Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not

Why was Western Europe, Britain in particular, the first to industrialise? Given the tectonic shifts in global power that industrialisation brought with it—imbalances that are only now beginning to ebb—this is arguably the central question of early modern historiography. Answers tend to fall into two categories. A venerable Eurocentric tradition, extending from James Mill and Max Weber through David Landes and Niall Ferguson, has claimed that European economic superiority became manifest quite early, certainly by the sixteenth century, and that this superiority derived from idiosyncratic political, cultural, and legal conventions. More recently, historians of Asia, including R. Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz, have argued that European–Asian differences in 1750 were still modest and that the subsequent divergence reflected in large measure Europe’s geographic good fortune, including British coal and New World ‘ghost acres’. Needless to say, this contrapuntal historiographic rhythm reflects in some measure Asia’s late-twentieth-century ascent: after all, one can hardly tell a nobleman, even a parvenu, that his ancestors were beggars

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