Technology and Technical Knowledge in the Great Divergence

Before looking in more detail at how early modern technology has been discussed in recent decades in the controversy over the "great divergence", it might be appropriate to sketch briefly two of the central features of that debate. This section will survey how the debate unfolded over time and the academic profiles of its protagonists.

It is surely not new to compare differences in economic performance of diverse high cultures in world history. Contemporaries of industrialization in the nineteenth century already highlighted European or "Western" superiority as part of colonial and often racist arguments, for example, in the context of the widely discussed presentations of material culture on world fairs, starting with the famous exhibition in London in 1851. 

Michael Adas has shown, references to advanced technologies became more and more frequent among the arguments offered by nineteenth-century authors for the cultural dominance of the West⁹.

In scientific discourse, authors in the early 20th century like the German sociologist Max Weber discussed in detail different developmental paths of various regions of the world and sought cultural explanations for Europe's particular path to industrialization. Much later, in the 1980s and 1990s, a growing awareness of globalization processes led to renewed interest in historical explanations for different developmental paths taken by the various world regions. Since then, the centre of gravity of this debate has shifted away not unlike the swing of a pendulum. The first bestsellers included Eric Jones' The European miracle (1981) and David Landes' The wealth and poverty of nations (1998). Their authors supported the idea of Western dominance by often unduly clear-cut arguments¹⁰.

A wealth of studies emerged in the rise of global history since the 1990s that pointed out the many blind spots in publications such as those by Jones and Landes. Now, they argued, it was urgently necessary not just to back the discussion about the "great divergence" with more solid data from economic history. In particular, the issues at stake must also be considered on the basis of well-informed research on Asian. The title of André Gunder Frank's book, Re-Orient (1998), symbolizes this approach well¹¹. Particularly the "California school", named as such because its writers taught at Californian universities, synthesized studies specifically on the economic history of pre-modern China, to enable a more nuanced comparative analyses.

Despite all this contention, most of these debaters shared the conviction that Europe's "special course" into industrialization was to some extent contingent. British industrialization is not seen as a necessary outcome of some particular characteristics that had evolved over centuries, but as a result that emerged somewhat arbitrarily out of a convergence of factors, among them the availability of coal and ores, the financial means to invest in large technological projects, and advanced forms of technical expertise.

Most recently, this line of research followed by the "California school" is being supplemented by increasingly specialized studies of non-Western economic development, providing a more solid basis for comparative studies¹². Some core arguments of the California school have be questioned, most prominently by the economic historian Peer Vries. He argues that during the early modern period Britain accumulated a wealth of factors on the economic level that allowed its transition to industrialization whereas those possibilities were not available to China¹³. At first sight this position seems to mark the pendulum's swing back to the positions taken by Jones and Landes decades ago, albeit based on substantial amount of research results and data which became available since, in particular on Asian economies.

Even if the debate on the "great divergence" clearly has an interdisciplinary character, its most visible protagonists are economic historians and social scientists with a historical interest. It would be hard to over emphasise that despite the large number of publications that in one way or another are contributing to the debate, many experts, particularly those on non-Western cultures, are refraining from engaging in the debate even if tacitly, although their research experience is highly relevant to its core issues. There are surely good reasons for this choice: an inherent problem in the debate on the "great divergence" is that a presupposition of "Western" categories can hardly be avoided as its starting point – most prominently, industrialization and economic growth as the crucial events seeking explanation.

Such Eurocentric presuppositions have, however, in principle long since been overcome in the large community of global historians. For many of them global history, by definition, must not presuppose "Western" categories, but must devise categories apt for the study of diverse world regions on an equal level. This position is connected with a more general suspicion concerning "comparisons" of regions or cultures as such – they have too often resulted in highlighting what "the West" had and what "the Rest" did not have. As one of the ways out of this trap, it is usually proposed to focus instead on concrete interactions and networks, shifting the attention to processes of exchange and to personalities who served as brokers between cultures.

As convincing as this position is, one might also regret its consequences on the debate about the "great divergence". The puzzling issue "Why Europe?" easily stirs interest and stimulates discussion in broader audiences of historical research among the well-informed public. It is thus somewhat deplorable when historians refrain from explicitly incorporating their positions into the controversy, even if they may have good reasons for taking a fundamentally critical stance on this debate as such. Such silence quite necessarily results in a lopsided assemblage of arguments and a lack of relevant issues in historical expertise within the debate. As will be argued in what follows, a related problem also holds true for the factor of interest here, namely early modern technology.