WATCH: Our story, beautifully told by ESOF speaker

27 Jul 2016

Michael Wood, Professor of Public History, gives keynote speech at ESOF

Michael Wood, our Professor of Public History, is a keynote speaker at ESOF, Europe’s greatest scientific gathering, which celebrates Manchester’s role as European City of Science 2016.

Professor Wood is speaking at Science, industry and revolution: some thoughts on England, China and the ‘Great Divergence’.

One of the great questions of modern history is why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain and North-West Europe, and not in China. It was in China that most of the key technological advances and industrial processes which made industrialisation possible, along with many other key scientific discoveries, had been made long before the West.

In the 18th century China had the world's biggest population and economy: capitalism was also developing there with banking and some aspects of what we would call Civil Society.

So why did the West take the lead from the late 18th century? Following up his BBC 2 series on the history of China, Professor Wood will look at some of the current thinking about what historians have come to see as the Great Divergence, with special reference to the North-West and the city of Manchester itself, and to the role of science in the rise of the West – asking whether it is inevitable that the East will rise again to the position it held for much of pre-modern history.

Watch Professor Wood tell the story of Manchester, explaining how we are “part of something special” as “our personal journeys merge into the bigger story in which we all play our part”: