Great Divergence

This article is about the era of dominance of Western civilization. For post-1970 growth in inequality, see Great Divergence (inequality). For the nonfiction book, see The Great Divergence (book).
"European miracle" redirects here. For the 1981 book, see The European Miracle.

The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe along with its settler offshoots in Northern America and Australasia) overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization, eclipsing previously dominant or comparable civilizations from Asia such as Qing China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tokugawa Japan, among others.

Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including geography, culture, institutions, and luck. There is disagreement over the nomenclature of the "great" divergence; while some scholars emphasize slow, long-term structural social changes rooted in the medieval period, others traditionally point to the 15th or 16th century as the definitive beginning, citing the Commercial Revolution and the origins of mercantilism and capitalism during the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, the rise of the European colonial empires, proto-globalization, the Scientific Revolution, or the Age of Enlightenment. Yet the largest jump in the divergence by most accounts happened in the late 18th and 19th centuries with the Industrial Revolution and Technological Revolution. For this reason, the "California school" considers only this to be "the great divergence".

Technological advances, in areas such as transportation, mining, and agriculture, were embraced to a higher degree in western Eurasia than the east during the Great Divergence. Technology led to increased industrialization and economic complexity in the areas of agriculture, trade, fuel, and resources, further separating east and west. Britian's use of coal as an energy substitute for wood in the 18th century gave it a major head start in modern energy production. In the twentieth century, the Great Divergence peaked before the First World War and continued until the early 1970s; then, after two decades of indeterminate fluctuations, in the late 1980s it was replaced by the Great Convergence as the majority of developing countries reached economic growth rates significantly higher than those in most developed countries, although these countries still have much smaller per capita GDPs, for now.

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