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"For over a century now, historians have debated the causes of the lagged industrialization of the Dutch economy during the nineteenth century. To this debate, Trials of Convergence brings the analytical perspective of prices, factor costs and the functioning of markets. Its critical insight is that only an approach based on the integrated incentive structure of the economy allows us to delimit the role of alternative explanations. Using statistical reconstruction and microdata, it shows that the retarded transition resulted from a confluence of forces. These ranged from open economy effects and natural endowments to the fiscal policy stance adopted in response to Belgian secession. At the height of the British Industrial Revolution the Dutch economy slowed, triggering a return to the problems of eighteenth-century stagnation. All this meant that the transition to 'modern economic growth' after 1860 came about only in a changed international context and after a period of politico-economic reform"--

India and Britain were much bigger players in the eighteenth‐century world market for manufactures than were Egypt, the Levant, and the core of the Ottoman Empire, but these eastern Mediterranean regions did export carpets, silks, and other textiles to Europe and the east. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they had lost most of their export market and much of their domestic market to globalization forces and rapid productivity growth in European manufacturing. How different was the Ottoman experience from the rest of the poor periphery? Was de‐industrialization more or less pronounced? Was the terms of trade effect bigger or smaller? How much of Ottoman de‐industrialization was due to falling world trade barriers such as ocean transport revolutions and European liberal trade policy, how much due to factory‐based productivity advance in Europe, how much to declining Ottoman competitiveness in manufacturing, how much to Ottoman railroads penetrating the interior, and how much to Ottoman policy? This article uses a price‐dual approach to seek the answers.