Japan in the Great Divergence Debate: The Quantitative Story

In response to The Great Divergence, a number of economic historians set about attempting to test Pomeranz’s hypothesis against such quantitative data as could be found. The availability of such data for Japan meant that the Japanese case could be considered within quantitative comparisons related to the Great Divergence, even if access to qualitative evidence was limited. The starting point for these comparisons was Maddison’s global estimates of GDP, but these were based on very limited sources, and considerable efforts have been made to find better comparative indicators of economic conditions, such as real wage rates or improved GDP per capita series. These have generally failed to confirm Pomeranz’s case and have suggested that levels of output and income had already begun to diverge across Eurasia well before the Industrial Revolution. Early-modern Japan, like China, appears to have lagged behind northern Europe, but to have moved ahead of China as leader of a ‘little divergence’ within Asia by the eighteenth century. However, while the many inadequacies of such quantitative evidence are still being addressed, it remains to be seen how far it accords with the available qualitative picture of economic change in pre-industrial Japan.