State, Economy and the Great Divergence

State, Economy and the Great Divergence PDF Author: Peer Vries
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472530225
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Get Book Here

Book Description
An exploration of the debates surrounding the comparative economic development of Europe and Asia.

State, Economy and the Great Divergence

State, Economy and the Great Divergence PDF Author: Peer Vries
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472530225
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513

Get Book Here

Book Description
An exploration of the debates surrounding the comparative economic development of Europe and Asia.

Averting a Great Divergence

Averting a Great Divergence PDF Author: Peer Vries
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135012169X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
The most significant debate in global economic history over the past twenty years has dealt with the Great Divergence, the economic gap between different parts of the world. Thus far, this debate has focused on China, India and north-western Europe, particularly Great Britain. This book shifts the focus to ask how Japan became the only non-western county that managed, at least partially, to modernize its economy and start to industrialize in the 19th century. Using a range of empirical data, Peer Vries analyses the role of the state in Japan's economic growth from the Meiji Restoration to World War II, and asks whether Japan's economic success can be attributed to the rise of state power. Asserting that the state's involvement was fundamental in Japan's economic 'catching up', he demonstrates how this was built on legacies from the previous Tokugawa period. In this book, Vries deepens our understanding of the Great Divergence in global history by re-examining how Japan developed and modernized against the odds.

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Robert C. Allen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019162053X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why are some countries rich and others poor? In 1500, the income differences were small, but they have grown dramatically since Columbus reached America. Since then, the interplay between geography, globalization, technological change, and economic policy has determined the wealth and poverty of nations. The industrial revolution was Britain's path breaking response to the challenge of globalization. Western Europe and North America joined Britain to form a club of rich nations by pursuing four polices-creating a national market by abolishing internal tariffs and investing in transportation, erecting an external tariff to protect their fledgling industries from British competition, banks to stabilize the currency and mobilize domestic savings for investment, and mass education to prepare people for industrial work. Together these countries pioneered new technologies that have made them ever richer. Before the Industrial Revolution, most of the world's manufacturing was done in Asia, but industries from Casablanca to Canton were destroyed by western competition in the nineteenth century, and Asia was transformed into 'underdeveloped countries' specializing in agriculture. The spread of economic development has been slow since modern technology was invented to fit the needs of rich countries and is ill adapted to the economic and geographical conditions of poor countries. A few countries - Japan, Soviet Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, and perhaps China - have, nonetheless, caught up with the West through creative responses to the technological challenge and with Big Push industrialization that has achieved rapid growth through investment coordination. Whether other countries can emulate the success of East Asia is a challenge for the future. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Great Divergence

The Great Divergence PDF Author: Kenneth Pomeranz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691217181
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the West The Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe? Historian Kenneth Pomeranz shows that as recently as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, and product and factor markets were comparable in Europe and East Asia. Moreover, key regions in China and Japan were no worse off ecologically than those in Western Europe, with each region facing corresponding shortages of land-intensive products. Pomeranz’s comparative lens reveals the two critical factors resulting in Europe's nineteenth-century divergence—the fortunate location of coal and access to trade with the New World. As East Asia’s economy stagnated, Europe narrowly escaped the same fate largely due to favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas. This Princeton Classics edition includes a preface from the author and makes a powerful historical work available to new readers.

Before and Beyond Divergence

Before and Beyond Divergence PDF Author: Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674266846
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy, reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China? Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible both for China’s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe’s difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early industrialization. Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on institutional change has surprising implications for understanding modern transformations in China and Europe and for future expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic history, essential to any larger social science account of modern world history.

