| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Robert C. Allen, Tommy Bengtsson, and Martin Dribe, editors. Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xxii, 472. £75.00.
The seventeen essays collected in this volume are the product of a 2000 conference and display the usual diversity inherent in conference volumes. All of the essays can, however, be understood as contributions to the debate over standards of living in Europe and Asia in the several centuries before the first industrial revolution. Contributors measure "living standards" using life expectancy at birth, trends in physical stature, real wages, demographic responses to short-term economic variation, even maternal mortality.	1
As is now well known to economic historians, the current debate centers on the question of whether living standards in Europe, and particularly Western Europe, were significantly higher than those in Asia on the eve of the industrial revolution. It is fitting, therefore, that Kenneth Pomeranz, whose work The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World (2000) stimulated much of the recent debate, is the author of the first essay. Here, he restates major findings of his book, answers a number of the challenges to it, and adduces new evidence for his belief in the comparability of Chinese and European living standards around the middle of the eighteenth century.	. . .

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