The Great Divergence
The Great Divergence between European and Asian (especially Chinese and Islamic) civilizations in early modernity, and Huff's account of paths not taken
The “Great Divergence” debate — why Europe industrialized first while China, Islam, and other equally advanced civilizations did not — has been a sustained CCR theme. Toby Huff’s The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (1993, revised 2017) is the most-cited single work in CCR for framing the question. The student prize-winning paper in v71 by Pierre Dimaculangan, “The Needham Question and the Great Divergence,” engages Joseph Needham’s question directly. Huff’s two-part essay “Civilizational Analysis and Some Paths Not Taken” (Parts I in v75 and II in v76) provides a comparative analysis of how Islamic civilization encountered Greek and Hellenic culture, and how the third encounter — China and the West — diverged.
The Great Divergence is not only a question of industrial revolution but of civilizational preconditions: legal institutions, the corporate form, the European system of competing nation-states, the printing press, the cathedral schools and universities, and the diffusion of Greek and Arab learning through medieval Toledo. CCR articles engage the revisions of Eurocentrism that emphasize the Islamic and Chinese contributions to Western modernity, while also arguing — in the tradition of Pirenne’s thesis — that without the civilizational rivalry with Islam, modernity might not have originated in Europe.
Source summaries:
- v71 (Fall 2014) — Pierre Dimaculangan, “The Needham Question and the Great Divergence,” wins the student prize. Toby Huff, “Can Civilization Save Us? A Study in Civilizational Analysis and Legal History,” extends the civilizational analysis to legal history. (v71)
- v75 (Fall 2016) — Toby Huff, “Civilizational Analysis and Some Paths Not Taken, Part I,” opens the comparative analysis. (v75)
- v76 (Spring 2017) — Huff’s “Part II: The Great Divergence” continues: Islamic Civilization’s encounter with Greek and Hellenic culture; the third encounter of China and the West; China as the “informating civilization”; the architecture of the information wave (2000); the dynamics of the virtual civilization in the 21st century. The Great European Centre for Higher Education (a UNESCO effort) is discussed as Cold-War-era civilizational infrastructure. (v76)
- v77 (Fall 2017) — The Arnason-Huff exchange deepens the debate: Arnason draws on Wickham’s Medieval Europe (2016) and Gernet’s Chine et christianisme (1990) to argue that the medieval Western takeoff was the product of an interconnected division of religious and political centers (papacy/empire, the public sphere of the Investiture Controversy, the rise of universities), not of any single factor; Huff replies that the legal revolution of the long 12th century — the ius commune, the canon law, the founding of independent legal profession — is what made European modernity possible. The exchanges on the absence of law schools, autonomous legal scholarship, and due process in Ming-Qing China illustrate the comparative-civilizational case. (v77)