摘要
Was today＇s alternative model of development universal in the eighteenth century？ By comparing what was then mainstream economic development with today＇s alternative model, The Great Divergence： China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy （hereafter, The Great Divergence） reminds us that development has many possibilities. Like many of us who are familiar with the classic research models for the origins of Western European capitalism, Pomeranz, on encountering evidence betraying the paucity of advocates for the ＂European miracle＂ and the backwardness of early modem England and Europe, was irresistibly impelled to reassess this period. What he found was a decline in environmental resources relative to the growing population in the preindustrial world--an issue that can hardly be said to be economic; rather, for the moment, let us acknowledge it as arising from the demand for plant and animal resources. The Great Divergence asserts that in the eighteenth century, when timber had not yet been completely replaced by coal, four major products of the land--food, fuel, fiber and building materials--were facing increasing demographic pressure, which people in Europe, especially England, and in China, especially the lower Yangzi Delta （Jiangnan）, and even in Japan and India, were all trying to deal with, and to which they all responded by choosing a labor-intensive path. This raised output and satisfied the environmental resource needs of a growing population. In the end, however, The Great Divergence lets the cat out of the bag, holding that environmental pressures were considerably relieved in England in the mid- to late eighteenth century, due to the industrial revolution sparked by its coal and iron and the abundant supply of land-intensive products imported from the New World; England then abandoned its labor-intensive path and took the road of industrialization, in which capital and labor made up for shortage of land. With the advent of the industrial revolution, Pomeranz＇ doubts about Eurocentrism automatically come to an end; the nineteenth century becomes a dividing wall. The concept of development that takes environmental resources--including land--as existing merely for demand and consumption takes its fixed form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the stage in which economic development reigned supreme and industrialization proceeded through plunder and rapine.
Was today's alternative model of development universal in the eighteenth century?By comparing what was then mainstream economic development with today's alternative model,The Great Divergence:China,Europe,and the Making of the Modern World Economy(hereafter,The Great Divergence)reminds us that development has many possibilities.Like many of us who are familiar with the classic research models for the origins of Western European capitalism,Pomeranz,on encountering evidence betraying the paucity of
