Kenneth Pomeranz


Kenneth Pomeranz, FBA is University Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1980, where he was a Telluride Scholar, and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1988, where he was a student of Jonathan Spence. He then taught at the University of California, Irvine, for more than 20 years. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006. In 2013–2014 he was the president of the American Historical Association. Pomeranz has been described as a major figure in the California School of economic history.

Selected publications

Books

  • The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press, 2000. John K. Fairbank Prize 2001. Joint winner, World History Association Best book of 2000.
  • The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. M. E. Sharpe: 1999.
  • The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937. University of California Press, 1993. John K. Fairbank Prize 1994.

    Edited volumes

  • The Pacific in the Age of Early Industrialization. Farnham England: Ashgate/Variorum, 2009.
  • with McNeill, J. R., . The Cambridge World History: Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750 to the present. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • with Barker, G., Benjamin, C., Bentley, J. H., Christian, D., Goucher, C., Kedar, B. Z., Mcneill, J. R., Yoffee, N.. The Cambridge World History: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance.. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009.

    Articles and chapters in edited volumes

  • The environment and world history. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
  • “Orthopraxy, orthodoxy, and the goddess of Taishan .” Modern China 33.1 22–46.
  • “Region and world in economic history: the early modern / modern divide” Transactions of the International Conference of Eastern Studies 52 41–55.
  • “Standards of living in eighteenth-century China: regional differences, temporal trends, and incomplete evidence” In: Allen, Robert C.; Bengtsson, Tommy; Dribe, Martin, eds. Living standards in the past: new perspectives on well-being in Asia and Europe. : 23–54.
  • “Women's work and the economics of respectability ” In: Goodman, Bryna; Larson, Wendy, eds. Gender in motion: divisions of labor and cultural change in late imperial and modern China : 239–263.
  • “Women's work, family, and economic development in Europe and East Asia: long-term trajectories and contemporary comparisons” In: Arrighi, Giovanni; Hamashita, Takeshi; Selden, Mark, eds. The resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 year perspectives : 124–172.
  • “Facts are stubborn things: a response to Philip Huang” Journal of Asian Studies 62.1 : 167–181.
  • “Political economy and ecology on the eve of industrialization: Europe, China, and the global conjuncture” American Historical Review 107.2 425–446.
  • “Beyond the East-West binary: resituating development paths in the eighteenth-century world” Journal of Asian Studies 61.2 539–590.
  • “Is there an East Asian development path? Long-term comparisons, constraints, and continuities” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 44, pt.3 322–362.
  • “Re-thinking the late imperial Chinese economy: development, disaggregation and decline, circa 1730-1930” Itinerario 24.3-4 29–74.
  • "Ritual Imitation and Political Identity in North China: The late Imperial Legacy and the Chinese National State Revisited," Twentieth Century China 23:1 Fall, 1997.
  • "Power, Gender and Pluralism in the cult of the Goddess of Taishan," in R. Bin Wong, Theodore Huters, and Pauline Yu, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History.
  • “"Traditional' Chinese business forms revisited: family, firm, and financing in the history of the Yutang Company of Jining, 1779-1956.” Late Imperial China 18.1 : 1–38.
  • “Local interest story: political power and regional differences in the Shandong capital market, 1900-1937” In: Rawski, Thomas G.; Li, Lillian M., eds. Chinese history in economic perspective 295–318.
  • "Water to Iron, Widows to Warlords: the Handam Rain Shrine in Modern Chinese History," Late Imperial China 12.1 62–99.

    Awards and honors

  • 1994 John K. Fairbank Prize for best book in East Asian history
  • 1997 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
  • 2001 World History Association Book Prize
  • 2001 John K. Fairbank Prize for best book in East Asian history
  • 2011-12 Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey
  • 2017, Elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.
  • 2019 Dan David Prize
  • 2021 Toynbee Prize