Well...obviously that took a while, but it was entirely worth it. An extremely intricate, complex look at the different paths of industrialization and development taken by western Europe and east Asia, with particular foci on the Kanto and Kinai regions of Japan, Guangdong and Lingnan in China, and Great Britain and the Netherlands as something all akin to peers around the 17th century. But why did they diverge? Pomeranz makes a fairly airtight case for the bounty of the New World, both in resources and as a means of avoiding labor-intensive agriculture at home, as a key contributor to ultimate British dominance, as well as the accident of geography. British coal's proximity both to its end-users and to means of transporting it (rivers) made it much more cost-effective to extract than China's coal resources, which are mostly confined to the dry interior far from both population centers and transportation networks.

Pomeranz is an economist's economist and gets way down in the data (such as it is), and leaves the reader convinced that but for an act of colonialism, Europe may well have gone the path of China. Not no industrialization, but slower and later. And he further elaborates how the unique economics of chattel slavery enabled Britain's rise. Was it worth it?

if you're my professor, yes I was able to read this whole book in time :)

This is quite a dull book, unfortunately, structured like a bunch of academic papers strung together to form some coherent conclusion (in fact, it even lacks a proper conclusion!).

Also, I don't think it's that interesting or provocative, perhaps because of the length since publication, but I think just in general because it's quite commonsensical that historical events and narratives have multivariate explanations.

Nonetheless, it's rigorous and I can certainly respect the depth of the research.

Pomeranz argues persuasively that the "core" economic areas of the old world were all pretty similar, or at least more similar than different, until just before the Industrial Revolution. And that it was a particularly fortuitous set of circumstances, namely, the New World's coercive plantation slavery and easy access to coal, that led England to leap forward and diverge in the mid-19th century.

The core argument is meticulously laid out, with as much data as we can possible have, and does a great job repudiating many arguments about European/Western European/British specialness compared to the core areas of China and Japan (and to a lesser extent India.). The New World argument is also quite persuasive, in particular, that depopulation and repopulation to great economic was possible in the New World for Europeans because of disease, something that the East and South Asians couldn't have replicated in any of their possible "colonial" regions in Southeast Asia and the island chains.

The coal argument, though, fell a little flat for me, especially because the northern Chinese core area had used coal in the past. I get that using fossil fuels for power is the critical leap, but it's not clear to me why this happened in England and not anywhere else. The lucky placement of coal would seem to exist elsewhere as well but was not exploited. There's still something here that needs to be accounted for.

But, overall, this is a truly excellent look at the core economic areas is the old world and at least a partial look at why one part of a larger core (England, of the "English Channel" core) was able to make the leap into modernity.

if you're my professor, yes I was able to read this whole book in time :)

Very important book with ideas that were groundbreaking at the time, but needlessly dense.