The Politics of the Great Divergence and the Question about the Rise of the Middle Class

Abstract This review essay calls for involving political science in the conversation of interdisciplinary history, particularly concerning the scholarship on the Great Divergence. In past years, some institutionalist economic historians have advanced political explanations of modern economic growth centered on political participation. Nevertheless, the research findings in comparative political science do not empirically support their causal claims. Recent political scientists see politics as agency-based interactions that drive institutional change rather than as system-like natures of institutions. Although the politics of the Great Divergence is itself a classic intellectual agenda that has been discussed since Marx, it requires a reexamination with the latest knowledge. In particular, the dynamics of political competition between the dominant incumbent landed elites and the emerging middle class, and the latter’s eventual triumph, which occurred only in some countries and served as a major source of institutional change for modern economic growth therein, remains an unsolved puzzle.