Free After Tamerlane by John Darwin

maize, beans and potatoes, transformed (in places) the agrarian potential of Europe, Asia and Africa. A profitable network of long-distance sea lanes helped to turn Europe into a great maritime entrepôt ruling the oceans. But this early-modern world economy (1500–1750) gave Europe no decisive advantage over the rest of Eurasia. It increased Europe’s dependence on the produce of Asia, but offered fewmeans of enlarging its share of Asian consumption. 9
    After 1750 this pattern altered dramatically, but not all at once. The opportunistic seizure of the Bengal economy gave the British the chance to change the terms of their trade with China. India was the source of the opium supply with which and the military base from which they made their forced entry into East Asian trade. However, the critical change was the advent of mechanized production in Europe. Within a fewdecades, Asia’s export market in textiles had been lost to European competition, and European cloth was even pushing its way into the textile economies of India and China. The volume of world trade nowbegan to growrapidly – by some twenty-five times in the long nineteenth century. But the terms on which Asia nowtraded with Europe gave it much less room for manoeuvre. Europeans controlled the networks of long-distance commerce, as well as supplying its most valuable items. To enter this trade and pay for Europe’s manufactures, Asian economies were forced to rely on exports of rawmaterials and foodstuffs. To make matters worse,from an Asian standpoint, they had to compete with the commodity producers of the Atlantic economy as well as with each other. American cotton and wheat rivalled Indian; Indian tea replaced China tea in the British market. With their command and control of Asia’s seaborne trade, their newfound access to the Asian consumer (by conquest in India, by forced treaty in China) and their big industrial lead, the Europeans seemed to have drawn the Asian economies into a globalized market at the moment of greatest divergence in their relative strengths. The numbers are telling. Whereas in 1820 India and China had a gross domestic product per head around one half of the level in Western Europe, by 1913 it was more like one seventh. 10
    This gloom-laden picture is not the whole story. Asia became part of a newglobal economy in which the volume of goods that was traded was enormously greater than before 1750. But the Europeans’ control over the Asian economies was far from complete – for a number of reasons. They had too little capital to ‘colonize’ Asian producers fully. They were baffled by the problems of penetrating deeper into Asia’s largest economy. China’s language, currency and domestic mercantile networks kept them at bay. Nor was time on their side. It was well after mid-century before railway construction, the Suez Canal, the steamship and the telegraph brought even maritime Asia into the same proximity as transatlantic economies had long had with Europe. The timing was especially significant in the case of Japan, where industrialization was well under way by the 1880s. Far from East Asia being reduced to a subaltern region, Japan’s export trade to the West and the income it brought triggered a rapid expansion of trade
within
Asia and
between
Asian economies. It was soon Japanese industrialists (often in partnership with Chinese merchants) and Indian mill-owners who were meeting the region’s demand for more consumer goods. By 1914 Asia’s trade with Asia was growing more quickly than its trade with the West. 11
    The hundred years that led up to 1914 could thus be described as an age of ‘semi-globalization’. They had seen the emergence of a single world market for primary and industrial goods as well as for capital and financial services. In a number of states (though not the majority) the volume of trade compared with the state’s total output had grown very