On Great Divergence, Great Convergence, Industrial Revolution, and California School

Since man first forged metal tools and started farming for his food, thus emerg-ing from the Stone Age, no event in human history has had a greater impact than the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. During that span, Europeans increased their use of fossil fuel energy by several orders of magni-tude, began to use that fossil fuel energy to produce motive power as well as heat, and developed a host of high-efficiency industrial processes and new modes of transportation, with spillovers into military technology as well. As a result, Europeans went from ‘underdeveloped’ nations, who mainly traded raw materials and bullion for the manufactured and plantation goods of the ‘devel-oped’ world of Asia (cotton and silk textiles; ceramics and lacquer ware and tropical woods; coffee, tea, indigo, nuts and spices), and who were allowed limited trading roles on the suffrage of India, China, and Japan, to the world's center of manufacturing and manufactured exports, with military dominance and the ability to dictate terms of trade to the major Asian societies.