Why the West? Colonies, Fossil Fuels, and Lessons from China ~ Kenneth Pomeranz

You are listening to the All-In-Humans podcast with your host, Eliy Makala. And now for the past three and a half years, all humans has been bringing you all sorts of episodes about the human journey, sometimes approaching our history from the very beginning, starting with the origins of humankind or even the origin of life, but sometimes we have taken the other approach. Starting in the present day, I'm moving backwards, peeling off layers of modernity and thereby trying to understand how we got to where we are. Now today, I'm very proud to introduce a new series that will do exactly this. A series that is produced together with Warwick University's Cage Research Center, a collaboration that has really afforded us a stellar lineup that raises a who is who in the field and feels trying to tackle a question at the heart of our understanding of the modern world. And this question is, why the West? Why did Western Europe and later the US become the richest region of the modern world? Was the rise of the West powered by colonial violence, scientific ingenuity, or something else entirely? And what happened to the medieval might of China or India? During the past decades, the term "great divergence" has increasingly been used by historians who want to tackle this massive question, but want to do it carefully without falling into traditional East-West clichés. And in this series, we'll meet several of the foremost historians involved in the debates about the great divergence, including China's and India's leading economic historians and a 2025 Nobel Prize winner. But to start us off, we will talk to the very historian who coined the term "great divergence" in his book of the same name, University of Chicago Professor Kenneth Pomorans. Pomorans' book was published in Europe 2000 and really became a field of finding work, but why was that? After all, the rise of Europe. This was not a new topic, but Pomorans' approach was. He was not trained as an expert in Europe. He was trained as a historian of China. And he said that to understand the rise of Europe, we really have to zoom out and look at its side by side with what was going on in other dynamic regions of the world economy. And by doing this kind of a comparison, Pomorans came to a conclusion that went against most of what had been written about this topic. He came to the conclusion that the great divergence between the West and the West started late. No, it was not the direct outcome of the Renaissance, the printing press or the 1492 voyages of Columbus. It was something powered by the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s. So how did Pomorans come to this conclusion? And why did the Industrial Revolution then happen in Britain and not say China? What was the role of colonies and fossil fuels? His original focus? What about the roles of science, technology or politics, the focus of many of his critics? We discuss all of this in this vast conversation, and in the end, I also ask Pomorans to place the story that we've been discussing into the bigger picture, into the whole economic history of humanity. From the heat-offs with remarkable clarity, dividing the story of humanity into four parts, the fifth beginning as we speak. I hope that you enjoy this. If you do, do check out further material on this topic with links in the show notes and do subscribe to the podcast. There's plenty more to come, including next week's episode with Nobel Prize winning economist and historian Joel Mokir, who will give a very different take on the roots of Europe's rise. But now, let's hear from Kenneth Pomorans. Professor Kenneth Pomorans, it's great to have you here. Welcome. Well, thank you. It's good to have the chance to talk. The great divergence and iconic book in the field. It's been 25 years or so that it came out. Right. How did you get interested in the topic and upriding this book? Tell us the story. I was originally planning to go to graduate school in European history. In fact, had my applications in the mail. And I more or less by chance wandered into a Chinese history course as a fourth year undergraduate. Absolutely loved it. And I went to see the professor who had taught the course, told him I had this slightly crazy idea of switching fields. And he had what in retrospect I realized was brilliant advice. He said, "Here's a list of 15 books. If you read these over the summer, when no one is giving you a grade, it probably means your interest is genuine. And if you read those 15 books, you'd also be pretty close to where somebody who had done an undergraduate concentration in East Asian studies would be except for the language. But low and behold, I got to Yale. I knocked on Jonathan Spencer's door. He kind of said, "Well, I teach one graduate course that does not require the language. Why don't you take that? And if you're doing well enough in it, then we'll see about whether we can find some money so that you can start cramming the language over the summer." And so that's pretty much what I did. And then my first book was a pretty conventional Chinese social, economic, and environmental history in the late 19th and early 20th century. I was starting on a second project, which was actually a project on popular religion in North China. And at about that time, the pregnancy that we thought was going to result in our second child resulted in our second and third children. Oh! And then we had three little ones at home. Quickly, he came clear that I was not going to spend the time trampling around the North China countryside. And then about the same time, I thought I could do this thing that I had kind of toyed in the back of my head for a long time, which was writing the history of the origins of the world economy from three