de Vries, Jan

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UC BerkeleyUC Berkeley Previously Published WorksTitleThe Great Divergence Reconsidered: Europe, India, and the Rise to Global Economic PowerPermalinkhttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/41w3w25xJournalAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, 121(3)ISSN0002-8762Authorde Vries, JanPublication Date2016 Peer reviewedeScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital LibraryUniversity of Californiaover many decades for aboriginal Kulin people in Victo-ria, she also acquired huge tracts of their land.The volume is somewhat unbalanced in terms of its na-tional coverage. The book includes four articles on Aus-tralia, three on Canada, two on South Africa, and oneeach on New Zealand and the U.S. More attention toNew Zealand and the U.S. would be welcome, especiallysince U.S. historians have lagged in analyzing the nation’ssettler colonial past.The best essays in the volume take pains to link theprocesses they describe to other colonial contexts. AngelaWanhalla, for example, observes how settler colonialismtook a much less draconian form in New Zealand. Resi-dents on the Taieri Native Reserve were not subject tosurveillance nor restricted to the reserve as she notes wasthe case for so many Indigenous subjects in the U.S.,Australia, and Canada.Many of the essays in the volume consider how thesehistories continue to exert influence today. The chapterby Julie Evans and Giordano Nanni on Coranderrkshows that when the Kulin brought their land claim tocourt in Victoria, Australia, in 1998, a judge relied on thenostalgic memoir of Edward Curr, a settler who had bla-tantly dispossessed the Kulin, as evidence that the Kulinhad not continuously occupied their land, and thus werenot eligible to reclaim it.It is hard not to get angry while reading this volume.Author after author uncovers a confounding pattern—Indigenous communities adapting to a new set of rules,winning the game, and then settler societies changing therulebook. As Sarah Carter sums up, “it was profitable toinsist that Aboriginal people were incapable agricultural-ists . . . despite clear evidence to the contrary” (175).By shuttling between the global and the local, this vol-ume accomplishes something quite extraordinary. Itshows us the power and hegemony of settler colonial in-stitutions in the late nineteenth century at the same timeas it uncovers the rich local histories of how Indigenouspeople confronted dispossession and displacement.MARGARET D. JACOBSUniversity of Nebraska-LincolnPHILIP T. HOFFMAN. Why Did Europe Conquer the World?(The Princeton Economic History of the WesternWorld.) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2015. Pp. 272. $29.95.ROMAN STUDER. The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Eu-rope, India, and the Rise to Global Economic Power.New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii,231. $99.00.Global history and large-scale comparative history nowenjoy a place of prominence in a discipline that for a gen-eration has been dominated by very different agendas.The contemporary reality of a globalized world and theinfluence of the Great Divergence thesis have inspired astream of stimulating new historical studies. Simultane-ously, they have forced historians to consider anew theplace of social science theories and quantitative methodsin their discipline. Studies of a global scope often requirethe use of sources and methods that most historians havenot considered since the onset of the “cultural turn.” Thetwo books reviewed here offer a nice demonstration ofwhat a discipline that hopes to participate in this new his-torical discourse must be prepared to incorporate into itsportfolio of research methods.Roman Studer’s book bears a title that might bethought a bit too grand for its actual subject matter, but itprovides a fine illustration of how large theses in Eur-asian history can actually be tested with specific historicaldata. Studer takes on the core Great Divergence claim ofpre-1800 equivalence in economic performance amongthe major economies of Eurasia. How can that claim betested? Studer reasons that an economy’s overall level ofdevelopment can be measured by the extent of its marketintegration. There can be no significant division of labor(Adam Smith’s measure of development) without mar-kets integrated over an extensive area that allow for spe-cialization among producers and that convey the fruits ofthis specialization to consumers via lower and more sta-ble prices. Therefore, if the Great Divergence claim canbe given credence, the price behavior of markets for basiccommodities such as wheat and rice should reveal com-parable levels of integration. Studer proceeds to test thisproposition for market prices in Europe and India.In order to describe and analyze the market prices forthese two locales, Studer employs techniques long usedby economists. Economists have relied on standard statis-tical tests for market integration: coefficients of