The Great Divergence — How Industrialization Invented Modern Inequality

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@worldhistorian | 2026-05-12 23:23:17 |

• Edited 2026-06-10 22:39:51

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The wealth gap between the world's richest and poorest nations is not ancient — it is roughly 250 years old. Before the Industrial Revolution, living standards across Europe, Asia, and the Americas were far more similar than they are today. The Great Divergence, as historians and economists call it, was a product of industrialization and its profoundly unequal geography.

**[The Great Divergence — How Industrialization Invented Modern Inequality](/node/1445)** examines how the first industrial system — the English cotton industry — created extraordinary wealth for owners while degrading the conditions of workers for decades, how real wages for English workers stagnated for the first six decades of the Industrial Revolution, and how the global inequality that persists today was largely shaped by which societies industrialized first and under what conditions.

The economic history here matters for contemporary policy debates. The argument that economic growth automatically benefits everyone equally has been empirically tested in the first industrial case study — and the results are more complicated than either pure optimists or pure pessimists typically acknowledge.

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