In his economic history, The Great Divergence, American professor Kenneth Pomeranz looks at the Industrial Revolution and its legacy through a new framework, alleging that Europe was special in its ability to harness the social and intellectual energies of rapid innovation to quickly outpace the rest of the world.
The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe and the parts of the New World where its people became the dominant populations) overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the middle of 18th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization, eclipsing previously dominant or comparable civilizations from the Middle East and Asia such as the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and Joseon Korea.
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