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China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2018

Stephen Broadberry ,
Hanhui Guan  and
David Daokui Li
Stephen Broadberry*
Affiliation:
Professor of Economic History, University of Oxford, Nuffield College, OX1 1NF, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Hanhui Guan*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Peking University – Economics, Yiheyuan Read, No. 5, Haidian District, Beijing PRC, Beijign, Beijing 100871, China.
David Daokui Li*
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics, Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, Beijing, Beijing, China.
*
E-mail: [email protected]
E-mail: [email protected]
E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

As a result of recent advances in historical national accounting, estimates of GDP per capita are now available for a number of European economies back to the medieval period, including Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain. The approach has also been extended to Asian economies, including India and Japan. So far, however, China, which has been at the center of the Great Divergence debate, has been absent from this approach. This article adds China to the picture, showing that the Great Divergence began earlier than originally suggested by the California School, but later than implied by older Eurocentric writers.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 78 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 955 - 1000
Copyright
© 2018 The Economic History Association. All rights reserved. 

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Footnotes

This paper began as part of the Collaborative Project HI-POD supported by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme for Research, Contract Number SSH7-CT-2008-225342. David Daokui Li and Hanhui Guan acknowledge financial support from the National Social Science Foundation (15ZDB130, 13BJL016). We are grateful to Jack Goldstone, Peter Lindert, Debin Ma, Bas van Leeuwen, Peter Temin, Tom Weiss, and to seminar/conference participants at Columbus, Istanbul, Lund, Lyon, Odense, Vienna, and York for helpful comments and suggestions. Pei Gao provided invaluable research assistance. We also owe our gratitude to two anonymous referees and Ann Carlos, the editor of this JOURNAL, for helpful guidance.

References

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