Matthew Sherlock

5/10/2020

Instructor Jonathan Daly

The Great Divergence: China, India, and Europe, a tale of three empires

Eurasia is a very large land mass. It has been the focal point of much of our historical

narratives about ourselves. Athens, the Roman republic, the French aristocracy, the millennia-old

Chinese state, the Mughal empire all occurred on one continuous land mass. The Great

Divergence debate revolves around why some nations were bigger successes than others. Why

did Great Britain, an island nation the size of the state of Oregon, gain control of India a country

that is so large that is often described as a subcontinent? The rise of European powers to global

supremacy is in many ways a sociological and historical anomaly. Europe was not the richest or

most populous place on the planet during its ascendancy; the holders of that lofty title were

China and India. This historical question has been debated since the powers in question had

started to create the world that we live in today. This paper will focus on the points of view of

Jonathan Daly (author “Historians Debate the Rise of the West” and “How Europe Made the

Modern World”), Roman Studer (author of “The Great Divergence Reconsidered, Europe, India,

and the Rise to Global Economic Power”), and Kenneth Pomeranz (author of “The Great

Divergence”).

Before discussing these books, this author will give his own opinion on how the west

rose. I am skeptical of European exceptionalism. It could be a subconscious connection I make

between treating peoples as different and treating them as superior. Whatever the reason, I can be

suspicious of making broad overarching statements on the “specialness” that Europe had and has
(though to be fair that I can be guilty of the same generalizations sometimes). The real reason

that the west rose, it seems to me, is a series of interlocking events, conditions, and sheer luck.

Arguing for one origin point to the rise of European superpowers, like the Nazi insistence on

some super race descendants of Atlantis immediately comes to mind, is misplaced. Geography,

historical positioning, cultural shift, and political competition seems likely to have created a

perfect storm that engulfed the world.

Europe was for much of its existence considered a backwater compared to the larger and

better organized states in Asia (the various iterations of the Chinese empire, the Islamic

caliphates, etc.) The roman empire was long gone by the time of Columbus’s journey across the

Atlantic Ocean and there was no noble house in Europe that was in anyway capable of being

considered a peer of the Chinese imperial family. They were smaller in size, their armies were

either feudal, mercenary, or non-existent (the discovery of the American continent, the thing that

debatably triggered the explosive expansion of overseas colonialism, took place in 1492 nearly

two centuries before emergence of professional armies in Europe.) and they had poorly managed

cities that were little more than oversized collections of villages. What Europeans had above the

other peoples of their day, was an understanding of the value of innovation and constant

improvement.

China, the Ottomans, and other powerful empires of the era, my contrast, were

unmatched in their respective spheres of influence. None of their neighbors could to threaten

them in any significant way. The greatest Asian powers were thousands of miles apart and never

clashed. The geopolitics of Western Europe were volatile by comparison. The great power of one

decade could be attacked of the next. Competition was continuous in Europe. States with the best

armor, cannons, soldiers, tactics, and guns were the ones that could succeed on the battlefield.
The ones that could rule the battlefield could dictate their will on their neighbors, and that was an

enviable position to be in. This near anarchic political situation led to an arms race, as armor and

weapons were constantly improved. Plate replaced mail, then plate was phased out when guns

became more accurate; those guns were then replaced when technology improved. As put by

Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker, military advancement was fueled by “…the intensity of

competition among states that drove each constantly to innovate and to imitate and build on its

rival’s advances…1 ” The Chinese had invented the firearm, but they had no real need to improve

or use them. Europeans by contrast needed any advantage that they could get, so their military

technology far outpaced their military organization. Thus ,when they expanded into the wider

world other peoples fell to them until they grew powerful enough that the ancient empires of the

Qing and the Turk no longer had the upper hand. So why was it that Europe didn’t create the

kind of empires that popped up in Asia? What quirk of geography made the balance of power

among European states possible?

Europe is not really a continent in the purest sense; it is a part of a larger whole, a

peninsula of a super continent, Eurasia. Europe is a place that is inundated with difficulties for

any would-be unifier. Rivers could be used for travel and trade,2 but they could also act as

barriers. There were several mountain ranges dividing Italy and Spain from the rest of their

neighbors. The weather was hostile for much of the year. The harsh nature of Europe kept the

nations that call it home from being so powerful that they could stagnate into mediocrity, but not

so bad that they could not think of anything besides surviving another day.

1
Jonathan Daly (Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker), Historians Debate the Rise of the West
(London: Routledge, 2015), 39.
2
Daly (David Cosandey), Historians Debate the Rise of the West, 54.
 For example, geography greatly shaped England. Being an island, its people had to build

a strong navy to defend themselves from their larger and more populous neighbors (France,

Germany, Spain, etc.) this in turn helped them with power projection in the age of colonialism.

