ABSTRACT
Over the last decade the Great Divergence, or the timing of when the wealth gap between the Western world and the Rest of the world opened up, has become a prominent issue in the discipline of economic history. The debate has been conducted at a macro-economic level, however, and business historians have made hardly any contribution. They have made a potentially richer contribution to the less explored question of why the Rest failed to catch up after the gap had opened up, though most of this literature has not been structured in terms of the Great Divergence. This chapter begins with these two debates before turning to the Great Convergence of the last three decades. By 2017 China was the world’s second largest economy. It accounted for nearly 15 percent of world GDP. Asia as a whole accounted for 34 percent of world GDP; the United States and Canada for 28 percent; and Europe for only 21 percent (World Economic Forum, 2017). While many developing economies, especially in Africa, were still desperately poor compared to the West, the scale and speed of the Great Convergence was nevertheless striking.
