Landes And Pomeranz: The Effects Of Industrialization

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The Industrial Revolution serves as a great division throughout the history of globalization. Not only are many of the effects of the Industrial Revolution still felt immensely in today's society, but also the Industrial Revolution is what set Europe apart from other early great powers, such as those of Asia. This European domination and concurrent Asian subordination has sparked debate between many scholars such as David Landes and Kenneth Pomeranz. In both Landes’s and Pomeranz’s works, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and The Great Divergence respectively, the authors reach starkly different conclusions as to why Europe was able to industrialize in the nineteenth century and Asia, aside from Japan, was not. While Landes’s argument …show more content…

In Landes’s opinion, Europe was able to succeeded in its industrialization because its past experiences and unique culture. Europe’s long history of fragmentation not only lead to the development of a uniquely dynamic culture, but also to competition. Decisions of European monarchies were fueled by this competitive drive; likewise, monarchs would make decisions that benefited their subjects (36?). In contrast, Landes contends that Asia was too self-satisfied, turned inward, and lacked the competitive curiosity of European culture.
With the advancement of technology following the Scientific Revolution and the beginnings of European exploration and expansion, Europeans began to extend this competition to other parts of the world. It is this dynamic culture that made Europeans not only more willing to experiment with technology and science, but also allowed them to become more driven by the acquisition of profit. Because of these attributes, Landes argues, Europe quickly dominated the technologically primitive Native Americans and the culturally static and despotic Asians (CITE). → move this …show more content…

Within Europe itself, he believes that as soon as any European state lost some of its cultural dynamism, another more dynamic European state quickly became dominant. He argues that Early Spanish and Portuguese dominance declined as these societies became increasingly religiously intolerant, only to be superseded by the more dynamic Dutch and British. The Dutch then lost their economic advantage as they became lazy. Landes follows this line of reasoning through to the industrial era and the present day. Britain industrialized first because of a variety of institutional factors, but most importantly because of its dynamic culture and openness to scientific experimentation. The other parts of the world that soon industrialized (France, Germany, the United States, and Japan) did so because of their flexibility, cultural dynamism, and willingness to embrace change and to copy the British model. Spain, Italy, eastern Europe, and most of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which did not rapidly industrialize, were unable to embrace change because of despotic rulers or some element of cultural stasis or religious intolerance.
In contrast with Landes’s work, within The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz attempts to answer the same question through the comparisons economic developments in Europe and China. Pomeranz

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