Just thought that I would note in passing that in The Great Divergence: Europe, China and the Making of the Modern World (Princeton, 1998) Kenneth Pomeranz argues that neither rising agricultural productivity nor the proto industrialization of the putting out system was unique to England or Europe and thus cannot geographic specificity of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent emergence of a core dominated world economy. For Pomeranz, the key limit to industrial capital and modern industrial growth was ecological, an energy shortage and a shortage of land intensive goods on which the extensive development of proto industrialization had foundered in other parts of Eurasia. In the absence of the overcoming of serious ecological constraints, proto industrialization even if it was more advanced in Holland than say the Gujarat in the 1600s would never have escaped the cul de sac in which Asia was to be trapped. The development of a new kind of periphery in the Americas--politically and militarily dominated, slave based and forcibly complementary to the mother country--allowed for the overcoming of ecological restraints on modern industrial growth in Europe (attention is also given to England's good fortune of coal deposits). Pomeranz denies that a shortage of capital prevented a similar transition in parts of China, and he denies that the property regime was uniquely biased towards modern industrial growth in Europe. Unlike Richard Jones and Robert Brenner, he does not locate the uniqueness of England in a novel tripartite agricultural regime of improving landlords-enterprising tenants--dispossessed wage laborers, though he does not in fact carefully refute this view. For Pomeranz, modern growth was impeded not on the value side, not in terms of the shortage of investible capital which Europe would later overcome by plunder (there was no shortage of capital in parts of China) but on the use value or physical side. It was a physical shortage of energy and of land-intensive goods that had to be overcome. The development of a new kind of periphery in the Americas allowed for this. Pomeranz thus gives a very different importance to the colonization of the Americas than James Blaut (and others in the dependency tradition) has. For our value- and social relations dominated OPE-list, it is interesting to take note of those whose primary focus is on ecological or use value impediments. I don't know if Paul Burkett and others find this kind of comparative, ecologically sensitive historical approach complementary to their efforts at a green/red synthesis? All the best, Rakesh
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