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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2010

Klas Rönnbäck
Klas Rönnbäck
Affiliation:
University of Gothenburg, Department of Economic History, P.O. Box 720, SE-405 30 Göteborg, Sweden E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , November 2010 , pp. 373 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000Google Scholar. See also idem, ‘Political economy and ecology on the eve of industrialization: Europe, China, and the global conjuncture’, American Historical Review, 107, 2, 2002, pp. 425–46.

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4 Pomeranz, Great Divergence, ch. 1–2.

5 See for example Robert Allen et al., ‘Wages, prices, and living standards in China, 1738–1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan and India’, University of Oxford, Department of Economics discussion paper 316, 2005, http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/allen/unpublished/group-1.pdf (consulted 18 August 2010); Robert Allen, The British industrial revolution in global perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘The early modern Great Divergence: wages, prices and economic development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800’, Economic History Review, 59, 1, 2006, pp. 2–31; Jan Luiten van Zanden, The long road to the industrial revolution: the European economy in a global perspective, 1000–1800, Leiden: Brill, 2009.

6 Pomeranz, Great Divergence, ch. 6 and appendix D. The vast endowments of land in the New World are also an important explanation behind the colonization of the Americas, according to P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, Harlow: Longman, 2001.

7 Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 267.

8 P. H. H. Vries, ‘Are coal and colonies really crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence’, Journal of World History, 12, 2, 2001, p. 434.

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10 Davis, Industrial Revolution, table 9.

11 Gregory Clark, Kevin O’Rourke, and Alan Taylor, ‘Made in America? The New World, the old, and the Industrial Revolution’, American Economic Review, 98, 2, 2008, pp. 523–28.

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13 Inikori, Africans, table 8.1.

14 Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 258.

15 See, for example, Topolski, Jerzy, ‘Economic decline in Poland from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries’, in Peter Earle, ed., Essays in European economic history, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974Google Scholar, pp. 137–42.

16 Danish National Archive (Rigsarkivet), Sound Toll Chamber (Øresunds toldkammer), Commodity Records from the North and Baltic Seas, 1773–1856 (Vareregistre fra Nord- og Østersøen 1773–1856) (henceforth DNA, STCCR).

17 Sven-Erik Åström, From tar to timber: studies in northeast European forest exploitation and foreign trade 1660–1860, Helsinki: Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 1988; Kalevi Ahonen, From sugar triangle to cotton triangle: trade and shipping between America and Baltic Russia, 1783–1860, Jyvaskyla: University of Jyvaskyla, 2005; Klas Rönnbäck, ‘Atlantic sugar in the Baltic economy during the Early Modern period’, in Commerce and colonisation: studies in early modern merchant capitalism in the Atlantic economy, Gothenburg Studies in Economic History 3, Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 2009. See also idem, ‘The Sound Toll Chamber Commodity Records: estimating the reliability of a potential source to international trade history’, International Journal of Maritime History, forthcoming 2010.

18 See, for example, Pomeranz, Great Divergence, pp. 253–63.

19 Davis, Industrial Revolution, p. 82.

20 Van Tielhof, ‘Mother’, ch. 2.

21 Paul Sharp, ‘The long American grain invasion of Britain: market integration and the wheat trade between North America and Britain from the eighteenth century’, University of Copenhagen: Department of Economics Discussion paper 08–20, 2008, http://www.econ.ku.dk/english/research/publications/wp/2008/0820.pdf (consulted 19 August 2010), fig. 2.

22 Pat Hudson, ‘The limits of wool and the potential of cotton in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, in Riello, Giorgio and Parthasarathi, Prasannan, eds., The spinning world: a global history of cotton textiles, 1200–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009Google Scholar, pp. 327–50.

23 Peter Gunst, ‘Agrarian systems of central and eastern Europe’, in Agrarian development and social change in eastern Europe, 14th–19th centuries, Aldershot: Variorum, 1996, pp. 53–91.

24 See for example Jane Gray, ‘The Irish, Scottish, and Flemish linen industries during the long eighteenth century’, in Brenda Collins and Philip Ollerenshaw, eds., The European linen industry in historical perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 159–86.

25 Pomeranz, Great Divergence, pp. 276 and 315.

26 Kent, H. S. K., War and trade in northern seas: Anglo-Scandinavian economic relations in the mid-eighteenth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973Google Scholar, ch. 3 and appendix 1.

27 Åström, From tar, table II:1.

28 Åström’s data on timber exports from the Baltic through the Sound unfortunately only cover a shorter period, 1785–1817, and are therefore not included in the table. For the pre-Blockade period, the overall trend seems slightly negative, mainly because exports of both fir timber and deals grew to a peak by the 1790s, after which they stagnate and later decline, owing to a Russian prohibition on exports (more on this in the main text): see Åström, From tar, table VI:1 B.

29 See for example Topolski, ‘Economic decline’; Witold Kula, An economic theory of the feudal system: towards a model of the Polish economy 1500–1800, London: NLB, 1976, pp. 115–17.

30 Peter Gunst, ‘Some characteristics of east European economic and social development: data and reflections’, in Gunst, Agrarian development, pp. 13–41.

31 Peter Gunst, ‘Some characteristics of East European economic and social development: data and reflections’ in Gunst, Agrarian development.

