>The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe along with its settler offshoots in Northern America and Australasia) overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilizations, eclipsing previously dominant or comparable civilizations from Asia such as Qing China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tokugawa Japan, among others

>Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including geography, culture, institutions, and luck. There is disagreement over the nomenclature of the "great" divergence, as a clear point of beginning of a divergence is traditionally held to be the 16th or even the 15th century, with the Commercial Revolution and the origins of mercantilism and capitalism during the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, the rise of the European colonial empires, proto-globalization, the Scientific Revolution, or the Age of Enlightenment. Yet the largest jump in the divergence happened in the late 18th and 19th centuries with the Industrial Revolution and Technological Revolution. For this reason, the "California school" considers only this to be the great divergence

>Technological advances, in areas such as transportation, mining, and agriculture, were embraced to a higher degree in western Eurasia than the east during the Great Divergence. Technology led to increased industrialization and economic complexity in the areas of agriculture, trade, fuel, and resources, further separating east and west. Western Europe's use of coal as an energy substitute for wood in the mid-19th century gave it a major head start in modern energy production

>In the twentieth century, the Great Divergence peaked before the First World War and continued until the early 1970s; then, after two decades of indeterminate fluctuations, in the late 1980s it was replaced by the Great Convergence as the majority of developing countries reached economic growth rates significantly higher than those in most developed countries

The collapse in trade networks and the rise of Christianity as a political force during the early middle ages ended up eliminating most slavery in Western Europe.

The Black Death broke the back of serfdom in Western Europe —> Rise of the Middle Class —> Social Mobility —> Society turns into a meritocracy. The real great change was England between 1100 ad and 1500 ad where there was a miracle which took place of most the population going from being illiterate serfs to being freemen who were aspiring professionals.
This broke down regional markets and created waves of medieval urbanisation which led to nation-wide economy and economic viability of widespread mechanisation.

There were Greek and Roman republics to imitate.

The Printing Press made dissemination of information orders of magnitude more easy than it had previously been.

Europe developed colleges which spread knowledge of science.

Patent laws created a unique incentive to create and publicize economically useful technologies.

The combination of all of these produced the Scientific Revolution in 1600. Industrial revolution was started by scientific achievements. You can make railroads in Rome if you now how and no slave labor cant even pretend they could compete with railroad. But Romans didn't know how, they had no science.

>>507516829
>the Great Divergence peaked before the First World War and continued until the early 1970s
What could have possibly happened in the early 70s to reverse this trend?

>>507517224
>In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced that it was implementing a total oil embargo against countries that had supported Israel at any point during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began after Egypt and Syria launched a large-scale surprise attack in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the territories that they had lost to Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War

>In an effort that was led by Faisal of Saudi Arabia, the initial countries that OAPEC targeted were Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This list was later expanded to include Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa

>In March 1974, OAPEC lifted the embargo, but the price of oil had risen by nearly 300%: from US$3 per barrel ($19/m3) to nearly US$12 per barrel ($75/m3) globally. Prices in the United States were significantly higher than the global average. After it was implemented, the embargo caused an oil crisis, or "shock", with many short- and long-term effects on the global economy as well as on global politics. The 1973 embargo later came to be referred to as the "first oil shock" vis-à-vis the "second oil shock" that was the 1979 oil crisis, brought upon by the Iranian Revolution