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From the link, it sounds like recent study has pushed back on Pomeranz's thesis of "coal and colonies": >So is Pomeranz’s book, his theory about the Great Dive

From the link, it sounds like recent study has pushed back on Pomeranz's thesis of "coal and colonies": >So is Pomeranz’s book, his theory about the Great Divergence, now the received wisdom? >It’s the received wisdom among some historians. However, I would say that the empirical evidence has moved against it in the last 20 years. >It turns out that in England silver wages were three times those in the Yangtze delta and five times those in India already by 1600. So the latest you can probably put the Great Divergence is 1700, which means that Pomeranz’s story about it being all about colonial windfalls and British coal use is probably misguided. >One historian, Deirdre McCloskey, has pointed out that if coal was so important, Chinese industries could just have moved closer to coal because they have tons of it.

paganel 4y ago
What I got out of Poneranz’s book is that China started stagnating once it got out of wood to use, around the early 1700s if I remember rightly, I can’t remember that much of a discussion about England and about its coal deposits, hence why I particularly liked it (there are countless other books written by Western writers about England and its industrial revolution).
- towaway15463 4y ago
  The question then should be why did they not switch to coal after wood became scarce. England was also rapidly running out of wood to use as fuel before they adopted coal as a source of heat.
  - yorwba 4y ago
    Coal deposits are mostly in sparsely-populated areas. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-geographic-distribution-of-population-centers-and-coal-reserves-and-the-level-of_fig1_243968885 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-geographic-distribut... People in the coal-rich, tree-poor northern steppe did mine coal, but getting it to densely-populated areas would've been expensive.
    - towaway15463 4y ago
      That map and this one https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-coal-deposits-in-China-Source-IEA-Clean-Coal-Center-Coal-Online_fig10_228838239 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-coal-dep... seem to show a lot of centrally located deposits along with several near the coast. Most coal deposits in England are in the north so they did have to transport it. I realize England is much smaller but it looks to me like China has a lot more coal spread over a wider area. I imagine wood fuel would also need to be transported a long distance after forests near major population centres had been depleted so I don’t think the transportation cost argument holds up.

paganel 4y ago

What I got out of Poneranz’s book is that China started stagnating once it got out of wood to use, around the early 1700s if I remember rightly, I can’t remember that much of a discussion about England and about its coal deposits, hence why I particularly liked it (there are countless other books written by Western writers about England and its industrial revolution).

towaway15463 4y ago
The question then should be why did they not switch to coal after wood became scarce. England was also rapidly running out of wood to use as fuel before they adopted coal as a source of heat.
- yorwba 4y ago
  Coal deposits are mostly in sparsely-populated areas. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-geographic-distribution-of-population-centers-and-coal-reserves-and-the-level-of_fig1_243968885 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-geographic-distribut... People in the coal-rich, tree-poor northern steppe did mine coal, but getting it to densely-populated areas would've been expensive.
  - towaway15463 4y ago
    That map and this one https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-coal-deposits-in-China-Source-IEA-Clean-Coal-Center-Coal-Online_fig10_228838239 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-coal-dep... seem to show a lot of centrally located deposits along with several near the coast. Most coal deposits in England are in the north so they did have to transport it. I realize England is much smaller but it looks to me like China has a lot more coal spread over a wider area. I imagine wood fuel would also need to be transported a long distance after forests near major population centres had been depleted so I don’t think the transportation cost argument holds up.