perspectives, one North Atlantic, one East Asian, and one South Asian. And I started working on what I thought was going to be the first chapter. And I showed it to a colleague of mine. He said, "This is not a chapter. This is a book." And a friend recommended Joe Mokir's series at Princeton, which was just getting started. And so I sent it to Joel and got back very lengthy comments that Morales said, "I don't agree with you, but there's a lot here that's worth putting in print." And that's Morales where it went. Well, those disagreements that you had with Joe Mokir, we are certainly going to get to them today. But I'm very happy that he said yes to the book because now we have it. It's a great, I think, way to approach this mega question, which is why Europe? Why did the last, whatever, 200, 300 years become so overwhelmingly dominated by Western European economies and their colonial offshoots, right? Your way of addressing this was not to ask a kind of why the West and not the rest, not even why Europe and not Asia. But you suggested that we should look at what you call the old world core. So, few very specific regions that you suggested were actually relatively similar economically, yes, around maybe two, three hundred years ago. What are those old world cores and why should we focus on them specifically? That if we do national units, we're immediately confronted with a problem of scale, right? So China is very big. The logical comparator for it in some ways is not England or Holland or France, but Europe. So in a way, we tilt the tables unfairly if we compare Britain to China because in Britain, we only count Europe's most proto-industrial areas and in China, we take the whole place. Exactly. Just as China has its Gansu, Europe has its Balkans, etc. And so what it seemed to me made more sense was to start looking at particularly dynamic places that again, might be a fraction of a modern nation state where they might be, they might scroll across a couple of modern nation states, but that were more or less integrated economic units. So there's one that you might call the sort of North Sea core. So today's Netherlands, part of Belgium, southern UK, Gujarat and Bengal in India and in the case of Bengal, India and Bangladesh, the Yangs of Delta and maybe also the Pearl River Delta in China. So those other places where now you would have Shanghai and Hong Kong respectively? Right. You might make a case for a couple of other places. If you went back a couple of centuries to 1500, you'd probably want to add Northern Italy, but by the 1700s, it had fallen behind for various reasons. Reindustrial living standards are hard to measure, so you can crunch the numbers different ways and come up with different estimates of per capita income, for instance. But certainly in 1700, the Yangs of Delta is comparable to any place in Western Europe. By 1750, you can argue it had fallen behind, but not dramatically, just to give you a sense of scale. By 1914, the ratio is something on the order of 8 to 1 between England and the lower Yangs of. That's an enormous, well, great divergence. Well, let's then look at this world around, say 1700, 750, this area where time when you think that we still have between these cores, a world that you called a world of surprising resemblances. In other words, if someone just walks in, consider it to what one of many people had said before you think that if someone. just walks in and tries to make predictions, or who is going to become the global economic leader, it would in no way be obvious that it's going to be Britain. Or at least, you think that it's not obvious if they would not take into account two very important components, which is coal and colonies. Right. So let's take those one by one. First one is coal. In some sense, this is probably the least controversial thing, just from the kind of popular culture of today, the idea that fossil fuels probably have something to do with the making of the modern economy, it does not sound so controversial. However, I think a lot of people, when they think about this, would think about technology first, fossil fuel second. So they would say that what happened was that in Britain, there were clever engineers who learned to harness fossil fuels in a new way. And therefore we get first a steam engine later, the internal combustion engine, etc., which create the demand for fossil fuels. And you flip that around. You say that no, it's not the technology driving this story. It's the fuels themselves. It's their location, their availability. That is actually a kind of character in the story. Why don't you tell that story? Okay. So you're absolutely right that almost any sort of educated person has the idea that fossil fuels and the steam engine both play a crucial role in the industrial revolution. Though it's funny how many economic historians for a long time sidelined that, right, that sort of growth is growth is growth is growth. And one dollar worth of new varieties of cheese in the Netherlands is just as important as one dollar worth of coal or whatever. And I think that's probably a mistake, but it was actually quite a common mistake in the economic history profession. And I think one of the good things that's come out of not just my work, but lots of people's work is that we've gotten away from a sort of fetish of just measuring everything in dollars. And one of the things I emphasize here is that, and this is an idea that partly comes from Tony Riggley, that if you think about a pre-industrial world, basically all the basics of life come from the interaction of sun, water and land. So what Malthus called the four great necessities, right, food, fuel, clothing fiber and heat. What that means in densely populated areas is that there are ultimately tradeoffs, right? An acre that's growing grain