ABSTRACT
The globalization of scholarship has in fact endorsed the power of North Atlantic academic orthodoxies through control of major journals, conferences, funding for research and global intellectual prestige. The Californian and post-Californian response to Whig scholarship, since Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence, has attempted to minimize the importance of precocious western cultural factors, emphasizing instead geographical elements or factor endowment constraints that prevented other economies from keeping pace with the West. The post-Californians have also downplayed the significance of the first industrial revolution and reconceptualized it as a transitory phase of primacy or just one of the many efflorescences experienced by the world's civilizations over the long term. The contribution of some scholars to opening up the field to new perspectives, based on this premise, has been substantial. Particularly inspiring has been Patrick O'Brien's invitation to treat British industrialization as a conjuncture in global history.
