HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

Why did industrialization first emerge in Britain and thereupon in other European regions? Why not in other world regions like China, India and the Ottoman Empire? This issue is being debated in the social and historical sciences under the heading "Why Europe¹?" Another label as frequently employed for this controversy is the "great divergence", coined by one of its protagonists, Kenneth Pomeranz, historian of China². The notion "great divergence" conveys the idea that something unprecedented happened in world history towards the end of what historians of Europe call the early modern period. Until then, history on a global scale had repeatedly seen the rise and fall of mighty empires. Periods of "efflorescence" – to use a term suggested by political scientist Jack Goldstone – were followed by economic and cultural decline³. The path into industrialisation taken by some of Europe's core regions and subsequently by the United States is seen in this view as a deviation from such continuous ups and downs, in a development into a hitherto unparalleled continuity of economic growth. The "great divergence" thus highlights the uniqueness of European and Western industrialization, in contrast to the paths taken by all other cultures in world history.

But when exactly did Europe's "special course⁴", which is another concept used to describe this same phenomenon, set in? There is yet no consensus on the answer to the question, or indeed if asking this question is a productive way of engaging the past, as will be explained in more detail later. Apart from the few who advocate its beginnings already during the European Middle Ages⁵, most agree, however, that this diverging path appeared sometime between 1500 and 1800.