is not growing trees that you can cut or flax or cotton that you can turn it to fiber. And that constraint becomes increasingly powerful as populations become denser in cores. And as they're living standards, at least inch up, right, which means they're consuming more. To some extent, you can compensate by trading, right? You get wood or whatever that's produced upstream and in return, you send them handicrafts or whatever. But it turns out that there are limits to those purely Adam Smith style solutions in a world of expensive transport. There's only so far you can go. Hole is a really dramatic breakthrough. A plenum of coal saves you roughly two tons of firewood. And that coal mine only takes up a small amount of surface area. So coal is a really big deal. So then you get to the question of, okay, great, coal, but isn't coal mostly a matter of technological cleverness and the steam engine. And here I say yes and no. So on the one hand, yes, the steam engine is crucial. So basically as you're as you mind deeper and deeper, especially in a place like Britain, the mind tends to fill with water, which has to be pumped out. And so you're spending more and more calories feeding the horses that power the pumps. So you're using more power to get the power, right? And Flynn did a rough, but I think convincing calculation that had you not made the transition to steam powered pumps somehow, British coal production could not have gone much above at 1700 level. So I said it multiplies and here I'm doing this off the top of my head, but I think it multiplies by nine times over the next 120 years or so. But this is very important to put a pin here because I think that many people when they think of the steam engine, they think of the what steam engine, which you can then later put on whatever a train, most importantly, but the first steam engine was ironically in the coal mines pumping water out of the coal mines. Exactly. I think that it's very interesting that one of the reasons why Britson happens to be the birthplace of the steam engine might have been a kind of geographical accident where they happen to have this very wet mines where it makes economic sense because the coal is right there. You really need it. And you have the water to pump out that it might not have been some kind of inherent ingenuity in the British engineering profession that the steam engine was born in Britain. Right. So there are two things. One is that these mines that fill with water. The other is a question of transportation. In the pre-industrial world, the cost of fuel is the cost of moving it. A gyan de vries has a calculation somewhere that I think the cost of coal multiplies something like four times for moving it like 50 miles over land. Coal has to be somewhere where you can get at it and then you can put it on water. Right. You can put it on a river or it's right near the sea. That happens to be true of a lot of Britain's coal mines. It's not true of the main Chinese mines which are way out in Shanxi and the landlocked area. There are some exceptions but by and large that's true. So in 1704 a guy named Lockier is on a British ship that's docked at Canton for several months. And he's one of these guys historians love because he wrote down the price of everything while he was in port. He gets a haircut. He buys an egg. You name it. So it's for the year 1704 we can actually get a very good price index. This one Chinese city. Oh, you just think and grain is four times cheaper in Guangzhou than in London. So that basically means muscle energy costs a quarter as much. Charcoal which is heat is five times more expensive. So heat energy is one D times cheaper in London relative to muscle energy. The early new common steam engine is incredibly inefficient. This is the one that's pumping the water out of the mines. Right. They use something like a thousand calories of energy for every seven calories of work. So they're less than one percent efficient. In which places it worth investing in a machine that very inefficiently turns heat into the kind of work that would otherwise do with muscle. It's going to be worth it in London. It's not going to be worth it in Guangzhou. Yeah, I love the way that the thing that is so obvious and the back of our heads like fossil fuels. You show how central it is and how easy it is to forget. There is a term that I've seen increasingly around internet which is energy blindness. I think it was Nate Hagen's who coined this idea that when this kind of what you mentioned about the cheese versus the coal that people just think of, you know, energy is just one good amongst the others. But it is really like once you start looking at it, you see it everywhere. And I think that to just remind ourselves that it's not just the steam engine, I think the historians of architecture are actually really strong in this one because you look at modern architecture. But is it? It's basically the fact that you don't anymore pay someone very long hours to carve wood or whatever you use fossil fuels to heat glass, heat concrete, heat bricks, whatever where you can substitute work for heat. But there is one, I think, pushback that comes up a lot, which is that hold on a second, anyone who's heard of the song dynasty economy. The first thing they will say is that the song dynasty, or this is like a thousand years ago. And there was what some people even call the Chinese Industrial Revolution. I don't know if we should go that far, but they burned a lot of coal. They burned it more in this architecture sense. So they used to heat not to run engines, but to mold metal and create famous China where right. And so given that your story suggested in 1700 this coal business, such as, you know, is very different. It's much more expensive in China. The reason is that it's very far from where