For much of the twentieth century, historians explained the industrial revolution's origin in northwestern Europe rather than in China's equally commercialized Yangzi Delta by pointing to institutional and cultural differences that had supposedly been building for centuries: secure property rights, scientific rationalism, and market-friendly legal traditions unique to Europe. This "internalist" account treated the divergence between European and Chinese economic trajectories as the culmination of a long divergence already visible well before 1800. Kenneth Pomeranz's comparative research complicated this narrative by showing that, as late as the eighteenth century, advanced regions of China and Europe were remarkably similar across measures such as life expectancy, market integration, and per-capita consumption of manufactured goods. If the two regions were still so closely matched on the eve of industrialization, Pomeranz argued, the explanation for their subsequent divergence could not rest primarily on centuries-old institutional advantages that, by hypothesis, should already have produced visible gaps. He proposed instead two more proximate factors: Britain's unusually accessible coal deposits, which supplied cheap energy exactly where early industrial technology needed it, and access to New World land, which relieved English agriculture of ecological constraints that continued to bind the Yangzi Delta's more fully utilized soil. Pomeranz's critics have not generally disputed his statistical comparisons; several concede that Yangzi Delta and English living standards were closer than older accounts assumed. Their disagreement instead concerns explanatory weight. Some argue that even modest, centuries-old institutional differences-in credit markets or in the predictability of taxation, for instance-could compound gradually into decisive advantages without producing large observable gaps until industrial technology arrived to amplify them. On this view, the similarity Pomeranz documents is compatible with an underlying institutional divergence that was real, if not yet dramatically visible, well before coal or colonies entered the story.