Re: [Marxism] Re: Pomeranz

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Here's a little gasoline for the fire (expensive, but I don't, believe
> it or not, own an SUV.  Hell, I don't even own a car):
>
> I think Robert Brenner and Christoper Isett in their work  "England's
> Divergence from China's Yangzi Delta:  Property Relations,
> Microeconomics and Patterns of Development," answer and rebut Pomeranz's
> <The Great Divergence>.  Pomeranz's central assertion that the
> divergence is contingent upon England's mercantilism is pretty well
> refuted.
>
> rr

I thought that Pomeranz's central assertion is that England leapfrogged
China because it had coal.

In any case, the main problem with the Brenner thesis is that it has failed
to answer Blaut's main criticism, namely that the rise of European
capitalism was intimately linked with the massive transfer of value from
the Americas after 1492, a point made by Marx in "Genesis of the Industrial
Capitalist" for that matter.

I have been too busy with other matters to keep up with the
Pomeranz-Brenner controversy (I should add that Pomeranz's business about
coal seems a bit too ecological deterministic to me, but not as bad as
Jared Diamond), but found this reply to Brenner by R. Bin Wong to be of
some interest:

http://www.aasianst.org/catalog/wong.pdf


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism