I am confused. It seems to me that Gunder Frank is between a rock and a hard place. The key hypothesis (an empirical claim) is that the East was about level with Europe ca. 1750. That seems like a testable hypothesis, and the work of many scholars, like Ken Pomeranz (whose work was the subject of a FORUM on This List), is putting it to the test. But what of its implications? Does it matter? And how does it matter?(posted 8756 days ago)Suppose the hypothesis is false. The East was behind, as the Eurocentrics believe. Then we are back to having the old stroy about the "superiority" of European institutions for what--500, 750, 1,000 years? And Frank's case would be lost.
Suppose the hypothesis is true. Then, following a ruthlessly nihilistic line, we may dismiss everything before the Industrial Revolution, at least in comparative terms, as of little interest. Everybody was on the same page, no great divergence, etc. But then, EVERYTHING, hinges on the last 250 or so years, and the "great bifurcation" (as Joel Mokr termed it in the online internet video seminar last week). And the issue there is why did Asia (read: non- European or non-European New World) fall so far behind? We know from Bairoch/Maddison et al. that this divergence was huge. Is this scenario any better for Frank? If the New Economic History, New Institutional History, and the New Growth Theory and Empirics, say anything, it is that, going beyond simple neoclassical models, policies and institutions did make a difference in growth outcomes. So hey, we have whittled down 1,000 years of "superior" European institutions to just 250 years... great! But that just happens to be the 250 years in which the gap between rich and poor nations has gone through thr roof. And so it really matters, and it still begs the question as to what made the difference for Europe, and why Asia (and others) didn't have the right conditions. So Frank now has to move to post-1750, not pre-1750, and tell us why that happened, and where we are going. And here there are two problems--one theoretical, one empirical. First, if it is not the Institutions/NEH/Growth story, then what is it--surely not a rehash of the discredited structuralist/dependency theories of the 1960s? Second, who said Asia is getting ready to once again catch and surpass Europe; a handful (literally) of countries have reached middle income per capita levels, namely the NICs, meaning they have reached the same level as the richest Latin American countries, and are close to the poorest "Western" nations. But the rest of Asia is far behind. China and India dominate the population weighted picture. Their institutional and policy environment is/was not very conducive for growth, or else why would their per capita incomes be so low? Even on the most optimistic forecasts, parity of the East (as a whole) and West might be decades or centuries away.
I think (and I think David Landes, Joel Mokyr, and many others think) that the Industrial Revolution is so important because it is the beginning of that great bifurcation. (And that bifurcation is great even if we allow Europe to still have a lead in 1750; the lead just gets and order of magnitude bigger after that). Explaining that post- 1750 bifurcation is probably THE greatest challenge of global economic history. Landes deserves credit: he has tried to meet that challenge, and he gave us a story. What's yours?