correla-tion measure co-movement between pairs of price series;coefficients of variation measure the volatility of price se-ries; price convergence (a reduction of price differentialsbetween price series) measures the reduction of the fric-tion of transaction costs on markets; and, finally, errorcorrelation models measure the speed with which a givenmarket responds to a disequilibrating price shock.In order to successfully conduct this investigation,Studer needed reliable data stretching back into the earlymodern era—long, unbroken series of annual averageprices—for the two subcontinents. European price dataare abundant, although Studer enriches his study withSwiss data in order to de-emphasize the advanced mar-kets of northwest Europe as a comparator. His main his-torical challenge was to locate and properly utilize the farscarcer Indian market prices. This review cannot supply afull evaluation of the comparability of the Indian price re-cords to those available for most of Europe. Studer lo-cated fifty-four Indian price series, although the pre-nineteenth-century series remain scarce and the annualdata seem often to be based on very few observations.The data are not ideal, but they far exceed what has hith-erto been available. Moreover, Studer takes care in hisstatistical analyses to “handicap” the more abundant andfine-grained European data so as to avoid reaching re-sults that are simply a reflection of differences in datadensity and quality.Studer walks his reader through the statistical tech-niques and offers intuitive interpretations that should beaccessible to any interested reader. His findings are clear914 Reviews of BooksAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2016Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/121/3/914/2582287by University of California, Berkeley useron 19 December 2017and appear robust: Indian grain markets showed very lowlevels of integration by every measure used until after themid-nineteenth century. Before then India’s grain tradewas essentially local; annual price fluctuations were ex-tremely high (two to four times higher than in Europeanmarkets); differences in price levels between marketswere pronounced and persistent, and prices betweenmarket pairs were essentially uncorrelated. Europeanmarkets reveal a fairly steady increase in integrationthroughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and,indeed, from the early seventeenth century. By Studer’smeasures, the Great Divergence between Europe and In-dia “needs to be shifted back to the seventeenth century,if not earlier” (182). Nearly as remarkable as the poor in-tegration of Indian markets before the mid-nineteenthcentury is Studer’s finding of rapid improvement in all hisindicators thereafter, reaching a rough parity with Euro-pean standards by 1900. Our confidence in the benefits toIndia of “Smithian growth” would be greater if the evi-dence for market integration had been paired with a re-duction in the incidence of famines. These seem only tohave intensified, which suggests that there is more to theprocess of market integration than Studer has been ableto tell. But his book is to be recommended as a clear andaccessible example of recasting a grand historical claimas a testable proposition, assembling the needed evi-dence, and deploying relevant statistical methods to con-duct fair tests. As things now stand, it is hard to see howthe claim of economic equivalence between India, or ad-vanced parts of India, and Europe, or even its mountain-ous Helvetic zone, can be sustained.Philip T. Hoffman’s impressive book offers a very dif-ferent kind of analytical history. His title, Why Did EuropeConquer the World?, refers to military rather than eco-nomic achievement, and while he assembles quantitativedata to support some of his claims, the heart of his studyis an application of game theory to the behavior of rulersand, hence, to the question posed in the book’s title.Europe, Hoffman argues, “conquered the world” be-cause it mastered better than rivals elsewhere the “gun-powder technologies”—the firearms, artillery, armedships, bombardment-resistant fortifications, and associ-ated organizational methods and tactics—that spreadacross Eurasia from late medieval times. If rulers acrossEurasia all had access to and made use of gunpowdertechnologies, why did the Europeans alone come to excelin those technologies’ further development and effectiveuse?Hoffman’s approach to this big historical question is tosearch for a model of competitive behavior that can beapplied to differentiate among Eurasia’s many bellicosepolities. European rulers, he concludes, did not simplycompete with each other—this was true everywhere—butthey engaged in a special, intensive form of competitionakin to a tournament. He then develops a formal tourna-ment model to predict the behavior of participants (rul-ers) who faced all of its incentives and constraints, andthe behavior of rulers who confronted historical situa-tions in which one or more of the tournament’s condi-tions were