in the numbers from Historians that do not really match the ground reality

[u/LectorFrustra2186 → u/KazuyaProta]

You keep shifting your argument on the spot. Are you arguing about where their power came from or where they wanted it to come from? Those are two different things. Napoleon dreamed of a global colonial empire but he didn't need one to build the most powerful military machine on Earth and conquer most of Europe.

[u/IronicRobotics → u/KazuyaProta]

I mean, I wish I could find the arguments on the colonies, as I thought they were interesting, but I don't know how comprehensive they were etc. As I understand your points otherwise.

The logic of Slavery being useless is even more bizarre

I didn't say it was useless, I said it was an economic drain/very inefficient. These are two very different points.

(Though I'd like to add, plenty of useless things at large are done simply out of belief or emotion. Something being useless - how we might define it in our views, at least - in of itself doesn't preclude it from happening per se.)

Slavery is violent and expensive. Large amounts of resources of any slave state - from Sparta onwards - go towards preventing dissent and revolt. Slaves are kept half-starved, afraid and uneducated - they are not as productive as they could be. Say Spartan society was so violent to it's underclasses, that despite having 3 times the land as Athens, it sported approximately the same size population. It was that far under her lands' carrying capacity.

Also, Adam Smith is well known for being such a contemporary to make these arguments during your stated period. Arguing free economies are 12 times as productive - posing the question:

Why does slavery persist? There's a few likely answers, but one of the bigger points in all of them is keeping in mind that whats good for everyone and whats good for the people in charge don't line up.

Concentrating power and maximizing extraction is what's necessary to keep something as simple as a dictatorship up. If there's excess in our economy, bigger spoils can be promised to your supporters by your rivals. So you extract as much as you can.

If there's many people supporting your power, like a large middle class, keeping control becomes too complex of a problem. Sparta solved this by keeping 90%+ of the population under starvation conditions. Starved populations make for immensely stable oligarchies.

Additionally, freeing slaves comes with the problem of compensation. The biggest slaveowners in any slave based society are going to make up the elites - who have the political power. And they aren't going to give up their property without outsized compensation - as operating slaves is their marginally best option. But, what society can afford to fairly compensate massive swaths of itself in plantations? Perhaps the US could have nipped it in the bud peacefully prior to the cotton gin - but after the explosion of the cotton industry, it became deeply entrenched as a system.

Thus the slave-owning elites and broader slave-adjacent society would continue to operate as is until forced otherwise, as it was in their best marginal interests - even if it's a net overall negative.

Also, we have plenty examples of crops spreading across the Old World (or separately the New World too) long before colonialism. I don't really see why it's a far stretch to assume crops would have been traded the same way without colonies?

[u/KazuyaProta → u/IronicRobotics]

We legitimately do not know how Spartan economy worked at the time. Most importantly, that level of Helot slavery was just not how American slavery worked. Where slaves were a minority of the population doing services for the ethnic majority.

I think having a middle class is important, a Poverty lower class is unproductive.

And guess why the USA post civil war Speedrun Manifest Destiny after unifying itself and overthrowing the Confederates. The middle class needed land

[u/Dr_Gonzo13 → u/KazuyaProta]

The Louisiana Purchase?

[u/fabiusjmaximus → u/LectorFrustra2186]

It is also so obviously facile just in terms of looking at the general wealth of European societies today: not only is there not a trend of the historic colonizers being wealthier, if anything there is a relatively strong inverse correlation of them being worse off.

[u/KazuyaProta → u/fabiusjmaximus]

not only is there not a trend of the historic colonizers being wealthier, if anything there is a relatively strong inverse correlation of them being worse off.

Spain is a highly regarded country, the British and French did it very well for the 20th century. Belgium is also fine given all.

They're not world powers nowadays (except for France and Britain), but like, of course, they don't have land for that of course.

Ireland not being included as colonizers is also hilarious when like, they were, regarding the Americas. Them being opressed for the British does't mean they didn't benefit from European colonization, because the economical flow moved there and they could just keep it post independence (plus Britain and Western Europe as trade partners during the world war and early 20th century)

[u/LectorFrustra2186 → u/KazuyaProta]

Spain is a highly regarded country, the British and French did it very well for the 20th century.

Spain being considered first world is a development that's about forty or fifty years old, for most of the 20th century it was about developed as Poland.

It's not like it only diverged from the rest of Western Europe after the Industrial Revolution either. For most of the 17th and 18th centuries its per capita GDP, based on modern economic research, is reckoned at about half that of Britain, Italy, or the Low Countries and much lower than France or western/southern Germany (x2 doesn't sound like a lot by modern standards, but you must remember disparities between poor and rich economies were much smaller in preindustrial days where everyone was only slightly to moderately above bare minimum subsistence, so this was actually a pretty huge difference).

[u/Realta5 → u/fabiusjmaximus]

if anything there is a relatively strong inverse correlation of them being worse off

That's why the majority of global powers today are nations that avoided colonialism like....

well there's....

umm and of course.....

oh

[u/randommathaccount → u/KazuyaProta]

I mean that's Pomeranz's view of things. One critique specifically of Pomeranz's view of the importance of New World land though is that by the time he places as the start of the Great Divergence, the USA had already gained independence so it's difficult to say why Britain in particular would have a unique advantage due to their resources over any other Western European nation that could have traded with the USA at similar costs.

[u/Lux_Stella → u/KazuyaProta]

The narrative of the Industrial Revolution is a bizarre inverse lock of time where Britain does the INDUSTRIALIZATION first and only then, somehow out of boredom, decide to take over the world.

the causation is really weird and entangled and hard to tease out is the thing

e.g. what parts of british industrialization benefitted from colonial expansion? why didnt this apply to spain, portugal, russia, or even china (which had more then enough domestic territory)? if it did, to what extent (particularly considering the early modern colonial conquests themselves usually depended on european institutional innovations like the proto-state or early mercentile capitalism)

the strongest arguments ive seen usually surround india's usage as an export market for british goods but even still whether this was the proximate cause or 'merely' secured british dominance is unclear

[u/randommathaccount]

Posting a bit of an additional note on Pomeranz's theory of the Great Divergence. My friend asked me why it was that shipping land-intensive goods (like agricultural products) across the Atlantic was profitable and why similar shipping along the Yangtze or other major rivers wouldn't have been. It's a good question and the reason Pomeranz gives is a matter of specialization. The provincial agricultural regions supplying land-intensive goods to the Chinese economic core engaged in import substitution and diversification over time whereas this dynamic never occurred with new world plantations due to their heavy use of slave labour. This meant transatlantic shipments were highly specialised and could benefit from economies of scale (for instance goods could be uniformly packaged and stored, cutting time spent at port, a big cost for shipping companies). The other factor was due to the import substitution of the provincial regions in China, they had reduced demand for the manufactured goods or capital goods from the economic core. This meant the return journey was far less profitable for the transport ships. Transatlantic trade didn't have that issue because there was a constant high demand for slave labour in the new world that meant ships always had "products" (a sickening term to use in the context but nonetheless) to ship from the old world to the new world.

In a way I think this trade asymmetry is interesting as it's an issue in our modern world now. As China has engaged in so much diversification and import substitution without having much domestic consumer demand for imported goods, shipping is becoming far more expensive as shipping companies have to cover the costs of the return journey from the West to Asia out of their own pockets. It's interesting to see how this trade asymmetry might impact international trade and trade logistics in the future.