By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s subseq

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One of the key reasons we should expect China’s continued vitality and rapid economic growth is that China has moved from being an importer of technologies from the United States and Europe to becoming a major technology innovator and exporter in its own right. An example of China’s new technological prowess is in high-speed wireless technology, no

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The incursion of the European imperialists put China into an economic tailspin from which it would not recover for more than a century. With the Qing Dynasty humiliated and weakened by the losses of the First Opium War, an internal rebellion broke out between 1850 and 1864. Known as the Taiping Rebellion, it pitted the Qing Dynasty against the foll

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China, a proud empire with an astounding 37 percent of the world’s population in 1820, found itself humbled by countries less than a tenth its size. While China avoided direct colonization during the nineteenth century, it did not avoid chaos, military defeat, or European imperial encroachments on its sovereignty. India, with 20 percent of the worl

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