The Great Divergence

There's only so far we can stretch away from our grubby material reality.

This point is hammered home by Nick in his use of two seminal texts of nineteenth century history, Karl Pomeranz's The Great Divergence and Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocaust.

I've not seen the two bracketed together like this, and whilst very different books written from different perspectives, they make sense.

Pomeranz argues that what were some of the richest parts of the planet by the late eighteenth century, the Yangtze River Delta in China, Bengal in India and England, with very similar living conditions, had by the nineteenth century's end been forced onto radically different paths, which Pomeranz attributes primarily to colonialism.

It was, as Davies' subtitle says, the making of the Third World.

The crucial piece here is that, as Nick writes, a period of major tension and disruption in the world economy was resolved for a while through the creation of another form of hierarchy.

The great divergence in this case between the developed Western Europe and its underdeveloped colonies and near colonies.

Nick thinks a similar great green divergence could happen today, with those countries best able to claim their share of an increasingly zero sum world likely to come out on top.