Excerpt from The Great Divergence (2000) by Kenneth Pomeranz This book will emphasize the exploitation of non-Europeans and access to overseas resources more generally-but not as the sole motor of European development. Instead, it acknowledges the vital role of internally driven European growth but emphasizes how similar those processes were to processes at work elsewhere, especially in East Asia, until almost 1800. Some differences that mattered did exist, but I will argue that they could only create the great transformation of the nineteenth century in the context shaped by Europe’s privileged access to overseas resources. For instance, western Europe may well have had more effective institutions for mobilizing large sums of capital willing to wait a relatively long time for returns-but until the nineteenth century, the corporate form found few uses other than for armed long-distance trade and colonization, and long term syndicated debt was primarily used within Europe to finance wars. More important, western Europe had by the eighteenth century moved ahead of the rest of the world in the use of various labor-saving technologies. However, because it continued to lag behind in various land-saving technologies, rapid population growth and resource demands might, in the absence of overseas resources, have forced it back onto a path of much more labor intensive growth. In that case it would have diverged far less from China and Japan. The book thus calls upon the fruits of overseas coercion to help explain the difference between European development and what we see in certain other parts of Eurasia (primarily China and Japan)-not the whole of that development or the differences between Europe and all other parts of the Old World. A few other factors that do not fit firmly into either category, such as the location of coal supplies, also play a role. write down what his argument is about WHY the IR happens in Great Britain before India/China?
Excerpt from The Great Divergence (2000) by Kenneth Pomeranz
This book will emphasize the exploitation of non-Europeans and access to overseas resources more generally-but not as the sole motor of European development. Instead, it acknowledges the vital role of internally driven European growth but emphasizes how similar those processes were to processes at work elsewhere, especially in East Asia, until almost 1800. Some differences that mattered did exist, but I will argue that they could only create the great transformation of the nineteenth century in the context shaped by Europe’s privileged access to overseas resources. For instance, western Europe may well have had more effective institutions for mobilizing large sums of capital willing to wait a relatively long time for returns-but until the nineteenth century, the corporate form found few uses other than for armed long-distance trade and colonization, and long term syndicated debt was primarily used within Europe to finance wars. More important, western Europe had by the eighteenth century moved ahead of the rest of the world in the use of various labor-saving technologies. However, because it continued to lag behind in various land-saving technologies, rapid population growth and resource demands might, in the absence of overseas resources, have forced it back onto a path of much more labor intensive growth. In that case it would have diverged far less from China and Japan. The book thus calls upon the fruits of overseas coercion to help explain the difference between European development and what we see in certain other parts of Eurasia (primarily China and Japan)-not the whole of that development or the differences between Europe and all other parts of the Old World. A few other factors that do not fit firmly into either category, such as the location of coal supplies, also play a role.
write down what his argument is about WHY the IR happens in Great Britain before India/China?
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