most people are, where most economic activity is. And so, what do you square that weave the song dynasty? They had a lot of coal. They got it somehow. There must be another explanation than the geography because the geography has stayed the same since the song dynasty. The geography has stayed the same, the human geography has. So in the song dynasty, the center of population and of the economies in the north and the state spent a fortune to build canals that brought, they were above all concerned with iron making, particularly for weapons. And that's what an awful lot of the coal was used for in addition to other things. And yes, the coal was there. It was not an impossibility that a Chinese state determined to build those canals. Even hundreds of years later, when the economic center of the country had moved much further south, further away from the coal. certainly was not. humanly impossible if you had decided that this was a priority. But then you have to ask the question of, well, why would you do it? You know, looking back from the 21st century and the enormous improvements in human longevity, comfort, etc., that fossil fuel industrialization have gotten us, we might be inclined to slap your head and say, well, why wouldn't you do that if you could? But nobody saw that coming. Yes, yes. Well, if we leave the energy blindness and now energy sightings aside and focus on the other part of the puzzle is colonies, and there is not energy blindness as much as I guess land blindness that people might have had when thinking about this. So it's not just that you need energy. You need land like you've mentioned many times to to run an economy. And you suggest that Britain without coal, of course everything would have went very differently, but also without colonies, Britain could have been running into a kind of economic dead end where they're just isn't enough land to do all the fancy kind things that you need to industrialize and the land was solved by colonial acres, what you call ghost acres. And you give the example of Denmark as a kind of alternative history of when you face these land constraints, we just don't have enough proper land, which could have been British fate without colonies, right, you say that they don't have urbanization. They actually have gear urbanization. They have to call back these kind of artisan urban proto-industrial people to work with forestry to work with the dikes, right. These patterns persisted well into the 19th century, even though Denmark had reasonable amounts of capital, good transport, participate in European science and had plenty of nearby and culturally similar models of industrialization. I think there's a lot in that one line you're showing that a lot of the things that people use to talk about us, the origins of Europe success, they don't make a difference between Britain and Denmark, but it was Britain that industrialized and you can make the difference Britain had ghost acres over the Atlantic. What happens in Denmark is not crisis, it's not that people are going hungry, they find ways to adapt, but they're not headed towards an industrial revolution, and it's not unreasonable to think that in the absence of some kind of ecological relief that would have happened in Britain as well. Britain gets that relief on the one hand from coal as we've talked about. And then on the other hand, from these enormous inputs of land intensive goods from the Americas. The biggest benefit of colonization in the new world actually comes after it's lost most of its colonies in the Americas, right. The huge cotton boom comes in an independent United States, but nonetheless, the nature of the social system bears the colonial imprint. And the imprint obviously both of original coercion that took the land from the indigenous people, and of course in the case of the American South ongoing coercion because so much of the cotton was harvested by slaves. Well, let me give one point to just to maybe as a point of support that I find interesting and secondly push back. So the point of support is that it's not just the Americas, of course, you also have later colonn, you have the British Empire in Asia. And I think there's a very well-documented way in which when the American Civil War disrupts the flow of cotton, what do the British do, they do everything they can in India to use their political leverage there to make Indians grow cotton. So in that sense, I think the logic that you've described and some of these later events do all line up, but then the pushback when looking at just what actually is coming from the colonies, they are often not the maltheussian necessities. Cotton absolutely as, but if we put cotton aside, they are mostly luxuries. So for example, in America, a lot of it is beaver pelts, which Europeans make funny hats for. If you look at the opium war, it was mostly tea that the British one did to make their ore gray, etc. Most of the slavery, especially if it's not for cotton, it's working for tobacco and sugar. And so the point there is not that the precise trajectory of British economy could have been just the same without colonies, of course, it couldn't have. But that it doesn't, it's not obvious that the impact of colonies was kind of ecologically smart. It could have been just kind of plain greedy. And indeed you look at Spain, they had a lot of colonies in America, they actually their economy stagnates during this time. And by the way, the British are doing pretty well before colonies during this at that same time. So how do you respond to that kind of the colonies are not so important part of the economic growth story argument? Yes, it is absolutely true that a lot of the early modern imports from the colonial world are not necessities tea coffee sugar tobacco. And of course, saying that colonial ghostacres