The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which Western Europe along with former settler colonies in Northern America and Australasia overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization, eclipsing other previously dominant or comparable Eurasian civilizations such as Qing China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tokugawa Japan, among others.
Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including mineral deposits, geography, culture, institutions, and luck. There is also disagreement about its timing. While some scholars cite the Commercial Revolution or emphasize slow, long-term structural social changes rooted in the medieval period, others point to the early modern era (15th or 16th century) as the definitive beginning, citing the origins of mercantilism and capitalism during the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, the rise of the European colonial empires, proto-globalization, the Scientific Revolution, or the Age of Enlightenment. Because the most significant surge in economic productivity happened in the late 18th and 19th centuries with the Industrial Revolution, the "California school" considers only this later period to be the "great" divergence.
Technological advances, in areas such as transportation, mining, and agriculture, were embraced to a higher degree in western Eurasia than the east during the Great Divergence. Technology led to increased industrialization and economic complexity in the areas of agriculture, trade, fuel, and resources, further separating east and west. Britain's extensive pre-industrialization use of coal as an energy substitute for wood in the 18th century gave it a major head start in modern energy production.
Terminology and definition The term "Great Divergence" was coined by Samuel P. Huntington in 1996 and used by Kenneth Pomeranz in his book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000). The same phenomenon was discussed by Eric Jones, whose 1981 book The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia popularized the alternative term "European Miracle". Broadly, both terms signify a socioeconomic shift in which European countries advanced ahead of others during the modern period.
The timing of the Great Divergence is in dispute among historians."Although the data is highly contested, most economic historians would agree that the large inequality which became evident in the nineteenth century between regions is relatively "new," at least in historical terms. The timing, however, remains contentious. A consensus that incomes had diverged between Europe and China in the early modern period was disrupted around 2000 when Pomeranz put the term "the Great Divergence" into scholarly usage by suggesting that certain regions of China, India, and Western Europe were at broadly similar levels of agricultural productivity, commercial development and the ability of some firms to raise capital in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Great Divergence in wealth between the West and the Rest, then, began with the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern economic growth in Britain." The traditional dating is as early as the 16th (or even 15th) century, with scholars arguing that Europe had been on a trajectory of higher growth since that date. According to Stephen Broadberry and Runzhuo Zhai, the divergence began around 1700. Pomeranz and others of the California school argue that the period of most rapid divergence was during the 19th century. Citing nutrition data and chronic European trade deficits as evidence, these scholars argue that before that date the most developed parts of Asia, in terms of grain wage, had comparable economic development to Europe, especially Qing China in the Yangtze Delta and South Asia in the Bengal Subah. Economic historian Prasannan Parthasarathi argued that wages in parts of South India, particularly Mysore, could have been on par with Britain, but noted his research on the matter was not conclusive.
Some argue that the cultural factors behind the divergence can be traced to the Middle Ages — when foundational institutional and psychological differences began to emerge — or to the Renaissance and the Chinese imperial examination system. Broadberry asserts that in terms of silver wages, even the most advanced pre-industrial regions of Asia were trailing Western Europe as early as the 16th century. He cites statistics comparing England to the Yangzi Delta (the most developed part of China by a good margin) showing that by 1600 the former had three times the latter's average wages when measured in silver, 15% greater wages when measured in wheat equivalent (the latter being used to approximate buying power for basic subsistence goods and the former to approximate buying power for craft goods, especially traded ones), and higher urbanization. England's silver wages were also five times higher than those of India in the late 16th century. Grain wages started to diverge more sharply from the early 18th century, with English wages being two and a half times higher than India or China's in wheat equivalent while remaining about five times higher in silver at that time.Broadberry, p. 17. However, this disparity only applied to Western Europe; Broadberry states that silver wages in Central and Eastern Europe did not surpass advanced parts of Asia until 1800.Broadberry, p.3
Advanced pre-industrial regions
China
China has had a larger population than Europe throughout the last two millennia. Unlike Europe, it was politically united for long periods during that time. During the Song dynasty (960–1279), the country experienced a revolution in agriculture, water transport, finance, urbanization, science and technology, which made the Chinese economy the most advanced in the world from about 1100. Mastery of wet-field rice cultivation opened up the hitherto underdeveloped south of the country, while later northern China was devastated by Jurchen and Mongol invasions, floods and epidemics. The result was a dramatic shift in the center of population and industry from the home of Chinese civilization around the Yellow River to the south of the country, a trend only partially reversed by the re-population of the north from the 15th century. By 1300, China as a whole had fallen behind Italy in living standards and by 1400, England had also caught up with it in all but its wealthiest regions, especially the Yangtze Delta, may have remained on par with those of Europe until the early 18th century.
