New and old peripheries: Britain, the Baltic, and the Americas in the Great Divergence

In his seminal book The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz has argued that access to inputs from the vast acreages available in the Americas was crucial for the Industrial Revolution in Britain. But could no other regions of the world have provided the inputs in demand? Recent research claims that this could have been the case. This article takes that research one step further by studying Britain’s trade with an old and important peripheral trading partner, the Baltic, contrasting this to the British trade with America. The article shows that production for export was not necessarily stagnating in the Baltic, as Pomeranz has claimed. Qualitative aspects of the factor endowment of land did not, however, enable the production of specific raw materials, such as cotton, to meet the increasing demand. Thus, the decreasing role of the Baltic ought to a large extent to be attributed to the patterns of British industrialization, and the demand it created for specific raw materials, rather than internal, institutional constraints in the Baltic region.