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China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850
Open accessAbstract
As a result of recent advances in historical national accounting, estimates of GDP per capita are now available for a number of European economies back to the medieval period, including Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain. The approach has also been extended to Asian economies, including India and Japan. So far, however, China, which has been at the center of the Great Divergence debate, has been absent from this approach. This article adds China to the picture, showing that the Great Divergence began earlier than originally suggested by the California School, but later than implied by older Eurocentric writers.
Overview
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TL;DR
Using historical national accounting, the paper estimates Chinese GDP per capita from 980 to 1840 and finds it fluctuated at a high level during the Northern Song and Ming before declining during the Qing, to about 70% of its 980 level by 1840. It argues the Great Divergence from Western Europe was already under way by the first half of the eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution.
Key findings
- China’s real GDP grew at 0.88% per year during the Northern Song, 0.25% during the Ming, and 0.36% during the Qing; Qing GDP per capita trended down at -0.34% per year, and by 1840 had fallen to around 70% of its 980 level.
- Northern Song China was richer than Domesday Britain circa 1090, but Britain had caught up by 1400; China as a whole was poorer than Italy by 1300, and by 1750 the gap with the leading European economies was too large to be bridged by regional variation within China.
- In 1840, Chinese GDP per capita was $599 in 1990 international dollars, or 23.76% of Britain’s $2,521 at PPP; by 1850 China was 20% of the British level. Nominal GDP in 1840 was 5,379.6 million taels, with population of 412 million and GDP per capita of 13.05 tael.
- In 1840, agriculture accounted for 66.1% of net output, industry 8.1%, and services 25.8%; by 1750 Dutch GDP per capita was 42% higher than in the Yangzi delta, rising to a 90% lead by 1770.
Methods
- Output-side historical national accounting: agricultural output from cultivated land and grain yields; industry from metals/mining, food processing, textiles/other manufacturing, and building; services from commerce, government, and housing/domestic services; combined with population to derive GDP per capita. Data are decadal for the Northern Song (980–1120), Ming (1400–1620), and Qing (1690–1840), with 1840 value-added weights from Zhang (1987).
- Sources include official historical literature (e.g., Shihuo zhi, Shilu), private histories, regional gazetteers, and secondary quantitative literature; reliability grades A–D and subjective error margins are used. International comparisons are made in 1990 international dollars, using an 1840 Fisher PPP of £1 = 2.03 tael against a silver exchange rate of £1 = 3.20 tael.
- Sensitivity analysis uses a high Yangzi delta estimate (1.75 times China-wide GDP per capita) and a low estimate benchmarked on $472 in 1850 from Shi, Xuyi, Ni and van Leeuwen (2014).
Limitations
- Paper-stated: underlying data accuracy is uncertain; official records were sometimes distorted by fiscal incentives; there are no annual grain-yield fluctuations, so decadal data are used; territorial changes are handled by excluding periods of expansion; separate time series for subsidiary agriculture are lacking; reliable wage data are absent, preventing the demand-side approach; error margins are subjective.
- Evident from the text: many component series are interpolated; urbanization has only one observation per dynasty; some series receive low reliability grades (e.g., GDP deflator D for the Northern Song, nominal GDP C); regional variation within China is addressed only through the Yangzi delta sensitivity exercise.
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Claims the paper makes
0 Valid · 3 Not valid · 53 Not checked · 112 Own results and interpretations
A result the paper reports from its own data — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The population data are plotted on a log scale in Figure 1, and show rapid growth during the Northern Song dynasty at an annual rate of 0.87 per cent.”
§ CHINA, EUROPE AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: A STUDY IN HISTORICAL NATIONAL ACCOUNTING, 980-1850 > III. CHINESE ECONOMIC GROWTH, 980-1840 1. Population
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
A result the paper reports from its own data — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Chinese GDP per capita fluctuated at a high level during the Northern Song and Ming dynasties before trending downwards during the Qing dynasty.”
- Also stated in: § I. INTRODUCTION · plain
“China's GDP per capita fluctuated at a high level during the Northern Song and Ming dynasties, before trending downwards during the Qing dynasty.”
§ CHINA, EUROPE AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: A STUDY IN HISTORICAL NATIONAL ACCOUNTING, 980-1850 > Abstract
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
- Also stated in: § I. INTRODUCTION · plain
A result the paper reports from its own data — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The data in Figure 4 suggest a good deal of volatility in the output of the iron and copper industries.”
§ CHINA, EUROPE AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: A STUDY IN HISTORICAL NATIONAL ACCOUNTING, 980-1850 > 3. Industrial output
hedged- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
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In the paper
“Notice however, that the territorial expansion between dynasties was not an important driver of the overall downward trend in agricultural output per capita.”
§ CHINA, EUROPE AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: A STUDY IN HISTORICAL NATIONAL ACCOUNTING, 980-1850 > 2. Agricultural output
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
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In the paper
“Following a substantial decline during the Mongol interlude, population growth returned during the Ming dynasty, but at the slower rate of 0.32 per cent per annum.”
§ CHINA, EUROPE AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: A STUDY IN HISTORICAL NATIONAL ACCOUNTING, 980-1850 > III. CHINESE ECONOMIC GROWTH, 980-1840 1. Population
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
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In the paper
§ CHINA, EUROPE AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: A STUDY IN HISTORICAL NATIONAL ACCOUNTING, 980-1850 > 4. Sensitivity analysis
“a grade A series such as GDP per capita during the Ming dynasty”
§ CHINA, EUROPE AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: A STUDY IN HISTORICAL NATIONAL ACCOUNTING, 980-1850 > Additional information
“TABLE 3: Data reliability assessments Northern Song Ming Qing Agriculture Cultivated land C B A Crop yields B B A Industry Iron B C B Copper B C B Salt B B B Food processing C B A Textiles B B A Building B B A Services Commerce B B A Government B B B Housing & domestic service B B A Real aggregates GDP B B A Population B B A GDP per capita B B A”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Broadberry, S., Guan, H., & Li, D. D.
- Affiliations
- University of Oxford (GB)
- Peking University (CN)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Broadberry, Stephen
- Guan, Hanhui
- Li, David Daokui
- Venue
- The Journal of Economic History
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2018-09-19
- Volume
- 78
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 955-1000
- ISSN
- 0022-0507 (ISSN-L)
- 1471-6372
- OpenAlex
- W2317695678
- Semantic Scholar
- f2d44fdc9c0dcd5fc9f420b6ddbc3e5e4f0a94f9
- Cited by
- 193
- References
- 88
- Citations by year
- 2026: 22 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 27 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 4
- FWCI
- 25.38
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- ora.ox.ac.uk
- Locations
- The Journal of Economic History (publishedVersion)
- Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) (University of Oxford) (acceptedVersion)
- Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) (University of Oxford) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- European Commission (225342)
- Tsinghua University
- Economic and Social Research Council (ES/L011719/1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Historical Economic and Social Studies
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Economic Growth and Productivity
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › General Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economic Theory and Policy
- Keywords
- Great Divergence, GDP per capita, China, Europe, economic growth, long-run economic history, China-Europe comparison, California schools
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-11-12, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).
A second model labelled each claim on 2026-11-12 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