were necessary doesn't mean commit me to saying that absolutely everything that was grown on colonial they guessed ghostacres was necessary. It's enough that some things were. But secondly, I would say that tea coffee sugar, et cetera, matter in other ways, they matter partly to the transformation of the European workforce. These are little luxuries that poor people will work extra hours for right if you think about what Yandoverys has called the industry us revolution right which he says precedes the industrial revolution. So the breeds and the Dutch just working more right that you know it I mean this is controversial but a lot of people would tell you that up until some time in the 16th 17th century, whatever the normal response of artisans in particular to higher wages was to work less. That if I can get by on 20 hours a week, why would I work for it is I want leisure to break that we caught well it requires a bunch of things but one of the things that requires is other stuff that they might want to buy. Very interesting that will encourage them to voluntarily work beyond the number of hours they need to work just to put literally bread on the table. So tea sugar coffee, et cetera, all of which by the way are to various degrees addictive. Yes indeed I say as I lift my coffee cup and I will finish my tea right. No, no, that's a really interesting point. Another way in which they're important is the contribution they make to the rise of the fiscal state, the growth of European militaries over the course of the 16th to 19th century requires enormous amounts of revenue. It's actually the main thing that as you regimes purchase is military power right they're not spending much on social welfare or mass education or whatever and they're desperately looking for revenue. And at a certain point there too you have to tap sources of revenue beside agriculture like there's just a limit to how much agriculture can grow. The course is a far more dynamic sector and the growth of European states is your customs excises et cetera and that's on all sorts of goods. But goods like tobacco and sugar are particularly good a because they are as I said slightly addictive. So they're not very price sensitive meaning you can tax them heavily without earning demands and being the case particularly of sugar but also tea and coffee you can't grow them in Europe not until you master the sugar beat. And that makes them a lot easier to tax because it's a lot easier to tax one port than to tax a million people growing something and the share of these goods in particularly British revenue is quite remarkable and crucial therefore to the rise of European military power. So that's another way in which they matter well let's then return to something that we hinted at earlier which is Joel more key said and paraphrasing what you said is a great book although it is a green right he would focus much more on technology and science and there is a way in which I might also push a little bit against the way that our whole conversation has been focused on Britain if in particular because yes it is true. That Britain is the first mover it is true that a lot of the free read about the industrial revolution is it happens in Britain not in Denmark but of course a hundred years later Denmark even my home country Finland against all odds is joining a very clear trajectory where the masses are getting big increases in welfare that's not something that seems to come with the industrial revolution. I mean there is not it's not clear that the average bridge was much better off after the what steam engine for example Brad long wife interviewed for my my own show before he focuses a lot on the era of the second industrial revolution saying that this is really when it's you know before yeah maybe Britain was a little bit ahead but like who really care in Britain and everyone was pretty miserable in terms of the economic living standards now that is something where even if more care would be you know if you even if you disagree with him about the British industrial revolution of how important science and technology was for that it's clear that for the second industrial revolution what drives the kind broader rise of the west European western science is a huge huge thing what do you think of that. I don't think that that's wrong for the last 150 years. The second industrial revolution, as you say, electricity, chemicals, et cetera, is unthinkable without scientific progress. Absolutely true. I also don't think you ever would have gotten there if you didn't have the first industrial revolution. Also, let's not forget, I mean, the long as right that living standards start to rise dramatically only in 1870, partly because grain and meat from the Americas starts coming across the water in incredible volumes after the Civil War. This big rail net, suddenly is moving, well, I live in Chicago, right? Hog butcher to the world. And back at your cold point, this is also in oil. Right, barrels start sloshing around the seas. Yes, right. So, you know, I would say we shouldn't forget the resources even later on. But yes, absolutely, without science, no second industrial revolution, and it is the second industrial revolution that doubles life expectancies, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, not only on the fringes of Europe, but almost as quickly in, let's say, Japan. And here, it's a bit more controversial, but I think I could make the case. Once again, if you abstract away from all of China and look at a little ribbon along the coast, including the old Yang's Adelta, life expectancies and certainly per capita income start to pick up pretty quickly in the late 19th century in part by importing some of those same technologies. And it could slower partly because China politically is such a mess at that