Their ships could disrupt the mobility of their enemies, keep supplies and reinforcements from

reaching the colonies while ensuring that their own colonies remained secure.

India however had more in common with Europe geographically than we tend to think.

They are both topographical diverse subcontinents who are also peninsulas to a larger continent.

“Europe is generally divided from Asia by the watershed of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River,

and by the Caspian Sea. This whole landmass covers about 10,180,000 km. However, as the

Russian-speaking territories, which make up roughly half of this landmass, are not covered in the

analysis, the very large areas under study here, British India without Burma (hereafter referred to

as “India”) and Europe without the Russian territories, are of a comparable size.”3 They are both

surrounded by the ocean, which is conducive to maritime trade. Their similarities can be

extremely striking for those that examine them, and the differences are just as striking. “Europe

has some special advantages in terms of its physical geography. Because its coasts are jagged, it

has many large and small peninsulas, so that through the Mediterranean, Baltic, and Black Seas

the maritime influence, both climatic and economic, penetrates the continent. Moreover, there

are many large and small offshore islands, so that overall, no place in Europe, except in Russia,

is really very far from the sea.”4 Europe’s temperate climate is a stable and is easy to plan ahead

environment. There are no deserts and no tropical jungles. No large mountain ranges in the

northern countries, separating them from each other and hindering trade. The are no monsoons
3
Roman Studer, The Great Divergence Reconsidered, Europe, India, and the Rise to Global
Economic Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 37–38.
4
Studer, The Great Divergence Reconsidered, 40
seasons in Europe. They can build a canal and irrigation without fear of them being washed away

the next year. It can be incredible that such small differences can have such drastic and long

reaching consequences. Geography can count for a lot, bringing obstacles and advantages.

Some of these obstacles are the availability of land in Europe. Europe may have had more

stable weather patterns and the same rough the same size, but the amount of land that could be

lived on in Europe is a different story. “Both in western Europe and east Asia, there was

relatively little room left by the late eighteenth century for further extensive growth to occur

without significant institutional changes, new land saving technologies, and/or vastly expanded

imports of land-intensive commodities.”5 There were ways of making what land that they had

stretch farther than it did, but the realities of European agriculture (which we will be discuss

later) made these ways unlikely to be ever exploited. Asian countries like China and India had

room to continue to expand within their own boarders (China from the shear size of their empire,

India from lower population growth in comparison to other regions and efficient resource

exploitation from the Indian caste system6). Like so many things in the rise of European empires,

if one little detail was changed they might have a much different outcome. If European

agriculture was a little more different, they may have never felt the need to leave for the new

world colonies. However, could Europeans have had a different agricultural system with the

limitations of their dietary staples?

Geography dictated another change, diet. The European diet was heavy with meat and

grains. The stock animals that plowed the fields, ground the grain, transported the farmer to

market, and filled the stomach. Rice cultivation, the staple of much Asian agriculture, yields
5
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern
World Economy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 172
6
Pomeranz. The Great Divergence, 173
higher harvests than wheat while requiring less animal power7. This ease of cultivation had

unforeseen consequences with the animal power of Europe being used in industrial activity (i.e.

grinding grain to flour) setting precedence for the later industrial revolution in its own small way,

activities that are unnecessary with rice8. Meat has high caloric content, which increased

potential production. “Braudel finds a huge variety in European reports of calorie intake before

1800 and notes most come from sources on the lives of the privileged; he suggests 3,500 calories

per day for people doing hard physical labor (e.g., crews in the Spanish fleet) and around 2,000

calories per head for the ‘great urban masses.’… Estimates of the grain consumption for the

entire Chinese population in the eighteenth-century vary, but they average about 2.2 shi of rice

per day, yielding roughly 1,837 calories per person per day. If the age structure of the population

was the same in the eighteenth century as it was in John Buck’s samples from the 1920s and

1930s, this would convert to 2,386 calories per adult equivalents, plus whatever non grain

consumption they had.”9 These are respectable numbers for both china and Europe, but with a

larger protein percentage in Europe’s diet lies a small significant advantage. Food is something

that is a major trade good for most societies, and trade routes are something that can be

complicated.

