Introduction. And Yet the Twain Meet: Great Convergence Brings the East Closer to the West

Abstract

This chapter introduces the whole monograph, which is devoted to the analysis of truly global processes. It considers the economic development of the world in the last 600 years and offers forecasts for the next five decades and more. The nineteenth century witnessed an explosive growth of a gap in per capita incomes (and the level of development in general) between the West and the rest of the world that has become recently known as “the Great Divergence”. In the twentieth century, the Great Divergence continued until the early 1970s; then, in the late 1980s, some convergence between the First and Third World started to be observed. Though this convergence has been noticed already by a number of researchers, many economists still doubt its presence or importance. This book attempts to demonstrate that after the 1980s we deal with a global process of the same scale as the process of the Great Divergence and authors propose to designate it as the “the Great Convergence”. Furthermore they show that the Great Convergence is a logical continuation of the Great Divergence, and that certain components of the Great Divergence process were already preparing the onset of the Great Convergence in the period of the former’s peak. What is more, the authors suggest that the Great Divergence and Great Convergence constitute two phases of a single Global Modernization process being tightly intertwined with other dimensions of Global Modernization as well as with globalization in all its historical phases.