Chapter 11 is the first of two that explains why Britain industrialized and why China and India did not. They provide a non-Eurocentric answer to the famous ‘Needham problem’, which boils down to asking ‘why China (and to an extent India), which had been a pioneer of technological development for over two millennia failed to industrialize whereas Britain, which had been a laggard for several millennia, succeeded? To answer this I bring out surprising resemblances and differences in the ‘developmental architectures’ of the three aforementioned countries, which factors in state-society relations and the modes of: production, empire, warfare, taxation and epistemic construction. In this chapter, I argue that differing global and domestic contexts can account for the ‘second great divergence’ in cotton-textile production. In essence, my solution to the ‘Needham problem’ is two-fold: first, neither China nor India were on a trajectory into a cotton-based industrial capitalism owing to the nature of their developmental architectures, especially the nature of their systems of production and class relations. Second, there was neither a desire nor a need to industrialize partly because there was an absence of imperial- and global-economic pressures and partly because these societies were ‘historical capitalist satisficers’.