In 1800, therefore, Britain enjoyed two long-term — as opposed to contingent — advantages over China. The British state (and, in varying degrees, other Western European states) was more favourably disposed towards industrialization than the Chinese state, while colonization and persistent intra-European wars had furnished Western Europe with various strategic assets, notably raw materials and military capacity. The fact that colonization was to provide Britain with the means by which to side-step its growing land and resource problem towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, was entirely fortuitous. The point remains, therefore, that in 180 °China (and, indeed, Japan) found itself in a rather similar economic position to Western Europe and possessed a not dissimilar potential for economic take-off. What made the decisive difference were those contingent factors — New World resources and, to a lesser extent, accessible supplies of coal — that enabled Britain to deal with its resource constraints, together with the supportive attitude of the British state towards industrialization. China enjoyed no such contingent salvation and, as a result, found itself in a hole from which it was unable to extricate itself, a situation that was to be exacerbated within less than half a century by the growing incursions of the European powers, especially Britain, beginning with the Opium Wars. The historical consequences were to be enormous: China was at least as agrarian in 1850 as it was in 1750 and not much less so even in 1950. According to the economic historian Angus Maddison, China ’s GDP in 1820 was $228.6 billion — almost four times greater than in 1600 — but had barely increased at all by 1913, by which time it had nudged up to $241.3 billion, and actually fell to $239.9 billion in 1950. [75]

If the root cause of China’s catastrophic performance between 1800 and 1950 lay not circa 1600 but circa 1800, then the antecedents of China’s present economic dynamism, rather than being lost in the mists of time, are, on the contrary, relatively recent. [76] This makes China ’s remarkable economic transformation since 1978 rather more explicable. [77] Far from being a basket-case, the Chinese economy in 1800 remained, in many respects, very dynamic; society continued to be highly competitive, the peasantry displayed a powerful capacity to adapt and innovate, and merchants possessed considerable commercial acumen. While these characteristics may have remained relatively dormant in the inclement intervening period, after 1978 they have once again come to the fore. [78] To this we might add a further contemporary point. In 1800, rather than being Eurocentric, the global economy was, in fact, polycentric, economic power being shared between Asia, Europe and the Americas, with China and India the two largest economies. The global economy is now once more becoming increasingly multipolar. Rather than regarding this as unusual, perhaps instead we should see the last two centuries, in which economic power became concentrated in the hands of a relatively small part of the world’s population, namely Europe and North America, as something of an historical aberration. Colonization, furthermore, was to play a crucial role in this outcome, by providing some of the preconditions for Europe to break into Prometh ean growth while at the same time also bestowing on it the power and opportunity to stifle and distort the economic development of much of the rest of the world for a century or more.

Figure 3. The fall and rise of China and India: changing shares of global GDP, 1820–2001.

If, towards the end of the eighteenth century, Western Europe was in a rather similar position to China, the implications for our understanding of history and subsequent events are far-reaching. It suggests that the explanation for the rise of Europe was in large part to do with relatively short-term factors rather than preordained by its slow but steady transformation over previous centuries; in other words, we need to rethink the idea that the ensemble of characteristics which Europe had been acquiring over centuries, and enjoyed on the eve of economic take-off, were, as has often been assumed, also preconditions for that take-off. They might have been desirable, they could have been advantageous, but were they also conditions without which the process would never have happened at all? Japan, China and India were not too far away from achieving a similar economic breakthrough but their political and cultural histories contrasted sharply with that of Europe. If they had succeeded and Europe failed, then the characteristics of their subsequent paths of development, and the institutions and values they would have spawned, would certainly have looked very different from those we have come to associate with Europe. Indeed, as we shall see later, as these countries have modernized they have diverged markedly from the European template.

It is clear from the experience of the last half-century, during which a growing number of countries have achieved rapid industrialization, that the processes and conditions that characterized European take-off, and particularly that of Britain, were largely peculiar to Western Europe and that there are, in fact, many ways of achieving take-off. As the historian Peter Perdue writes: ‘Industrial growth does not have to be an outcome of a centuries-long accumulation of the particular skills found in north-west Europe; there are numerous paths to economic modernity, and England followed only one of them.’ [79] As a small example, the nature of class differentiation in the English countryside, including the rapid decline of the peasantry, has not been repeated in the case of China ’s industrialization nor, indeed, many others as well. [80]

This brings us to the broader political, cultural and intellectual framework of Europe ’s passage to modernity. The roots of European civilization are usually traced back to Greek democracy, Roman law and Judaeo-Christian religion. It has been commonplace to regard these as preconditions for, as well as characteristics of, European modernity. Although the impact of democracy in ancient Greece has been exaggerated, with the West not adopting it, except for small minorities, until the late nineteenth century at the earliest, there is no mistaking the broad influence that Greek civilization has exercised on European history down the ages, including the way we think about right and wrong, the tradition of debate and oratory, the notion of independent citizenship, and the idea of democracy. A more prosaic example is the constant recycling of mainly Doric but also Ionic and, via the Roman Empire, Corinthian columns as the preferred architectural style for buildings that seek to convey a sense of eternal authority, from the Bank of England to the Supreme Court. [81] Similarly, the development of Roman-inspired law — essentially through Christianity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries — helped to establish the concept and reality of an independent legal system, which played a significant role in the subsequent entrenchment of property rights. [82] Finally, Christianity was to imbue Europe with a powerful sense of universalism, which was to shape the continent’s attitudes towards not only itself but also other cultures and races, playing an important role in moulding the colonial mentality and the notion of a civilizing mission. [83]