Kenneth Pomeranz is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His best known books are The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of a Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). He has 3 new edited or co-edited volumes this year: China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance (with Kate Merkel-Hess and Jeffrey Wasserstrom; Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield); The Environment and World History, 1500-2000 (with Edmund T. Burke III; University of California Press), and The Pacific in the Age of Early Industrialization (Ashgate).