I was taught in high school that the Industrial Revolution came about in England through technological innovation, which led to a fundamental reordering of British society, with old cottage industries overtaken by factories and with country laborers drawn into new, large, cities with perennial grey skies. Later on in lower division history survey course, I was taught that the depletion of English forests to supply the Royal Navy meant that those forests had to be protected and forced Englishmen to look elsewhere for fuel, namely underground, and that the struggle to keep the coal mines from flooding and to transport the coal long distances led to the development of the steam engine, which could then be put to a variety of labor-saving industrial tasks. This book doesn't address these issues so much. What it does do is provide international context to the Industrial Revolution, comparing the economies, laws, natural resources and social structures of Britain and China and Japan, and occasionally India or a few European nations to try and answer the question: Why England, or more broadly, which is what Pommeranz asks: Why Europe? To put, for example, China and Britain into context, he includes Britain as part of Europe, because it makes more sense to compare to large landmasses with large populations, some broadly shared cultural traits to each other. After all, he points out, while China's external trade paled in comparison with European trade in the 19th century, the nation's INTERNAL trade was just as robust as Europe's. Certain persistent myths about the Western cultural foundations of Capitalism should be thrown out-- in 1750 it was easier to buy and sell land on the private market in China than in England, which in retained more feudalistic social and economic structures later than did China. What Pommeranz suggests is that the great economic (and indeed political) lead that Britain and other western powers took on the world stage only occurred in the very late 19th century and lasted relatively shortly. Furthermore, he argues that it was not inevitable that only Britain (or other Europeans) would have developed the Industrial technologies that allowed for so much of European imperial successes, but that other countries (specifically China and Japan) very well could have produced similar technologies given the time or correct . Basically, it was not a matter of cultural determinism à la Weber that the Industrial Revolution occured, but rather largely through more proximate factors. The subject itself is interesting, but the evidence at times can be yawn-inducing. Charts and tables on productivity and the like aren't exactly page-turners for me. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the formation of Industrial economies and in the shaping of the modern world, assuming you have the patience to wade through the economic data. Pommeranz offers a compelling, if non-traditional, view of the Industrial Revolution. In history, context is everything, and this book helps provide that.