Europeans had an advantage in travel and communications. Roads are important. They

were especially important in the premodern era. “Up to the early nineteenth century, transport

systems all around the world used only renewable resources and were exclusively powered by

renewable energy. Transport technology was based on wood, hemp, and iron, the latter produced

and processed using charcoal, while propulsion was supplied by wind, water currents, and human
7
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 32
8
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 33
9

Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 35-36

and animal energy.”10 This meant that that roads were essential for the transport of goods in large

quantity any real distance. Animals need to be fed, and that takes room in your cargo. That

means that whatever you carry must be valuable enough to make the trip worth it. Without a

road, wheels are impractical. Without wheels, you would have to carry your cargo on your back

or the back of your animal. That makes what kind of cargo you can carry limited to high value,

low volume goods. There was not much of a bulk trade of everyday necessities like the wool

trade between the British and the Flemish. This is not to say that the people of India did not

understand the value of such conveyance. “In seventeenth-century India, the Mughals built and

maintained a long-distance road network, which served both military purposes and commercial

interests. This system of built and well-maintained roads was, however, very limited in

geographic coverage and density, and was largely confined to the major trunk roads, and to the

cities.” These roads were expensive to build and was even harder to maintain for any length of

time. The rains made certain of it. That was not made any better with the lack of hard materials

in many parts of India to make such roads. The roads of India needed a state capable of keeping

it up and interested enough to even try. Which was not a guarantee in any locality. Material

transport by road and water is invaluable in the growth of economies and the transport of armies

but transfer of information is also an essential part of any empire. Being able to bring one’s arms

to bear on one’s enemies are is only useful if those forces know where the foemen are. The bulk

transport of necessities made those necessities more affordable. Circling back to diet, the

majority of a person’s income for most of human existence was spent on keeping oneself and

one’s family fed. With cheaper food, the income of the average consumer stretched farther. This

10
Roman Studer, The Great Divergence Reconsidered, Europe, India, and the Rise to Global
Economic Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 52
is the difference in the silver wage and the grain wage, and we will discuss its significance

later11. Roads can help messengers get to where they needed to go, but messengers can be killed,

and the message lost if it is not written on something more durable than human memory.

Literacy though not essential in the building of empires is key in keeping it together.

One of the greatest inventions of the early modern world was the printing press.

“Johannes Gutenberg (ca.1400-1468) was an ambitious, but unprosperous goldsmith. He

conceived the idea of moveable-type printing and worked secretly for several years to achieve a

series of technical breakthroughs.”12 This new method of making books made them far more

affordable for those in the lower income brackets. This created a new paradigm in which anyone

that wanted to read, potentially could. The ability to read and to write, once the exclusive domain

of the privileged elite who had the time and wealth to waste learning a nonessential skill. Though

we might not in our world of writing being a skill that is universally understood and taught, it

can be easy to forget that it is something that is not necessary for survival in a world before the

printing press. You don’t need to be able to read to dig a hole in the ground to grow food or to

lay a brick. So when the printing press made the written word accessible to wider groups of in

the 1400’s, it didn’t take off initially. When it did start to gain ground it was almost two hundred

years later in the 1600’s, but then it started rolling it gained traction nearly exponentially. The

literacy rates in Europe skyrocketed and the consumer market for print media grew in turn,

which creates new problems for the rulers of Europe. Dangerous new ideas could spread faster

and more effectively than before. In China and the Ottoman lands these ideas could be

11
Broadberry, Stephen, and Bishnupriya Gupta. “The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages,
Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500-1800.”, 2006, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/3806001, 1-3
12
Jonathan Daly, How Europe Made the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2020), 60.
suppressed by a powerful censorship office. In Europe though, there was little the crowned heads

of France or Germany could do about it. The time of “Rights and liberties” was coming.

The emperors of the powerful states could govern from a position of strength, they had

little need to delegate power or to negotiate with anyone. The monarchs that governed the post-

Roman world did not have that strength, in order to rule they need to cooperate/coordinate with

powerful noble families and a landed warrior caste (which also had the effect of creating a

hereditary elite that would become the early audience for the nascent consumer market for the

printed page). This did not sit well with the men that sat upon the throne, and they found a way

to redress the balance of power. Urban centers fell outside of the feudal system, so by gaining

their loyalty, the king could gain a great deal of wealth and power. How then do they procure

that loyalty? The same way that they gained the loyalty of their lords, by offering the inhabitants

of towns “rights and privileges”. For example “From the early 900s, kings occasionally ascribed

to Italian urban dwellers a status similar—or even equal to that of the highest ecclesiastical

lords.”13 When kings needed the aid of urban centers they would offer charters of liberty,

agreement between the city and the crown put to writing to make it more permanent. These

charters continued to broaden the power of ordinary people to gain more in the way of say. The

Magna Carta (one of the broadest of these charters, as well as one of the most famous) conveyed

rights to all free men in England (only about 12% of the population at the time, but it continued

to grow). Rights once given are hard to retract, and with this freedom, traders and manufacturers

flourished. Europe grew more urbanized thus paving the way for the industrial revolution. So

much change in such a little amount of time (relatively anyway, it still took generation). Those

liberties once given or taken however are fragile and can easily be rescinded by the powerful

13
Daly, How Europe Made the Modern World, 68.
figures that are tasked with protecting it. There must be something to keep them in check,

something more powerful than kings.