Great Divergence and Great Convergence

Great Divergence and Great Convergence PDF Author: Leonid Grinin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331917780X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
This new monograph provides a stimulating new take on hotly contested topics in world modernization and the globalizing economy. It begins by situating what is called the Great Divergence--the social/technological revolution that led European nations to outpace the early dominance of Asia--in historical context over centuries. This is contrasted with an equally powerful Great Convergence, the recent economic and technological expansion taking place in Third World nations and characterized by narrowing inequity among nations. They are seen here as two phases of an inevitable global process, centuries in the making, with the potential for both positive and negative results. This sophisticated presentation examines: Why the developing world is growing more rapidly than the developed world. How this development began occurring under the Western world's radar. How former colonies of major powers grew to drive the world's economy. Why so many Western economists have been slow to recognize the Great Convergence. The increasing risk of geopolitical instability. Why the world is likely to find itself without an absolute leader after the end of the American hegemony A work of rare scope, Great Divergence and Great Convergence gives sociologists, global economists, demographers, and global historians a deeper understanding of the broader movement of social and economic history, combined with a long view of history as it is currently being made; it also offers some thrilling forecasts for global development in the forthcoming decades.

The Economies of Imperial China and Western Europe

The Economies of Imperial China and Western Europe PDF Author: Patrick Karl O'Brien
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030546144
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a critical interpretation of a seminal and protracted debate in comparative global economic history. Since its emergence, in now classic publications in economic history between 1997-2000, debate on the divergent economic development that has marked the long-term economic growth of China and Western Europe has generated a vast collection of books and articles, conferences, networks, and new journals as well as intense interest from the media and educated public. O’Brien provides an historiographical survey and critique of Western views on the long-run economic development of the Imperial Economy of China – a field of commentary that stretches back to the Enlightenment. The book’s structure and core argument is concentrated upon an elaboration of, and critical engagement with, the major themes of recent academic debate on the “Great Divergence” and it will be of enormous interest to academics and students of economic history, political economy, the economics of growth and development, state formation, statistical measurements, environmental history, and the histories of science and globalization.

Escaping Poverty

Escaping Poverty PDF Author: Peer Vries
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 9783847101680
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the biggest debates in economic history deals with the Great Divergence. How can we explain that at a certain moment in time (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) a certain part of the world (the West) escaped from general poverty and became much richer than it had ever been before and than the rest of the world? Many prominent scholars discussed this question and came up with many different answers. This book provides a systematic analysis of the most important of those answers by means of an analysis of possible explanations in terms of natural resources, labour, capital, the division of labour and market exchange, accumulation and innovation, and as potential underlying determining factors institutions and culture. The author juxtaposes the views of economists / social scientists and of global historians and systematically compares Great Britain and China to illustrate his position. He qualifies the importance of natural resources, accumulation and the extension of markets, points at the importance of factor prices and changes in consumption and emphasizes the role of innovation, institutions - in particular an active developmental state - and culture.

India, Modernity and the Great Divergence

India, Modernity and the Great Divergence PDF Author: Kaveh Yazdani
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004330798
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 701

Get Book Here

Book Description
India, Modernity and the Great Divergence is an original and pioneering book about India’s transition towards modernity and the rise of the West. The work examines global entanglements alongside the internal dynamics of 17th to 19th century Mysore and Gujarat in comparison to other regions of Afro-Eurasia. It is an interdisciplinary survey that enriches our historical understanding of South Asia, ranging across the fascinating and intertwined worlds of modernizing rulers, wealthy merchants, curious scholars, utopian poets, industrious peasants and skilled artisans. Bringing together socio-economic and political structures, warfare, techno-scientific innovations, knowledge production and transfer of ideas, this book forces us to rethink the reasons behind the emergence of the modern world.

The Making of a Hinterland

The Making of a Hinterland PDF Author: Kenneth Pomeranz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520913191
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Get Book Here

Book Description
This wholly original reassessment of critical issues in modern Chinese history traces social, economic, and ecological change in inland North China during the late Qing dynasty and the Republic. Using many new sources, Kenneth Pomeranz argues that the development of certain regions entailed the systematic underdevelopment of other regions. He maps changes in local finance, farming, transportation, taxation, and popular protest, and analyzes the consequences for different classes, sub-regions, and genders. Pomeranz attributes these diverse developments to several causes: the growing but incomplete integration of North China into the world economy, the state's abandonment of many hinterland areas and traditional functions, and the effect of local social structures on these processes. He shows that hinterlands were made, not merely found, and were powerfully shaped by the strategies of local groups as well as outside forces.