The First Great Divergence?

Abstract

The ›Papal Revolution‹ in late eleventh and early twelfth century western Europe and the unsuccessful campaign by Wang An Shi and his followers to reform the imperial administration of Song China at just the same time are regarded as critical turning points in their respective histories. They are strikingly similar in some crucial respects. Both represented the responses of dominant elites to fundamental challenges to their traditional positions. Similar crises seem to have occurred at the same period in other citied regions of Eurasia. Each resulted, to varying degrees, in the emergence of a new or newly defined learned elite which drew its authority from its role as custodian and interpreter of a body of texts and associated ritual practices held to have been inherited from antiquity or late antiquity. The cultural hegemonies thus established in their respective regions endured until c. 1800 or later, constituting the ›civilizations‹ which are seen as the building blocks of modern world history. I have argued that in Latin Europe the crisis gave birth to an enduring clerical elite whose members accorded over-riding loyalty to nascent governing institutions in church and state rather than to their kin. Elsewhere the cultural power of the learned was essentially directed to sustaining the interests of their kingroups. In 2009, borrowing the phraseology of Kenneth Pomeranz, I suggested that these contrasting outcomes constituted a ›First Great Divergence‹ between western Europe and the other Eurasian ›civilizations‹. In this paper the appropriateness of that description is reconsidered and dismissed, as embodying a simplistic teleological polarisation of the kind that Pomeranz had rightly rejected. Rather, it is suggested that the outcome of the general – though not universal – crisis of elites in early second-millennium Eurasia would be better described as a Great Diversification.

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