The eleventh volume in the currently seventeen-volume Ashgate series “The Pacific World. Lands People and History of the Pacific, 1500–1900” is entitled “Pacific in the Age of Early Industrialization”, and has been edited by the distinguished historian of the modern world economy Kenneth Pomeranz, whose book of 2000, The Great Divergence. China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, has won numerous prizes. Moreover, as an active editor of the Journal of Global History, Pomeranz is in a good position to follow developments in the literature and thus select the most engaging articles for inclusion in a volume such as this.

Readers of the International Journal of Asian Studies will probably be familiar with the Ashgate format: here, fifteen articles representing the best academic work on the subject over the last sixty years, often culled from obscure journals that readers would have difficulty otherwise accessing. Part of their obscurity stems from publication in Asian academic research bulletins, and it is of credit to this volume that so many of the contributors are non-Western (Japanese are particularly well represented). Pomeranz has even introduced one essay that has not previously been published: Kirk Larsen's investigation of the Anglo-Japanese competition for the textiles market in Korea between 1876 and 1910.

Among the best features of these volumes are the very thorough introductions (thirty-one pages in total) and the provision of supplementary bibliographies. Here Pomeranz sets the scene: showing how East Asia was neither a poor brother nor laggard to the West, both in terms of living standards and pace of technology acquisition. Rather, other factors impeded the development of hi-tech industries in East Asia, namely smaller supplies and higher prices for capital, energy and most natural resources. One of Pomeranz's main contentions is that industrialization here was rather the case of traditional handicraft industries “growing up” rather than new industries having to be forged from scratch.

The trouble is that the Pacific framework we are using in this instance forces us to embrace not only East Asia but also Latin America where, unlike the gradual convergence of per capita income experienced in almost all East Asian countries with that of the USA, here many of these countries are worse off in relative terms than a century ago. We would have to include the Philippines in this instance as a “Latin American country”, which, despite increasing exports of some low-end manufactures (mostly electronics), is increasingly dependent on the remittances sent home by its workers overseas.

Essays in the volume, like that of Sugihara Kaoru, look at the “East Asian miracle” as a different but no less important phenomenon than Western industrialization. Sugihara emphasizes that the high population growth in East Asia between 1500 and 1800 should not be seen as a pathology that blocked “development”. Development itself needs to be approached from the perspective of “labour-absorbing innovations”: he also argues that the East Asian path to modernity has been less resource-consuming, and thus proposes a better model to those who aspire to imitate the “European miracle”. The next section looks at skills, investigating the long-standing prejudice that the textile production of East Asia is generally considered a “low-skilled” industry compared to, say, machine-building. But as William Kirby shows in this article on “Engineering China”, there were plenty of other industries and technical challenges going back to the 1920s and ’30s, such as building a massive hydroelectric station in the Yangtze Gorges, to overturn this claim. The development of factory production in the early twentieth century is nevertheless compared in both Chinese and Japanese cases, and the thesis that the present generation of skilled workers powering China's firms grew up in the defence-oriented heavy industries of the Maoist period is entertained.

Two sets of essays deal with different regions of the Pacific world: South-east Asia and the American West. South-east Asia is considered a victim of “multiple imperialisms” marked by the predominant production of primary products which, under colonialism, were exported at artificially low prices and after decolonization were forced to pay high import duties to places like protectionist Europe. In this volume, the essay by Barlow and Drabble deals with the example of the rubber industry in what is now Malaysia, showing the dangers of depending on a single export commodity and the inevitable disequilibria that resulted from particularities in a crop's life-cycle and unpredictable movements in global demand.

The second set of essays deals with the industrialization of the American West, and the nature of that process, harnessing both capital-intensive technologies and vertically integrated companies, which controlled every step of production. If we move south down the American Pacific coast, we find a North–South division in that Latin American industry was mostly linked to mining and other extraction activities, and which very importantly provided very little stimulus to the rest of the economy. Some of the reasons for this are investigated: the fact that much of Latin American export production was owned by foreigners (shipping and finance, for example); workers also were paid low wages, which they tended to repatriate to China or India. Although the essay selected to cover this topic is dinosauric, from 1948, in his Introduction Pomeranz fast-forwards us past the dependencista debates of the 1970s and '80s to a summary of the present state of the question, which shows how Latin America has not been locked into an unchangeable position in the world economy and can even be shown to have grown at a time exports fell (the argument hinges on the growth in regional demand for silver as currency in intra-American commercial circuits as a counter-balance to the shrinking quantities of silver exported).

The Pacific dimension to industrial development in China – so questionable from earlier volumes in this Ashgate series devoted, for example, to maritime exploration during a long period when China consciously abandoned all engagement with its seaboard – is relevant if we consider the nature of that development, how it is still only restricted to a narrow band along the Chinese coast, and which only with great difficulty has permeated the interior. As an ongoing process, we are left wondering whether the “Chinese miracle” can continue and whether the energy on which that development depends can be lessened, so as to create a distinctive and less resource-intensive model than the North Atlantic one.