absent. In short, Hoffman has taken an enor-mous question, reduced it to its essential elements, andfashioned a model consistent with these elements.A tournament differs from ordinary competitive be-havior in its intensity. The prize to the winner must bevaluable and indivisible (so that compromise or “partialvictory” is unavailable); the cost of mobilizing the re-sources needed to be competitive must be low (the rulersmust not face a hegemon enjoying overwhelmingstrength who makes the cost of competition prohibitive);and the rulers engaged in tournaments over time mustmake use of the same military technology (warfareagainst nomadic horsemen and archers diverts resourcesand attention from the development of gunpowder tech-nology). Standing behind these conditions is the exis-tence and maintenance over time of a fragmented politi-cal space in which the warring states are of commensu-rate size, and where the participating rulers can vie forvictory without fearing complete extinction in the case ofdefeat.Hoffman’s achievement is to develop a formal tourna-ment model that incorporates these elements. He de-scribes it intuitively in the text, reserving the mathemati-cal notation for appendixes. He is then able to show thatthe incentives and constraints facing participants in the“games” of his model will lead to the devotion of moreresources to warfare and more attention to the develop-ment of infrastructures of resource mobilization. Militarytechnology continues to evolve until the nineteenth cen-tury, when Hoffman’s model must be adjusted somewhatvia “learning by doing.” That is, a state can only improveits gunpowder technologies by experience in war, specifi-cally in war against enemies using the same technology.Outside Europe, rulers often fought against archers onhorseback and/or faced a hegemon, both of which dilutedthe flow of resources to warfare and the learning process.It also affected the associated development of state insti-tutions for resource mobilization. To a greater extent(China, Japan, and India) or a lesser one (Russia and theOttoman Empire), all non-European polities ineluctablyfell behind in military technology because of the differentincentives they faced in making decisions about howto engage in war. They were not less belligerent but“learned” less from their warfare.Hoffman now has the answer to his question, but onlya proximate answer. He stresses that the “ultimatecauses” of the tournament model’s applicability to Eu-rope reside in its political history. By this he means some-thing rather different from what a traditional politicalhistorian would expect. This is not a history tossed aboutby unrestrained contingency, but a set of political prac-tices and interests (emerging from the Germanic tribes,Carolingian institutions, and papal ambitions) that con-geal to set society on a “path-dependent” course. Such acourse is not immutable, but tends to reinforce itself overtime. In short, Hoffman’s political history is a causal forcein its own right. It sets the framework in which the rulersfaced, generation after generation, game after game, aset of incentives that encouraged them to fight for theprizes, invest in the “fixed cost” of fiscal systems and mili-tary establishments, and expend vast resources on war-Comparative/World/Transnational 915AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2016Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/121/3/914/2582287by University of California, Berkeley useron 19 December 2017fare. They thereby advanced the proficiency of their mili-tary technologies, but in Hoffman’s telling, they advancedmuch more than that. Via learning by doing the Euro-pean states also developed the fiscal and political institu-tions that made the tournaments possible.To return to economic history: Did Europe’s develop-ment of military superiority over the rest of the worldmake it rich? Does conquest and the threat of conquestaccount for Europe’s “primitive accumulation of capital”and later industrial revolution? Hoffman, who extendshis model to incorporate nineteenth-century develop-ments, sees a rather different connection between mili-tary power and economic development. For him, thepath-dependent political history referred to above isjointly responsible for both Europe’s growing military su-periority and the economic success that reveals itself ulti-mately in the industrial revolution. Following very differ-ent paths and using very different methods, Hoffman andStuder offer a single answer to the question of when theeconomic paths of Europe diverged from the rest of Eur-asia. The differences revealed around 1800 were theproduct neither of recent nor of fortuitous events, butwere the product of deep differences of long standing.Neither of these studies is without problems. But bothmake very substantial contributions that historiansshould take seriously. Nonetheless, doing so will requireengaging with the methodologies that have given theirauthors the capacity to address major questions in globalcomparative history.JAN DE VRIESUniversity of California, BerkeleyASIADAVID A. JOHNSON. New Delhi: The Last Imperial City.