I heartily recommend Pomeranz’s book, it steers clear of the quasi-triumphalist “the West was destined to win it” discourse, quite the contrary, and because of that it is all the better for it.
>So is Pomeranz’s book, his theory about the Great Divergence, now the received wisdom?
>It’s the received wisdom among some historians. However, I would say that the empirical evidence has moved against it in the last 20 years.
>It turns out that in England silver wages were three times those in the Yangtze delta and five times those in India already by 1600. So the latest you can probably put the Great Divergence is 1700, which means that Pomeranz’s story about it being all about colonial windfalls and British coal use is probably misguided.
>One historian, Deirdre McCloskey, has pointed out that if coal was so important, Chinese industries could just have moved closer to coal because they have tons of it.
People in the coal-rich, tree-poor northern steppe did mine coal, but getting it to densely-populated areas would've been expensive.