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.