The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe along with its settler offshoots in Northern America and Australasia) overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilizations, eclipsing previously dominant or comparable civilizations from Asia such as Qing China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tokugawa Japan, among others.

Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including geography, culture, institutions, and luck. There is disagreement over the nomenclature of the "great" divergence, as a clear point of beginning of a divergence is traditionally held to be the 16th or even the 15th century, with the Commercial Revolution and the origins of mercantilism and capitalism during the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, the rise of the European colonial empires, proto-globalization, the Scientific Revolution, or the Age of Enlightenment. Yet the largest jump in the divergence happened in the late 18th and 19th centuries with the Industrial Revolution and Technological Revolution. For this reason, the "California school" considers only this to be the great divergence.

Technological advances, in areas such as transportation, mining, and agriculture, were embraced to a higher degree in western Eurasia than the east during the Great Divergence. Technology led to increased industrialization and economic complexity in the areas of agriculture, trade, fuel, and resources, further separating east and west. Western Europe's use of coal as an energy substitute for wood in the mid-19th century gave it a major head start in modern energy production. In the twentieth century, the Great Divergence peaked before the First World War and continued until the early 1970s; then, after two decades of indeterminate fluctuations, in the late 1980s it was replaced by the Great Convergence as the majority of developing countries reached economic growth rates significantly higher than those in most developed countries.

The term "Great Divergence" was coined by Samuel P. Huntington in 1996 and used by Kenneth Pomeranz in his book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000). The same phenomenon was discussed by Eric Jones, whose 1981 book The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia popularized the alternative term "European Miracle". Broadly, both terms signify a socioeconomic shift in which European countries advanced ahead of others during the modern period.

The timing of the Great Divergence is in dispute among historians. The traditional dating is as early as the 16th (or even 15th) century, with scholars arguing that Europe had been on a trajectory of higher growth since that date. Pomeranz and others of the California school argue that the period of most rapid divergence was during the 19th century. Citing nutrition data and chronic European trade deficits as evidence, these scholars argue that before that date the most developed parts of Asia, in terms of grain wage, had comparable economic development to Europe, especially Qing China in the Yangtze Delta and South Asia in the Bengal Subah. Economic historian Prasannan Parthasarathi argued that wages in parts of South India, particularly Mysore,^[when?] could have been on par with Britain, but noted his research on the matter was not conclusive.

Some argue that the cultural factors behind the divergence can be traced to earlier periods and institutions such as the Renaissance and the Chinese imperial examination system. Broadberry asserts that in terms of silver wages even the richest areas of Asia were behind Western Europe as early as the 16th century. He cites statistics comparing England to the Yangzi Delta (the most developed part of China by a good margin) showing that by 1600 the former had three times the latter's average wages when measured in silver, 15% greater wages when measured in wheat equivalent (the latter being used to approximate buying power for basic subsistence goods and the former to approximate buying power for craft goods, especially traded ones), and higher urbanization. England's silver wages were also five times higher than those of India in the late 16th century. Grain wages started to diverge more sharply from the early 18th century, with English wages being two and a half times higher than India or China's in wheat equivalent while remaining about five times higher in silver at that time. However, this disparity only applied to Western Europe; Broadberry states that silver wages in Central and Eastern Europe did not surpass advanced parts of Asia until 1800.

"Why do the Christian nations, which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?" ... "Because they have laws and rules invented by reason."

Although core regions in Eurasia had achieved a relatively high standard of living by the 18th century, shortages of land, soil degradation, deforestation, lack of dependable energy sources, and other ecological constraints limited growth in per capita incomes. Rapid rates of depreciation on capital meant that a great part of savings in pre-modern economies were spent on replacing depleted capital, hampering capital accumulation. Massive windfalls of fuel, land, food and other resources were necessary for continued growth and capital accumulation, leading to colonialism. The Industrial Revolution overcame these restraints, allowing rapid, sustained growth in per capita incomes for the first time in human history.