point, which is partly a result of the great divergence, opium wars, et cetera, other things. But it's happening there, too. So yes, the long is right that you can't make sense of modern living standards without focusing on the last 150 years. A lot of that is new technologies driven by science that are portable and go way beyond Britain. All true. That means that my story has an ending point. But that doesn't deny its significance or the fact that I don't think you would have gotten to that second industrial revolution without the first and that even in the second primary product got to come from somewhere. I mean, when you think about part of what happens in the 20th century is that we learn to turn fossil fuels into artificial land, the fertilizer revolution raises yields far more rapidly than in any period in human history. I mean, it's really, really dramatic. And again, you're looking in the early modern period, not very large differences in yields per acre. By the 20th century, you're starting to get differences on the order of three and four to one for the same crops in some places. And then catch up when your places like South Korea get artificial fertilizer and now have the highest rice yields in the world. So there's that. The other thing that I'd say is crucial is, I don't disagree, obviously, with the claim that an awful lot of modern science congeals in Europe. That's where the pieces come together for the first time. But they're not all of European origin. If you think about everything from algebra, which after all comes from an Arabic word, because that where the algebra comes from, to the zero, which comes from India, to all sorts of empirical data, Simon Shama has some wonderful stuff about where the data used in Newton's Principia comes from. And it's basically a map of East India company trade routes. It's fascinating. And Newton, who was a shareholder in the East India company, took advantage of that. It actually wrote to Ships captains and said things like, I want you to record the tides at this particular place at this particular time, which became important for calculating the procession of the world's, the earth's access, things like that. So yeah, I mean, Marshall Hodgson 50 years ago, I guess, said, "Modernity is a global process that first wore fruit in Europe." And I think that to my mind says it. I don't know how much Joel would actually disagree with that. So yes, it comes together first in Europe. But it has all these global inputs. And I think if we call it European science, it's a little bit shaky. If we insist that it's part of a tradition that goes all the way back to the Greeks, I think that's even more shaky. Because after all, without the Arabs, you have no Greek knowledge in Europe. And without the Indian zero, you do not have modern science. With the Greek mathematics, no way. The Arabs in particular didn't just preserve Greek knowledge in a period when the Europeans had lost it. What the Europeans get back in the Renaissance is not exactly what the Greeks and Romans left behind. They get back a much improved version. I mean, a very simple example. So both Aristotle and Plato assumed that the heavens were made of a different kind of stuff than the earth was. As long as you believe that, then the ability to use either astronomical observation to big conclusions about laws of motion that prevail on Earth or to use experiments on Earth to generate hypotheses about the heavens doesn't work, right? Because they're fundamentally different. It was actually Indian astronomers who said, none of it's all kind of the same. Oh, interesting. And there's not conclusive, but I think very suggestive evidence that that stuff comes back from some of the early voyages to India after Dhanama and plays a real role in the European scientific revolution. So again, yeah, the story Joel tells us in some ways undeniable, but it's not the only story. Well, now that we are zooming out a little bit, I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on something which you consciously don't touch upon in the great divergence, which is that if we have indeed these old world cores like the Youngtodelta and Britain Netherlands in a part of Belgium also, right? And then we start seeing which of these cores could industrialize. We are, it's a little bit like starting to watch the film halfway. Because for whatever reason, we go to have very interesting, I don't know if it's right to say inequality, global inequality, but at least some kind of structure in the world economy where you're focusing only on a few bits. And so what about the first half of the film? Why do you think it was these particular regions in the first place? Why not Russia? Why not the Swahili coast in East Africa? Why not Spain, despite all their colonial adventures? Why was it these few places? So what's the first hot that we haven't touched upon? OK, I would say even the first half of the film, as you call it, should probably be divided into at least two parts. So there's one about the difference between the parts of the world that develop cities, states, intensive production, writing, et cetera, and the places that don't. And we tend to tell that story the way I just told it, which is actually, I think, a mistake, which is there's a presence in an absence. There are the places that develop the places that didn't. And I think that if we try to look back, that's a mistake. Because what that implies is that development has to have one trajectory. And you either got on the train or you did. Whereas I think if we look at a lot of these other societies, what we see is that they are consciously trying to block accumulation of wealth and power, the greater inequality that comes with that. They didn't just miss the wonderful boats in equality and hierarchy. Right. And I don't want to