Contingency and Structure in the Great Divergence Debate

How Historians Weigh Luck Against Deep Causation in Explaining the Rise of the West

Few questions in economic history have generated as much productive disagreement as the “Great Divergence” — the problem of why northwestern Europe, and Britain above all, industrialized and pulled decisively ahead of the advanced economies of Asia after roughly 1800. Beneath the empirical quarrels over wages, life expectancy, and coal output lies a deeper methodological divide about the nature of historical causation itself. One camp treats the divergence as contingent, conjunctural, and in principle reversible — the product of resource windfalls, geographic luck, and specific policy responses that might easily have gone otherwise. The other treats it as the expression of deep, long-maturing structural advantages that made European ascendancy something close to overdetermined. The place one assigns to counterfactual reasoning — to the question “could it have turned out differently?” — is the clearest fault line between them.

The Revisionist Case: Contingency and the California School

The revisionist position, often called the “California School,” is anchored by Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000). Pomeranz argues that as late as 1750 the most developed regions of Europe and Asia — England and China’s Yangzi Delta — were “surprisingly similar” in living standards, commercialization, market integration, and even ecological strain. If the two cores were comparable, then the explosive divergence that followed cannot be credited to some ancient European superiority; it must be traced to factors that appeared late and contingently. Pomeranz identifies two: coal deposits that happened to sit close to England’s population and manufacturing centers, and the “ghost acres” of the New World — the vast land-equivalent in sugar, cotton, and timber that colonies and slave labor supplied, relieving Europe of ecological limits that still bound the Yangzi. His method is essentially counterfactual: strip away coal’s convenient location and the colonial windfall, and England, he contends, would have run into the same land constraints that checked China’s most advanced region. Contingency is not incidental to the argument; it is the argument.

Prasannan Parthasarathi’s Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (2011) reinforces the comparative premise from the Indian side. He shows that the cotton textile industries of Bengal and South India were, into the eighteenth century, the most sophisticated in the world — the benchmark that European producers strained to imitate. For Parthasarathi the divergence flows not from European genius but from distinct competitive and ecological pressures and the policy responses they provoked: British manufacturers, facing superior Indian cottons, secured protection and import substitution, while a domestic timber shortage pushed Britain toward coal. Divergence, in this telling, is the product of specific pressures, state action, and resource constraints — again contingent, again bound up with global competition rather than innate advantage.

R. Bin Wong shares the school’s foundational move — its refusal to treat Europe as the universal standard against which Asia is measured. In China Transformed (1997) he advocates “reciprocal” or symmetric comparison: European and Chinese trajectories should each be assessed on their own terms rather than scored against a European template, and he warns against the teleology that reads the eventual European outcome back into earlier centuries. Yet Wong complicates any tidy revisionist consensus. In Before and Beyond Divergence (2011), written with Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, he departs from Pomeranz on both timing and cause, placing the roots of divergence up to two centuries earlier and locating them not in coal and colonies but in politics — Europe’s chronic warfare and political fragmentation, which raised the relative cost of rural production and drew capital and manufacturing into fortified cities. Wong thus occupies an instructive middle position: non-Eurocentric in method, but willing to reintroduce durable structural causes that the strictest contingency accounts play down.

The Structural and Endogenous Case

On this Wong points toward the debate’s other pole. Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient (1998) is anti-Eurocentric like the California School, but structuralist in a way that all but dissolves contingency: he posits a single, continuous, Asia-centered world economy in which Europe’s rise was a brief, cyclical episode financed by American silver — Europe merely “bought a ticket on the Asian train.” Frank resists counterfactuals from the left, so to speak, subordinating pivotal choices to long structural rhythms.

David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) resists them from the opposite direction. For Landes the divergence was neither lucky nor late; it was the harvest of centuries of endogenous European development — secure property rights, competitive markets, the political fragmentation that spurred rivalry and innovation, an institutionalized culture of scientific inquiry, and a set of values he summarizes in the claim that “culture makes all the difference.” Where Pomeranz sees two comparable cores separated by a fortunate break, Landes sees a Europe that had been quietly accumulating advantages for half a millennium, such that its ascendancy was less an accident than an outcome waiting to happen. In his frame counterfactuals lose their bite: remove coal or colonies and a Europe so equipped would, he implies, have found another road to the same destination.

Counterfactuals as the Dividing Line

The two approaches therefore diverge most sharply precisely over counterfactual weight. For the revisionists, history is open: comparable societies were tipped onto different paths by contingencies of geology, geography, and policy, and imagining those contingencies otherwise is central to explaining what actually happened. For Landes — and, by a very different route, for Frank — the outcome is closer to structurally determined, and counterfactual “what-ifs” are correspondingly marginal, whether because deep cultural-institutional advantages made European industrialization robust to accident or because vast world-systemic cycles dwarf any single decision.

Neither camp holds the field uncontested, and the most durable insight of the exchange may be that the disagreement is not only empirical but philosophical. It turns on how much explanatory work “luck” should be allowed to do, on whether Europe should be the yardstick or one case among several, and on whether large outcomes are best understood as the sum of small, reversible turning points or as the surfacing of forces long in preparation. Wong’s intermediate stance — comparative in method, structural in its attention to politics — suggests the productive path forward is not to choose contingency or structure but to specify how the two interact: which structures set the range of possible outcomes, and which contingencies select among them.

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