Rate My Professor Kenneth Pomeranz

Kenneth Pomeranz is University Professor of Modern Chinese History and in the College at the University of Chicago, where he joined the History Department faculty in 2012. He previously served as Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, after earning his PhD from Yale University in 1988 and his BA in History from Cornell University in 1980. Pomeranz's research centers on China, encompassing comparative and world history, with primary emphasis on social, economic, and environmental history. His work also addresses state formation, imperialism, religion, gender, and related topics. He explores the reciprocal influences of state, society, and economy in late imperial and twentieth-century China; the origins of the world economy through mutual regional interactions; environmental history in China; and comparative analyses of labor, family organization, and economic change in Europe and East Asia. Current projects include a history of Chinese political economy from the seventeenth century to the present and a book titled Why Is China So Big?, examining how China's vast land mass and population formed a single political unit.

Pomeranz has authored seminal works such as The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000), which received the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association and the World History Association book prize; The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (University of California Press, 1993), also awarded the Fairbank Prize; and The World that Trade Created, co-authored with Steven Topik (M.E. Sharpe, 1999; fourth edition, 2017). He has co-edited volumes including The Cambridge World History, Volume VII (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Environment and World History, 1500–2000 (University of California Press, 2009), and Encyclopedia of the History of World Trade (Thomson Gale, 2005). His honors include the Dan David Prize (2019), fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, Institute for Advanced Study, and National Endowment for the Humanities. Pomeranz is a founding editor of the Journal of Global History and has served as president of the American Historical Association.