idealize those places. There's all sorts of things. I would be miserable, I think, in Brazilian Amazon, or the few places where those other kinds of society still exist. But I think we have to see them like them or not as just as much the result of intention as the path of, quote, development. And we have to remember that it took millennia before going down the development path, made people better off. The average 18th century farmer is not better off materially than the average nomad or whatever. They don't live longer. They may have more stuff, but it's not clear they're more comfortable. They're not freer, et cetera, et cetera. So that's maybe the first quarter of the film. And that will be what Jared Diamond for example, tries to explain whether he explains it right. And while I disagree with many things about diamond. One thing I think he gets 100% right is to say that what the societies with states and cities have in their favor is power, right? That dense populations enable certain kinds of accumulation of resources. They're not making the vast majority of people any happier, but they do have a advantage in power, which then tends to be self perpetuated, right? Because with an advantage of power, they start conquering some of the rest of these places and over millennia, right? The parts of the world that are ruled by cities and states and so forth grow. Again, grow without making people much better off until the sedenturists become industrial sedenturists, which doesn't happen till the 19th century. So that's one thing. Second quarter of the film is then within the many places that are ruled by states and cities, which is most of the world by the 18th century. You know, why the Yangs-Adelta and the area around the North Sea rather than Turkey, Persia, Russia? That's how, because leading enormous question, I suspect it has a lot of pretty local answers. And some of it may actually be kind of contingent and freakish. You know, I do think that if you look at the world in the 18th century, you can see institutional reasons why certain state, state ruled societies are not doing all that well economically, right? The institutions in Russia, for instance, are just not very conducive to development in the ways that people like Adam Smith pointed to. In part, because they're set up to allow a fairly small elite to monopolize the surplus, I don't think that accounts for all the places that aren't doing well in the 18th century, but we shouldn't forget that, right? Institutions certainly do matter. And in some places, they are not very conducive to the kind of exchange and division of labor that produces the limited gains in living standards that you can see in, again, the Delta or the North Sea area or whatever, circa 1750. Those, as I call them and other people have called them Smithian gains, are not enough to produce the industrial revolution, right? That's, as we've been saying, a different story. But they certainly do matter. And, you know, I would say there are clear ways in which the institutions of say the Young's Delta are better for generating some improvements in living standards than those of Russia or those of Persia. You know, it's not the whole story, right? But, you know, institutions do matter and they explain at least some of the unevenness we see across the 18th century world. And they also, of course, explain some of the unevenness within political units, right? I mean, the political economy of Britain is in various ways set up, not shockingly, to favor its capital city. One of the odd things about China is that's much less true there. The, the Qing certainly take good care of Beijing. But in terms of regions, they don't particularly favor their richest area, the Young's Delta, over other parts of the empire. In fact, in some ways, they actually, in the interests of stability, they overtax the Young's Delta and use some of the surplus to stabilize more ecologically fragile areas. For instance, the Yellow River Valley in the North, certain places out on the frontier, in part because once they've conquered the Mongols and cut a deal with the Russians in the first half of the 18th century, they're not terribly worried about foreign rivals. The main threat to stability for them would come from angry people within the empire rising up. And the best way to minimize that threat is a combination of low taxes and some spending on infrastructure and social welfare, targeted at the poorest areas, while telling the rich areas like the Young's Delta, fund your own public goods. - So could we say then that the film has basically four parts in the first, do you have agriculture and paracletal states? Second, you have merchant institutions allowing this kind of Adam Smith style merchant growth. Third quarter, you have coal colonies producing the British industrial evolution of fourth quarter is the last 150 years where modern science has played a bigger part but as you reminded, has not been the only player. - Yeah, and then we're all waiting to see whether in the fifth part modern science gets us out of the ecological mess we've put ourselves in 'cause that story of more fossil fuel extraction obviously has not, that part of the film has still been running in the background right through the fourth part. - Yes, exactly. - And much more important. - Where that's headed. - Yeah, well I think that's a good place to start coming to a close. I have three brief questions before we do. The first one is given everything that we've discussed today. If you have six seconds to summarize, how should we explain the great divergence? What would you say? - It's a combination of a series of positive resource shocks coupled with a set of institutions that were set up in ways that both helped produce those shocks, particularly the positive shock of overseas resources. And