De Long reviewed Pomeranz's _The Great Divergence_ recently on EH.RES, and at .(posted 8755 days ago)The question put forth is why European countries quickly industrialized, when the rest of Eurasia did not.
Diamond presented a unification argument: that China, due to lack of geographic barriers, has been far more politically centralized than Europe, and hence risk-averse political choices could stunt growth.
I'm not sure that explains India, though: my impression is that the British were able to expand throughout the subcontinent so easily because it was as fragmented as Europe. One would think that the British would have even been a great argument for industrialization; the superiority of European troops should have spurred the native princes to an industrialization program such as the Prussian.
Perhaps the answer lies more in an argument which Stewart has made here on FoRK: labor saving is a process which feeds upon itself. If Europe was not in conditions as Malthusian as China or India (and the Black Death and a few religious wars may have gone a long way towards keeping it out of them), then there would have been an impetus to find ways to increase labor productivity, but such increase not only threw people out of old work, but also created new work in which they could engage. "The capitalist devil..."
-Dave
Jacobs had a related thesis in _The Economy of Cities_; her view of city growth was that it involved a continuous development in which a city gradually changes the goods it exports, as well as those which it imports. Contributed by (