Kenneth Pomeranz

• 1. Introduction

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  Kenneth Pomeranz asked a question that historians had been avoiding for centuries: why did industrialization happen in Europe, and not in China? In the year 2000, Princeton University Press published his answer in a book called The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. The argument inside that book would reshape how scholars, economists, and policymakers understood the origins of the modern world. But Pomeranz did not arrive at that question overnight. His path ran through the farmlands and markets of inland North China, through two decades of teaching in California, and through a school of thought that had spent years insisting the standard story of Western economic dominance was badly wrong. This documentary follows that path, from his earliest research into a forgotten hinterland to the prizes and presidencies that marked him as one of the defining historians of his generation.

• 2. Roots and Training

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  Pomeranz was born on the 4th of November 1958. He earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1980, where he was a Telluride Scholar, a distinction reserved for students of exceptional academic promise. He then moved to Yale University, where he studied under Jonathan Spence, one of the most celebrated historians of China in the twentieth century. That mentorship shaped the direction of his career. By 1988, Pomeranz had completed his doctorate at Yale. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Irvine, where he would spend more than twenty years teaching. It was there, in those California years, that his scholarly identity formed around what would come to be called the California School of economic history.

• 3. The Hinterland Years

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  Before Pomeranz tackled the big question of global economic divergence, he trained his attention on a much more specific place: inland North China during the years from 1853 to 1937. His first book, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937, was published by the University of California Press in 1993. That study won the John K. Fairbank Prize in 1994, the same prize awarded for the best book in East Asian history. The award signaled that Pomeranz had mastered the local and the granular before turning to the comparative and the global. His early articles traced equally specific territory: a chapter on the Yutang Company of Jining, a family firm whose records spanned from 1779 to 1956; a study of the Handam Rain Shrine in modern Chinese history; and an examination of capital markets in Shandong between 1900 and 1937. Each piece was a brick in a larger structure he was quietly building.

• 4. The Great Divergence

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  The year 2000 brought the book that changed everything. The Great Divergence argued that as late as the eighteenth century, key regions of China were roughly comparable to the most advanced parts of Europe in terms of living standards, market sophistication, and ecological constraints. The widening gap came later, and it came for specific reasons. Princeton University Press published the book, and the scholarly world responded immediately. It won the John K. Fairbank Prize for 2001, its second Fairbank Prize for Pomeranz in seven years. It also shared the World History Association's prize for the best book of 2000. The book did not stand alone. Pomeranz co-authored a companion volume, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, published by M. E. Sharpe in 1999, which set the divergence argument inside a broader history of global commerce. The subsequent stream of articles deepened specific threads: comparisons of women's work in Europe and East Asia, standards of living in eighteenth-century China, and the political economy of industrialization on the eve of its emergence.

• 5. Awards and Recognition

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  The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Pomeranz a fellowship in 1997, between his two Fairbank prizes. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey ran during 2011-12. In 2013-2014 he served as president of the American Historical Association, one of the most prominent positions in the American historical profession. The British Academy elected him a Corresponding Fellow in 2017, recognizing his standing in the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Two prizes of particular scale arrived in his later career: the Dan David Prize in 2019, awarded for contributions that have a significant impact on the world, and the Toynbee Prize in 2021, which honors lifetime achievement in global historical scholarship. He is currently University Professor of History at the University of Chicago, a title that reflects the highest level of faculty distinction at that institution.

• 6. The California School

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  Pomeranz has been described as a major figure in the California School of economic history, a loose intellectual movement centered in part around scholars at University of California campuses who challenged the idea that European economic dominance was inevitable or rooted in deep cultural superiority. The school pushed back against Eurocentric narratives by showing that other regions, particularly China, had sophisticated markets and capable institutions well into the early modern period. His 2002 article in the American Historical Review, titled "Political economy and ecology on the eve of industrialization: Europe, China, and the global conjuncture," laid out some of those arguments in concentrated form. A companion piece in the Journal of Asian Studies that same year asked readers to move "beyond the East-West binary" in understanding development paths in the eighteenth-century world. His edited volume on the Pacific in the age of early industrialization, published in 2009, extended the frame further, and his contributions to the Cambridge World History in 2015 placed his comparative approach inside a project designed to synthesize global historical scholarship at the highest level. The 2021 Toynbee Prize specifically honors scholars who have advanced our understanding of history at a world scale, which places Pomeranz squarely in that tradition.