The first invention of man is something that will never be known (in part because the

term invention can be somewhat nebulous). Was it a club made in some prehistoric period

wielded by some evolutionary precursor, or a sharpened stick made by a Cro-Magnon to slay

some beast? One of the most important early inventions of man though, is law. All societies

have, to one degree or another, laws. Rules that are not to be broken on threat of punishment.

These rules can be written or spoken and have many different origin points. However, that brings

to mind the question; if the law is a universal concept, what makes Europe’s (and by extension

their former colonies, i.e. the United States) version of the law so special? The belief in the

absolute authority of law. Law is like the parameters of the term invention; it is often quite

nebulous as an entity. Not many cultures really needed a concrete set of hard rules to function,

law was defined by informal taboo. In cultures with defined written law, there was usually an

exception. For example, China had laws, but those laws were subject to the whims of the

emperor. The Laws of Europe developed in a different way than in more stable locales, as there

was no central driving force that molded it. The nations of Europe were too large and developed

to simply trust in long standing traditions, and its monarchs had little power to enforce their

decrees in any great capacity. In the feudal society that Europe had become, law had become a

thing of local nobles and more important for the development of law, as an intellectual pursuit

the Church’s canon law. “Canon law consisted of divine law (as revealed in the Bible),

pronouncements of church councils, papal letters (decretals), and episcopal statutes… Reforming

popes therefore commissioned jurists to compile and organize them.”14 This compiling of legal

14
Daly, How Europe Made the Modern World , 22.
data (of not just church law but old Roman law) and its connection to religious practice created

something unique. That Law could come from something greater from Kings. It could be God or

the Will of the People and where that law comes from ultimately does not matter. The law put a

check on governmental power, it could be changed but never ignored. With the Law as a

counterweight, the people with little recourse before had an ability to challenge the power of

traditional elites in a new way. the liberties that they had are protected and provided by the Law,

making it a solidified permanent part of their societies as long as those laws were in place.

Liberties and powerful legal systems are the result of weak central governments and

divisions of power. The evolution of western society is fascinating, and it could have been

interesting to see how India could have had a similar evolution if the British never colonized it.

The political situation in India was complicated, especially in the years before the British started

there slow conquest “In the century following … (1556), most of India experienced an epoch of

relative peace, political stability, and prosperity, in which trade expanded and urban centers grew

everywhere. This situation started to change, however, when under Aurangzeb’s reign (1658–

1707) the Mughal Empire expanded so much that it could hardly be ruled any longer.”15 There

were peasant revolts, a weakening Mughal Empire, foreign invasion, and seceding governors. A

not dissimilar situation to the fall of the Roman empire. Would a new empire have taken its

place? Would the invading tribes and newly independent provinces have eventually settled into a

uncertain equilibrium like the European states? If they did so, would similar competition occur

as seen in Europe? Unfortunately the political fragmentation didn’t have time to play itself out,

and the fascinating possible comparisons that could have been made can only speculated on. The

disunity of India had serious ramification when the British began their ascension. In the year

15
Studer, The Great Divergence Reconsidered, 52
1818 common era the last of the British’s major rivals in the region, the Maratha Confederacy,

were decisively beaten in battle at the city of Pune 16. Thus began the end of Indian independence

and the beginning of British colonial supremacy. Unlike Europe who in the aftermath of the

dissolution of the Roman was allowed the time to evolve and find its footing, India was not given

the chance. The potential of the subcontinent cut short by British imperial ambition or was there

more to the creation of the European nation-states than simple political division.

