Chinese learned to use coal and probably coke (as against charcoal) in blast
furnaces for smelting iron, producing 125,000 tonnes of pig iron by the late
eleventh century. This was not achieved in Britain for another 700 years, while
in China the coal, coke and iron industry fell into disuse (Landes, 1998, 2006).
Europe’s willingness to benefit from innovation and opportunity is demon-
strated in a curious comparative story about the giraffe (Box 7.1).
As Roberts (1985) puts it,in Western Europe a ‘cumulative process was at
work. Knowledge was built on knowledge and lack of information stimulated
further investigation. The work of the great explorers and geographers was part
of the more general transformation in European culture loosely called the
Renaissance’. In Europe the mechanical clock undermined religious authority
by making the town clock the symbol of secular municipal life. The clock
contributed to the rise of the modern factory system by allowing industry to
measure productivity in relation to units of time and thus to strive to maximize
productivity. The Chinese, by contrast, treated time and its measurement as a
confidential privilege of monarchy. Islam used clocks for prayer and they never
contributed to a wider public sense of time. Printing was invented in China in the
The Great Divergence since 1750 163Box 7.1 How do we imagine a giraffe?Erik Ringmar says that it was ‘a cultural predisposition in favour of the extra-
European and the exotic, and not some impersonal imperative that prompted the
far-flung ventures of the Renaissance [colonialism after c.1500]. There would
never have been money to be made in commodities such as spices, pearls, silk,
teak, and tea but for this predisposition’ (2006:377). He cites the giraffe as an
example. Giraffes (then otherwise unknown) were presented to Lorenzo
de’Medici in Florence in 1486, to King Charles X of France in 1827 and to the
Chinese Emperor in 1414. In fifteenth-century Italy the giraffe was a new and
exotic creature. 350 years later huge crowds turned out to see the giraffe on its
900-km walk to Paris. A noted zoologist named Geoffroy introduced the animal
with a lecture at numerous local scientific academies along the way, and in Paris
the giraffe was presented to the monarch together with a scientific tract. The
Beijing giraffe arrived at a court that saw itself in 1414 as the most sophisticated
civilization on earth where tributes to the Emperor from surrounding states
would be magnanimously reciprocated by even more lavish gifts in a process
demonstrating submission,generosity and the splendour and virtue of the
Emperor. According to Ringmar, there are three basic cultural models here: a
Renaissance model of outward-looking curiosity (Florence); an Enlightenment
model of outward-looking self-sufficiency (France); and a Confucian model of
inward-looking self-sufficiency (China). These models had implications for
action. The Florentines went out into the world full of curiosity and a will to
satisfy a booming European market in exotic goods. The French lived in a
universe based on science and rationality related to what they perceived to be a
world of irrational superstition outside. The Chinese self-confidently closed
themselves off from the rest of the world.