Use the sentence frames below to summarize two contrasts between Europe and Asia described by the authors of sources 6 and 7. Then, claim stating how these contrasts affected the development of industry in these regions. While Asia While Asia Great Britain Europe
Source 6 Excerpted from Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms, 2007Why did the same conditions not lead to an Industrial Revolution at the same time, or evenearlier, in Japan, in the Yangzi Delta, or in Bengal? What was special about Europe? Why did tinyEngland, with a population of around 6 million in 1760, achieve an Industrial Revolution, whenJapan alone had about 31 million people living in a sophisticated market economy, and Chinahad nearly 270 million? The million people in Edo (now Tokyo) in the eighteenth century, forexample, made it the largest city in the world at the time. …Europe made this leap because it had coal reserves readily accessible to its populationcenters. In addition, it had the massive, largely empty land area of the Americas relatively closeat hand, to lift for a time the ecological constraint with a continent-sized flood of food andraw materials. These geographic advantages, rather than differences in innovative potential,explain English success and Asian failure.
Source 7 Excerpted from Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and BeyondDivergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe, 2011[A]lthough both China and Europe experienced long periods of unification and fragmentation,empire was the norm in China, while division prevailed more often in Europe. For much ofits history, Europe was poor because it was at war. The rise of capital-intensive methodsof production in Europe was the unintended consequence of persistent political strife. Incontrast, China, which was often peaceful and unified, developed large-scale markets andtook advantage of the division of labor. It was only after 1750 that the advantages of machine-based, capital-intensive methods of production became apparent. Before that time the recipesfor growth of the Qing emperors were commonsense everywhere: promote the expansion ofagriculture, keep taxes low, and do not interfere with internal commerce. …… China’s vast and stable empire was the source of its millennium-long prosperity, a linkagepresented in Chinese historical texts in terms of the state promoting prosperity in order tosustain a vast and stable empire. Together these two observations make it impossible topresume that China failed either because its economic system was incapable of developmentor because it was hobbled by overarching cultural, environmental, or political factors.