With a strong foundation in law, capitalism came slowly.” Braudel argues,

capitalism developed slowly and could only become truly powerful where a very stable social

order in which ownership was considered sacrosanct allowed capitalist families to build their

holding over many generations.”17 If the king or duke or whatever powerful political figure in

your specific system happen to be, could take the property you worked for with no consequences

then that work is wasted. Merchants were also not always considered particularly high on the

societal ladder. In Japan, before the reopening of their borders in the 1850s, the poor peasant was

higher up in the social order than the wealthiest trader. That said, wealthy long lasting merchant

families were not unheard of in Asia, The Yutang food processing company lasted from 1776 to

1949. What makes the European mercantile systems different to their Asian counterparts was a

detachment of the business from the individuals. Merchant groups in india had non-kin investors,

but these were still secured by persons and landed wealth. This insecure system was less stable

but was far more flexible and capable of creating a great deal more wealth18. What strengthened

the European capitalism system was something that did not happen anywhere else, the state got

involved in the market. “The merchants and bankers in these trading nations of Asia could not
16
Studer, The Great Divergence Reconsidered, 47
17
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 138
18
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence,139
turn their investments into spheres of public interest protected by law and encouraged by the

state. Members of the public who invested their money in the bonds of the republics of Venice or

Genoa or the Bank of Amsterdam were not free from financial risks. But the bonds had the

qualities of legal recognition and of mortgage value.19“ The European states became some of the

most wealthy nations in the history of human because they were willing to take the risk of

entering the business world, and it does not always work out. The south sea bubble nearly

toppled the British empire20. For all of the setbacks though, treating government like a business

that could be invested in with government bonds was successful and allowed western powers to

pay for exponential expansion. It can be difficult to think of a time where capitalism did not exist

as a system, with how it became omnipresent in the lives of nearly every single person on this

planet. This feeling is somewhat by design (intentionally or not), a way of discouraging trying to

break away from the capitalist mindset (it is not a good or bad thing, it is a statement of fact).

The difference in the Asian and European financial thinking explain the expansive growth of the

wealth of nobles and merchants, but what of the prosperity of the ordinary man.

We have mentioned earlier the silver wage and the grain wage. “Largely as a result of the

International Committees on Price History during the 1930’s, it is possible to gather dara on the

daily wages of unskilled and skilled building workers in many European cities and regions

between 1500 and 1800, and to compare them in terms of both the silver content of the local

currencies and the volume of grain that they could purchase.21” The silver wage in Asia was

19
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 139-140
20
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “South Sea Bubble.” Encyclopædia Britannica.
Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., November 5, 2008. https://www.britannica.com/event/South-Sea-
Bubble
21
Broadberry, Stephen, and Bishnupriya Gupta. The Early Modern Great Divergence 2006,
JSTOR, 4
initially higher than it was Europe, as time went on though that changed. As Europe grew.

Capital is power, that power is freedom, that freedom can open the world for those that take

advantage of it.

A factor in the European dynamism is the movement of people, the “barbarian” invasions

being to most well-known example22. The exchange of cultures and ways of doing things. The

Great Steppe of Eastern Europe and Central Asia is constantly traversed by horse nomads who

bring whatever they could carry with them. Tech, Ideas, and warriors that create a further wave

of migrations when they displace the peoples already living there. Ethnic groups displaced and

replaced. Just using Germany as a sample, the Romans took control of some of its border

territory in the reign of Augustus before being ejected following the battle of Teutoburg forest.

The tribes of Germany then were driven out by the Huns, who then formed the starting points of

later states (Franks = France, England = Angles and Saxons, etc.) In Asia the situation was more

stable, and so they never bothered to learn from each other. The Chinese had an empire that

lasted thousands of years in various forms, why should they bother learn anything from their

neighbors when theirs was the greatest civilization that ever was and ever would be. Europe’s

powers were not as stable and nowhere as old. They could look around them and see the ruins of

the ones that came before (their ancestors may have even had a hand in creating those ruins), the

peoples of Europe (at the beginning of their ascent anyway) knew they were not the best there

was. They learned from the Islamic world23 and evolved. Geography, political fracturing, and

constant change are the dominoes that were lined on the table of historical events, all it took was

a slight push.

22
Daly, Historians Debate The Rise of the West, 16 (Map 1.1)
23
Daly, Historians Debate The Rise of the West, 61 (Marshall Hodgeson)
 The paths of history are rarely smooth. They have twists, turns, and speed bumps. If

someone claims that they can predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy by studying

historical, statistical, and demographic trends, then they are either lying or kidding themselves.

No one in any age has any idea what will happen or why things ended up the way that they did.

There are no single answers to historical questions. The rise and fall of the roman empire was not

just because of the migrations of German peoples. The empire were wracked by plagues, civil

wars, palace coups, and a declining prosperity long before the final fall of Rome to the Goths.

The city of New York has been influenced by Irish immigrants, Dutch colonist, Swedish

foresters, and English merchants. History is the archiving and study of human events upon

reflection. Humans are complicated creatures and so history can be equally complicated. The

vast interconnected tapestry of a human life made vastly larger as billions of other lives are

added to the patchwork. We can ask the questions of why the West rose to its highest points

forever, and we should. In order to know anything, we have to question everything, to seek

answers even if we can never find them.