32 Gunst, ‘Agrarian systems’, p. 74.

33 Oliver Volckart, ‘Central Europe’s way to a market economy, 1000–1800’, European Review of Economic History, 6, 2002, pp. 309–37.

34 Berend, Ivan, History derailed: central and eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003Google Scholar, p. 27. See also Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Rodart, A history of world agriculture: from the Neolithic Age to the current crisis, London: Earthscan, 2006, p. 345; Giovanni Federico, Feeding the world: an economic history of agriculture, 1800–2000, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 148.

35 Robert Allen, ‘Economic structure and agricultural productivity in Europe, 1300–1800’, European Review of Economic History, 3, 2000, pp. 1–25.

36 Kula, An economic theory, pp. 94–5.

37 David Jacks, ‘Market integration in the North and Baltic Seas, 1500–1800’, Journal of European Economic History, 33, 3, 2004, pp. 285–329. See also Christiaan van Bochove, ‘Market integration and the North Sea system (1600–1800)’, in Hanno Brand and Loes Müller, eds., The dynamics of economic culture in the North Sea- and Baltic region in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2007, pp. 155–169.

38 Berend, History, p. 148.

39 Sven-Erik Åström, From Stockholm to St. Petersburg: commercial factors in the political relations between England and Sweden 1675–1700, Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1962, pp. 15–18. See also Kent, War, ch. 1.

40 Davis, Industrial Revolution, pp. 48–9; Åström, From tar, p. 92.

41 Williams, Michael, Deforesting the earth: from prehistory to global crisis, Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2003Google Scholar, ch. 10.

42 Åström, From tar, graph on p. 60, and tables V:3 and V:5 B 2.

43 Ibid., p. 40.

44 Federico, Feeding, table 4.1.

45 Kula, An economic theory, p. 114–15.

46 Ronald Findlay, ‘International trade and factor mobility with an endogenous land frontier: some general equilibrium implications of Christopher Columbus’, in Wilfred Ethier, Elhanan Helpman, and Peter Neary, eds., Theory, policy and dynamics in international trade: essays in honor of Ronald W. Jones, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 38–54. A similar argument has recently been made by Nuala Zahedieh, The capital and the colonies: London and the Atlantic economy 1660–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 280–92.

47 See, for example, Kevin O’Rourke, ‘The European grain invasion, 1870–1913’, Journal of Economic History, 57, 4, 1997, pp. 775–801; C. Knick Harley, ‘Western settlement and the price of wheat’, Journal of Economic History, 38, 4, 1978, pp. 865–78; idem, ‘Transportation, the world wheat trade, and the Kuznets cycle, 1850–1913’, Explorations in Economic History, 17, 1980, pp. 218–50; Sharp, ‘The long American grain invasion’.

48 DNA, STCCR 1773–1856, data not shown.

49 Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, The Russian factory in the 19th century, trans. Arthur Levin and Claora S. Levin, Homewood: American Economic Association/Richard Irwin Inc, 1970 [1898], pp. 54–5.

50 Pomeranz mentions some of these himself in passing – including technological factors and the labour intensity of the cloth-producing process – but mainly emphasizes the acreage necessary for the supply of the fibres: see Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 276. See also, for example, Joel Mokyr, The lever of riches: technological creativity and economic progress, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 103.

51 Beverly Lemire, ‘Transforming consumer custom: linens, cottons and the English market, 1660–1800’, in Collins and Ollerenshaw, European linen industry, pp. 187–208.

52 Vries ‘Are coal’, p. 429; Hudson, ‘Limits’; Lemire, ‘Transforming’.

53 This is perhaps compatible with Pomeranz’s claim that the Americas were important not only because of the vast acreage as such but also because the former colonies were ‘set up’ during colonial times to demand European products in exchange for the exports of raw materials: see Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 267.

54 Clark, O’Rourke, and Taylor, ‘Made in America’.

55 Cornelis Fasseur, The politics of colonial exploitation: Java, the Dutch and the cultivation system, trans. R. E. Elson and Ary Kraal, Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1992; Galloway, J. H., The sugar cane industry: an historical geography from its origins to 1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989Google Scholar.

56 Davis, Industrial Revolution, table 26. See also Michael Edwards, The growth of the British cotton trade, 1780–1815, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967, ch. 5; Douglas Farnie, The English cotton industry and the world market, 1815–1896, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, ch. 3.

57 See for example Findlay, ‘International trade’; Harley, ‘Western settlement’; idem, ‘Transportation’; C. Knick Harley, ‘Ocean freight rates and productivity, 1740–1913: the primacy of mechanical invention reaffirmed’, Journal of Economic History, 48, 4, 1988, pp. 851–76; Karl Gunnar Persson, ‘Mind the gap! Transport costs and price convergence in the nineteenth century Atlantic economy’, European Review of Economic History, 8, 2004, pp. 125–47.

58 Federico, Feeding, p. 40, also table 5.2 for figures on land and labour productivity in diverse countries by the late nineteenth century.

59 Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, ‘The economics of slavery in the ante-bellum South’, Journal of Political Economy, 66, 1958, pp. 95–130; Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the cross: the economics of American negro slavery, London: Wildwood House, 1974. For more recent summaries of the debates that followed, see Mark Smith, Debating slavery: economy and society in the antebellum American South, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, ch. 5; Fogel, Robert, The slavery debates, 1952–1990: a retrospective, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2003Google Scholar, pp. 30–2.