The Great Divergence : China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

作者：KennethPomeranz

出版社：PrincetonUniversityPress

副标题：China,Europe,andtheMakingoftheModernWorldEconomy

出版年：2001-12-9

页数：392

定价：USD35.00

装帧：Paperback

丛书： PrincetonEconomicHistoryoftheWesternWorld

ISBN：9780691090108

内容简介
 · · · · · ·

The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.

Pomeranz argues that Europe’s nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe’s failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.

Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia’s economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths–paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.

作者简介
 · · · · · ·

Kenneth Pomeranz is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937, which won the John King Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association, and coauthor (with Steven Topik) of The World that Trade Created.

评论 ······

a must-read (though not an easy-read) for comparative world history

今天中国经济史结课还是挺感慨的，本科课程基本结束，但对许多问题的纠结和思考，大概才刚刚开始。希望未来还能纠结很久。感谢大梁神上课尽职尽责地把这本书复述了一遍，不然大概没毅力细读;也要深深感激送我这本书的童鞋=D

今天那些喜欢说“在中国”就是会发生很多烂事，“在西方”就会发生很多好事的人，未来大概还会出现一本这样的书告诉你其实都一样。甚至西方不如中国，这时小琥阿姨就会出来唱一首：“没~那么简单~”

视角很新颖，史料很详实，但读起来真是无聊啊

• 下载电子版：下载地址
• 购买纸质版：京东商城
• 购买纸质版：当当网