we're also primed to take advantage of them by using the greater wealth to also produce greater power, which then was projected around the globe. Also, fairness to the technological story, also institutions that were reasonably conducive to the generation of intellectual property, though I think that mostly matters towards the end of my period. - What about four people who are working in this area? What would you say would be like a underrated or underappreciated angle or something that you would like to see more research on? Well, first a geographic thing. I think there's a lot to be done in figuring out the South Asian story in more detail. - The Bangalongu Gerard's story especially, I guess. - Yeah. We've got a couple of competing theories, but I still think we don't have a completely adequate theory of what happens to what was in many ways the world's leading industrial exporter in the early modern period. Some of it is obviously colonialism, but is that all of it? Not so sure. And then I think another really important area is to again, get a much finer lens than I was able to do and really look at a lot of the ecological processes. How many places were there that were actually on a kind of Danish road? We know that there are parts of France and Germany where, for instance, agricultural yields were also flattening, where deforestation was pretty serious, et cetera, et cetera. How big were they? How reputable were those problems without the kind of, we know what eventually gets them out of that box, but were there other ways out of that box that might have been more important had it not been for, for instance, the flood of grain from the Americas in the 19th century. I think that's something people need to do. And then I think the much more needs to be done on what again is something I just sketched really, really quickly, which is understanding the relationship between the rise of European science and the impact of contact with the rest of the world. We got a few good stories, I think I told what or two of them, but are those the tip of the icebergers that all we've got to say? I'm not sure. - Okay, the final question is how has all your research shaped your outlook on the challenges of our future? - Well, not surprisingly, I'm concerned about global warming. I mean, I probably would be without that research, but thinking about how much our world is in energy drenched world. And what happens if we either don't take steps to get that energy in ways that don't cook the planet or have to actually make do with less energy is obviously a big deal. A second big deal, I would say is because I told the Great Divergent Story primarily as a European East Asian story. You can say that by the 21st century, there's been a reconvergence. Certainly not completely, you know, per capita living standards in China, outside of places like Shanghai, are not comparable to Western European ones, but there's been significant convergence and even more in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan. Is this the first phase of a convergence and eventually going to include the parts of the world that are still quite poor, at least in the things like health, et cetera, if not necessarily in the amount of stuff that people have, at least in the basics of life. Or, you know, did East Asia catch the last train? And then in fact, the enormous industrialization of China, for instance, is now making it very hard one could argue, for other places to follow that same path. And unfortunately, I think the jury is still out on that one. Clearly, no place else is gonna get kind of explosive improvements that China's gotten over the last 40 years by following exactly the same path China did. But are there other ways to get in on this then? That are going to work in a world that now has true to three billion of its eight billion people living pretty well? Is there space for the rest of us, or the rest of, since I'm actually one of the two to three billion, I guess I should say, for the rest of humanity? I think again, I think the jury is still out. I mean, if you go back to 1914 and look at per capita GDP for various parts of the world as a percentage of the United States, most countries have not changed that much in terms of convergence. Sure, they've gained, but they remain very far behind the wealthiest places. And since wealth is power, right? It's not enough to say, oh well, people in Kenya have a higher GDP per capita than their great grandparents. That's true, but in terms of ability to chart their own destiny, I mean, not so sure it's true. East Asia, you've seen real convergence, the fringes of Europe, which as you pointed out at one put, we're still pretty poor even a hundred years ago, enormous convergence. I mean, Ireland is rich. Scandinavia is very rich, but outside of the fringes of Europe and East Asia, Dore is not that great. And I don't think we know where it's going. Kenneth Pomerance, thank you so much for all of the research and your time today. Well, thank you. I've enjoyed it and look forward to seeing what the other interviews say. Okay, so that was it for today. Thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this, there's plenty more to come. There are more episodes to come to do, subscribe to the podcast. But there's also more material that you will find on our series web page, including reading lists and a summarized essay of this conversation. Link to it is in the show notes. This episode is part of the great divergent series produced by Warwick University's Cage Research Center in collaboration with Own Humans. You'll find each of these episodes on both the Cage Economic History Podcast and the Own Humans Podcast. I'm your host, Hilary McEln, and I look forward to meeting you next week in the conversation with Joel Mukher. Until then, take care.