In the late imperial period (1368–1911), comprising the Ming and Qing dynasties, taxation was low, and the economy and population grew significantly, though without substantial increases in productivity. Chinese goods such as silk, tea, and ceramics were in great demand in Europe, leading to an inflow of silver, expanding the money supply and facilitating the growth of competitive and stable markets. By the end of the 18th century, population density levels exceeded those in Europe. China had more large cities but far fewer small ones than in contemporary Europe.
Western Europe
After the Viking, Muslim, and Magyar invasions waned in the 10th century, the Latin West entered a period of prosperity, population growth and territorial expansion known as the High Middle Ages. Medieval Europe became perhaps the first society in human history to build an economy on nonhuman power and thousands of new towns were founded between the 11th and 14th centuries. The oldest university currently in continuous operation in the world appeared in the late 12th century in Italy (the University of Bologna) and two more were established in the early 13th century in France (the University of Paris) and England (the University of Oxford). European population tripled between the years 1000 to 1348By 1300, the population of western Europe (that is, west of Slavic and Balkan territory) was about 54 millions. and is estimated to have reached a peak of 73.5 million to as high as 100 million,The citation combines sources from , and from substantially higher than the population of the Roman Empire at its peak. The 14th century, then, brought a series of calamities: famines, wars, the Black Death and other epidemics.
From a single print shop in Mainz, Germany around 1440, the movable type printing-press had spread to no less than around 270 cities in Central, Western and Eastern Europe and had already produced more than 20 million volumes by the end of the 15th century.Febvre, Lucien; Martin, Henri-Jean (1976). The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800. London: New Left Books. Quoted in: Anderson, Benedict. Comunidades Imaginadas. Reflexiones sobre el origen y la difusión del nacionalismo. Fondo de cultura económica, Mexico, 1993. . pp. 58f. At the same time, the number of universities had grown to more than 60. In the Age of Discovery, navigators using new ship technology discovered new routes to the Americas and Asia. Medieval technology had advanced far beyond anything known in antiquity and commerce expanded together with innovations such as joint stock companies and various financial institutions. According to medieval historian C. Warren Hollister by 1500 - two centuries before the Industrial Revolution and a century before the Scientific Revolution - Europe's technology and advanced political and economic organization had already "given it a decisive edge over all other civilizations on earth."
According to a 2014 study, "levels of GDP per capita are quite high in large parts of western Europe...the average for western Europe was about 1,100–1,300 dollars between 1400 and 1800, which is much higher than (for example) the Roman Empire, Iraq in the eighth century, or any other pre-1800 society." Within Europe, there was "consistent growth of GDP per capita in the North Sea area from c. 900 dollars before the Black Death, to more than 2,000 dollars in about 1800, making it into the most prosperous part of the world economy at that time (even averaging over the whole of western Europe clearly shows this to be the wealthiest region in the world during that period)."
According to a 2021 review of existing evidence by Jack Goldstone, the Great Divergence only arose after 1750 (or even 1800) in northwestern Europe. Prior to that, economic growth rates in northwestern Europe were neither sustained nor remarkable, and income per capita was similar to "peak levels achieved hundreds of years earlier in the most developed regions of Italy and China".Even England and Holland, according to Gladstone, show no evidence of a marked divergence from the rest of the world in economic output per capita until after 1780.
India
According to a 2020 study and dataset, the Great Divergence between northern India (from Gujarat to Bengal) and Britain began in the late 17th century. It widened after the 1720s and exploded after the 1800s. The study found that it was "primarily England's spurt and India's stagnation in the first half of the nineteenth century that brought about most serious differences in the standard of living".