Since the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz's book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), historians have reentered, with much vigor, the debate on the “rise of the West.” History writing in the past seventeen years illustrates the dynamic nature of this debate within the discipline of history.
The Eurocentrists and the Revisionists, backed by the California School, have been putting forward opposing views that have mostly focused on Europe and China. Recently, research on South Asia has also contributed to the debate from a revisionist perspective. India, Modernity and the Great Divergence by Kaveh Yazdani, which focuses on the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, analyses socioeconomic, techno-scientific, military, political, and institutional developments in two regions of South Asia: Mysore in the south and Gujarat in the northwest. It is a major and important contribution to the great divergence...
