All the riches of the east restored, by Philip S Golub

All the riches of the east restored, by Philip S Golub

Its distant origins are to be found in the position that Asia occupied in the world system before the North-South divide and the creation of third world countries (2) - a divide brought about by the European industrial revolution and colonialism. In a long-term perspective China, like Asia as a whole, can be seen to be resuming its precolonial history and gradually reclaiming the place that it occupied before 1800, when it was one of the main centres of the world economy and the world’s principal manufacturing power. China was then the centre of a dense, centuries-old regional trade network and Asia was the world’s main production and profit-generating area.

It is not surprising that Asia had a preponderant place in world manufacturing at the time. According to estimates by economic historian Paul Bairoch (8), in 1750 China’s share of world manufacturing output was 32.8%, compared with 23.2% for Europe, with populations of 207 and 130 million respectively. India and China together accounted for 57.3% of world manufacturing output. If the contributions of the southeast Asian countries, Persia and the Ottoman empire are included, the share of Asia in the wider sense (excluding Japan) was almost 70%. Asia was particularly dominant in finished textile products (Indian and Chinese cotton and silk goods) - a sector later to become the globalised flagship industry of the European industrial revolution.