Great Divergence

According to wikipedia, the Great Divergence is "the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe and the parts of the New World where its people became the dominant populations) overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilizations, eclipsing previously dominant or comparable civilizations from the Middle East and Asia such as Qing China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tokugawa Japan, among others."  

Why Western Europe? Why did capitalism emerge in Europe first and not elsewhere? And when? Why did Europe conquer, settle, and subjugate the world and not the other way around? These are the defining question for the past 25 years of economic history. The debate has done much to push the field of economic history to adopt a more global perspective. It's also encouraged the construction of world-spanning databases (see below). There's a number of ways you could organize the literature: California school vs the European exceptionalist tradition, longer vs shorter runway, institutionalist vs ecological causes, trade vs slavery, etc. The literature on this is vast and every-growing, so I'll just give you the greatest hits  in each cluster as I see them, and you can work your way up to the present.

Some books to start you off:


Geography and Environment

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel has to be the most famous (and most controversial) of the geographic determinist-type explanations, painting across the widest geographic canvas: Eurasia to the Americas, Austronesia, and Africa. The book is a useful antagonist to have, especially since it's so popular. His argument is essentially that Eurasia enjoyed an earlier diffusion of crop-animal packages that allowed people there to build cities, immunity, and social complexity. He's been ruthlessly criticized (see McAnany and Yoffee 2009 for one generation of critiques) and also vehemently defended (see Kedrosky's 15,000 word substack). Ian Morris' Geography is Destiny and Why the West Rules—For Now go even further in the determinist direction. 

For a more recent take on this literature, Fernández-Villaverde and his coauthors have a simulation-based paper which I like that examines the 'fractured lands' hypothesis more in depth, although the outcome of interest is state formation, not the general 'Rise of the West' or industrial revolution. Andersen and coauthors (2016) and Dell and coauthors (2014) re-examine climate transitions.


Alfred Crosby's older classics The Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism (1986) are generally better received by scholars than Jared Diamond's. Crosby says the rise of the West is not just a human phenomenon; it's a broader biological invasion, and we need to understand nature as an agent and cause of historical change. I honestly prefer Crosby, in part because he doesn't lapse into shoddy racialist language like Jared Diamond. 


Note that the 'virgin soil epidemics' idea pushed by Crosby has come under attack by disease historians, who have questioned how important it was compared to other colonial factors. 

Narrowing down on why Western Europe within Eurasia (not China, India or Middle East), coal deposits such as those in Newcastle and Ruhr are the most traditional ecological-geographical explanation. Wrigley is a famous proponent of this as well as Pomeranz. Wrigley in some of his work also says that Northwest Europe had unusually fertile agriculture and very early, by global standards. 

Comparing to the Middle East, Issawi and Christensen cited below have also made geographic-deterministy arguments, as did Marshall Hodgson in his Venture of Islam series. Note, this style of ecological arguments often surrounds particular climatic events, rather than persistent geographic conditions highlighted above. Campbell is a good introduction into the medieval climate anomaly literature.





Institutionalists

The institutionalists say that the key to success was building good institutions: secure property rights, the rule of law, the rise of a strong fiscal state which built infrastructure, expanded markets, and supported merchants, etc. These accounts tend to have a Smithian bent, talking about good institutions in the sense of facilitating the division of labour, innovation, and trade expansion. Some good ones to know:


Classics


Others


The bellicists tend to talk about 'good institutions' but in terms of war and bureaucracy. Their stories are generally much more about the process by which European political formations acquired the state capacity to mobilize resources to secure a monopoly on large-scale coercion. In a memorable quote by Samuel Huntington, "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence." 



Brenner Debate

The 'Brenner debate' was an academic debate that unfolded in the pages of Past and Present in the 1970s about the origins of capitalism. Brenner said it had to do with weak peasant farmers, strong capitalist farmers leading to enclosure and farming innovations (in England in the 16th century), and then rapid agricultural growth. His critics, including M. M. Postan and ELR Ladurie, focus on Malthusian population trends. Institutionalists later, like North and Thomas put the emphasis not on local class relations (a Marxian idea) but trade and property relations (a Smithian idea). The debate is basically dead but remains important historiographical event that gets mentioned sometimes. Conveniently, the original theses and substantive responses are collected in Aston and Philpin's book. 




Reviews:




Plagues


A lot of people seem really fond of incorporating plagues into the story of the divergence. You can read more about here:

Culture


'Deeper Roots' Cultural Explanations for Great Divergence.

California School


There's always some dimension reduction when you group diverse authors together, so take this label with a grain of salt. But the 'California School' generally refers to an interpretation of early modern economic history that positions the rise of the West as a relatively recent and abrupt phenomenon. They are called ‘the California School’ because most of them worked at universities in California. Among these, you can count Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone, James Lee, Feng Wang, Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, Robert Marks, and the late Andre Gunder Frank. They are called ‘the California School’ because most of them worked at universities in California, and their foil are those who see 'deep roots' in the rise of the West. For instance, classical Marxists, like Marx, concluded that the non-Western world lacked the internal dynamics to manage a transition to capitalism on its own (see Avineri 1969 and Krader 1975 below). Other foils are the new institutionalists, who identify the ‘rise of the West’ with ‘the rise of the market’ (see above), or who detect with deeper, pre-19th century roots in things like the European marriage pattern (van Zanden, Moor, and Carmichael 2019) or Weberian-style rationalization and bureaucracy (Schluchter 1985) or other kinds of culture (Clark 2008; Henrich 2020). Most of the California School try to decenter Europe and give China's history central importance. 


The classics:



Others




Critiques:




Datasets

One of the benefits of the Great Divergence debates is that it has encouraged people to build these huge datasets on historical GDP, real wages, skill premiums, government revenues, terms-of-trade, human capital, and land use.  Many of these you can download from the Madison Project or Clio-Infra. Here are the big ones:


Then are the debates about whether these data collection and estimation efforts are methodologically sound: 



There's also a methodological question of reciprocity that scholars have raised about these data; like why does it make sense to compare England to all of China, instead of just the Yangzi Delta. Pomeranz asks this question, but you also get it in these sources:



Direction for future research


There are still people doing work on the great divergence as a whole, but the future I think is going to be more studies of 'south-south' and 'north-north' divergences as well as a shift to more recent economic history (see Baldwin on IT). Here are some examples of that: