Abstract: The “California School”has insisted that the great distance between the northwest and Jiangnan was
the key reason of the delayed modernization of Jiangnan，and that the location of coal in England was one
of the important factors leading to the divergence between China and the West． This not only ignores the
development of coal in Jiangnan and its environs，but also attempts to explain this huge proposition purely
from the perspective of geographical environment． Through a comparative study on the coal industries in
early modern China and England，we can see that England and Jiangnan both had abundant coal
resources，but that there was also some important differences in fuel use structure，mining policy and
technology，which resulted in a completely different developmental path in the coal industry in the two
regions． The article provides a new perspective from which to criticize“accidental theory “of“California
School”．