(Britain and the World.) New York: Palgrave Macmil-lan, 2015. Pp. xv, 261. Cloth $95.00, e-book $69.99.Over the last decade or so, Delhi has been the focus of agrowing body of historical research (most notably, JyotiHosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architec-ture and Urbanism [2005]; Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colo-nialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities [2007]; andAwadhendra Saran, In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance,Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c .1850–2000 [2014]).David A. Johnson’s study differs significantly from thishistoriography in its focus and approach, examining thecreation of New Delhi against the wider backdrop of Brit-ain’s global empire in the early twentieth century. Thedecision to invest in this project, Johnson argues, wasmade in “response to the global challenges of a new geo-political reality in which Britain was just one amongmany powerful industrial states” (5). Bringing about acloser alignment of British and Indian interests became apressing political challenge for the imperial elite at thisjuncture. Hence, New Delhi “displayed a double narra-tive of promised liberation and continued colonial depen-dence.” It was simultaneously a “site of traditional impe-rial authority” and a “symbol of Britain’s willingness toaddress, and thus hopefully control, the political de-mands of its Indian subjects” (6).Johnson thus frames the history of New Delhi as “aBritish imperial story set in India” (12). The first part ofthe book (chaps. 2–4) delineates the internal debateswithin the imperial establishment regarding the decisionto relocate the capital of British India from Calcutta toDelhi. These debates represented two rival conceptionsof Britain’s Indian empire. Those who supported a newcapital argued that the rising tide of Indian nationalismcalled for a more inclusive approach to governance andthe granting of strategic concessions to educated Indians.New Delhi was an opportunity to reset the course of Brit-ish rule in India “along safe and sound lines” by increas-ing the representation of natives in the council chambersof government (51). But these ambitious plans were furi-ously opposed in and out of Parliament by the old Indiahands, for whom the decision was a stark acknowledg-ment of the British failure to deal forcefully with Indiannationalists. The new capital’s cost and its potentially ad-verse impact on financial markets in India and Londonalso triggered heated arguments in Parliament about“the place of India in Britain’s global system of trade”(82).The second part of the book (chaps. 5–7) highlightsthe contradictions and conflicts that marked the makingof the new capital. One bone of contention was its loca-tion. The planning committee unexpectedly rejected theexisting area of British settlement, the “Civil Lines” northof old Delhi. Among the factors that influenced the com-mittee’s decision were perceived natural and manmaderestrictions on future growth; the belief that the morenorthern location was more vulnerable to outbreaks ofmalaria; and a reluctance to build on an old Delhi sitewhere the bitter memories of India’s 1857 uprising andits repression had not entirely faded (87). Yet the desireto forge a new compact with Indian society was undercutby the authoritarian impulses that drove the project. Forone, the crucial decisions about the construction of thecapital were taken by Britain’s viceroy Lord Hardinge(110). Hardinge’s choice of Edward Lutyens as the prin-cipal architect was to cause him “a tremendous amountof anguish” on account of the latter’s open contempt forIndian architecture (122). When the principal buildingsof the new capital were finally completed, their amalgamof Western structural forms and Indian decorative motifsreproduced in stone the unequal relationship betweenthe metropole and the colony.The final chapter shows how land acquisition reflectedthe iniquities of colonial political economy. Customaryrights of landless peasants were ignored and many of theIndian farmers in the areas earmarked for New Delhilost their lands and livelihoods while large agrarian prop-erty owners benefited. At first, the colonial authoritiessought to compensate smaller landowners with tracts ofland elsewhere, but doctrinaire adherence to free marketprinciples eventually led colonial authorities to merely re-serve lands for dispossessed Delhi gentry who wished topurchase them. Ironically, then, even though reform-minded colonial officials “had become convinced that916 Reviews of BooksAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2016Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/121/3/914/2582287by University of California, Berkeley useron 19 December 2017

The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Europe, India, and the Rise to Global Economic Power

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