When Did the World Get So Polarized? Or, A Short History of the Latitudinal Gradient, 1820-2000
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My main beef with the Pomeranzian modern economic history literature is that it gets the explanandum wrong. What needs to be explained is not why the world was polarized in 1800, with Europe taking the lead over other core regions of Eurasia (India, China, Japan). But rather why did the world become polarized from the late-nineteenth century onwards. Another misunderstanding relates to latitude, often thought of as a constant conditioner. It is anything but. Latitude, rather effective temperature for which latitude is a good proxy, is a dynamic variable whose conditioning of societal paths has itself been conditioned by technology and knowhow. To wit, it mattered that industrial work could not be performed in low latitude nations with the same intensity as high latitude nations because of
When Did the World Get So Polarized? Or, A Short History of the Latitudinal Gradient, 1820-2000
When Did the World Get So Polarized? Or, A…
When Did the World Get So Polarized? Or, A Short History of the Latitudinal Gradient, 1820-2000
My main beef with the Pomeranzian modern economic history literature is that it gets the explanandum wrong. What needs to be explained is not why the world was polarized in 1800, with Europe taking the lead over other core regions of Eurasia (India, China, Japan). But rather why did the world become polarized from the late-nineteenth century onwards. Another misunderstanding relates to latitude, often thought of as a constant conditioner. It is anything but. Latitude, rather effective temperature for which latitude is a good proxy, is a dynamic variable whose conditioning of societal paths has itself been conditioned by technology and knowhow. To wit, it mattered that industrial work could not be performed in low latitude nations with the same intensity as high latitude nations because of