Between 1995 and 2000 a number of synthetic studies on the economic history of Asia in the Early Modern Period were published which have changed – or should change – our ideas and perceptions of the ‘rise of the west’ and the parallel ‘decline of the east’ in a fundamental way. The potential impact of these studies is comparable to that of a previous brief spell of brilliance in our profession, the early 1970s, with the pioneering publications by, amongst others, Wallerstein, Brenner, and North and Thomas. Whereas these studies proposed fundamentally new views on the long term dynamics of the ‘rise of the west’, and concentrated heavily on the economic and socio-political history of Europe (albeit sometimes within a ‘world system perspective’), the new generation of innovative works focuses on a new analysis of the economic history of parts of Asia - on China and India in particular. Much of the detailed empirical research on which this revisionism is based, was done before the books of Goody, Frank, Wong, Pomeranz, and Lee and Wang were published, and forerunners of the revisionism can be identified. But only now the movement has created a clear set of hypotheses that challenges the accepted wisdom about die economic and institutional contrasts between both sides of the Eurasian Continent.

In this paper, I want to explore a very simple contrast which has many potential implications. China at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century was, by most measures, a very poor society. China in the latter part of the eighteenth century seemed – both to its own members and to most, though not all, visitors from abroad – a very rich society. So what happened in between?

Much of the recent work on the economic and social history of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867) has been driven by a desire to identify what T.C. Smith has called ‘native sources ofJapanese industrialisation’. From the Marxist-influenced historians in the 1920s who sought to explain the pre-industrial roots of the structure of production in interwar Japan, through to contem-poraryJapanese historians' studies of the pattern of Japanese development, a major part of the agenda has been to identify how Japan had got to where it was, in other words, what was the secret of its twentieth century successes and weaknesses. It is not possible to explore the situation of Japan's economy in the century 1750–1850 without benefit of this hindsight, without being aware that while Japan's situation may have been in many ways analogous to that of China and Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, its economic fortunes were by the latter part of the nineteenth century experiencing their own ‘great divergence’ from those of China, India and the other countries of Asia and the near East. To search for the antecedents of this divergence is for economic historians of Japan a parallel exercise o t any search for the sources of the European ‘miracle’. While a focus on the period 1750–1850 as an era of European/Asian divergence means, therefore, that we must highlight the situation inJapan during that century, it must also be accepted that in the case of Japan any comparison with other countries or regions may also suggest the causes of Japan's own divergence some fifty to a hundred years later.

Indian nationalism was born out of the notion that India's poverty and backwardness was not a natural result of technical inferiority or inefficient use of resources, but that it was a consequence of colonial rule. Even before the development of scientific nationalist economics in the 1890s, the moralists of Young Bengal had called for a protectionist ‘national political economy’ on the lines advocated by Friedrich List in Germany, whom they had read as early as 1850. Bholanath Chandra asserted in 1873 that India had once been the greatest textile producer in the world and had initiated the industrial revolution. By 1970,.he predicted, Britain would be eclipsed by the United States and by India as the greatest industrial producers. This would be brought about by rigorous protectionism and by the growth of what he called ‘moral hostility’ to the consumption of foreign goods which had even polluted the materials used in the making of the sacred threads of orthodox Hindus. This emphasis on the culture of consumption and the structure of external economic relations was central to different varieties of Indian nationalist thought as they developed from Dadhabhai Naoroji through to Mahatma Gandhi.

Something exceptional happened first in England and later in Northwestern Europe beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. Institutions, state and the ability to achieve technological breakthroughs all need to be taken into account in any satisfactory explanation as to why and where the Industrial Revolution took place. This essay attempts to situate the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Until the 1780s, this century was a period of economic expansion for the Ottoman Empire but the empire was surely not in a position to achieve an Industrial Revolution of its own or even an extended period of technological change and productivity increases. The essay also argues that the explanation for this state of affairs should be searched not in any external intervention or impact but n i internal structures and dynamics. In short, social and economic forces for change remained weak while the Ottoman state was strong enough to defend a traditional order.

All historical research, however micro and focussed can be represented as part of a process of ‘reconfiguration’ Research is simply the crafts dominant and traditional activity of transforming archival evidence into printed narratives which validate, qualify and occasionally demolish dominant meta-narratives. Most historians continue to be engaged in Von Ranke's grand project for construction of history by making different, more durable and better quality bricks that are piled up awaiting to be used as more modern architecture for national histories. They agree as a point of discipline (if not belief) that this remains the best way to proceed. Some (as Randolph Churchill remarked of Gladstone) are ‘old men in a hurry’ and opting.to proceed from the top down by relocating national histories within the wider spaces, larger chronologies and cosmopolitan concerns of global history.

Hardly had the Spaniards and Portuguese established their first footholds in the newly discovered Americas they claimed as their exclusive preserves than their European rivals and enemies were on the scene. In what came to be known as the Spanish Indies they endeavoured to obtain some of the continent's staggering wealth in precious metals. In Brazil they were after the logwood that could be more or less had for the taking. It produced dyes far superior to those then in use in Europe and in great demand in an expanding textile industry, of which that of England was a considerable part. Besides which there was the pleasing prospect that Brazil's great rivers might give access to the silver mining regions of Spanish South America. Such predatory urges were sharpened as Protestantism took root in Western Europe. Convinced that the military strength of Spain, the continent's leading Catholic power, stemmed from American bullion, zealous Protestants believed that could this wealth only be diverted into the right hands the true faith would be saved, its adherents duly rewarded and Spain, deprived of its lifeblood, ruined. But the implementation of this godly strategy was no obstacle to conducting a lucrative commerce with the arch-enemy. Sugar and tobacco, of which the Iberian Americas were soon substantial producers, could be purchased for sale in a growing European market. Equally appealing was the opportunity to sell to Portuguese and Spanish colonists the African slaves their plantation economies demanded. And no less attractive or rewarding was the chance to supply them with those European goods, both luxuries and necessities, which they were forbidden to produce for themselves and which Iberian industries were increasingly unable to provide, or which, through the inadequacies of the Spanish and Portuguese imperial commercial monopoly, were usually in short supply and invariably grossly over-priced.

At the end of the Second World War, the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia were all under foreign control. The Netherlands retained West New Guinea even while control of the rest of the Dutch East Indies slipped away, while on the other side of the South Pacific, Chile held Easter Island. Pitcairn, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Fiji and the Solomon Islands comprised Britain's Oceanic empire, in addition to informal overlordship of Tonga. France claimed New Caledonia, the French Establishments in Oceania (soon renamed French Polynesia) and Wallis and Futuna. The New Hebrides remained an Anglo-French condominium; Britain, Australia and New Zealand jointly administered Nauru. The United States' territories included older possessions – the Hawaiian islands, American Samoa and Guam – and the former Japanese colonies of the Northern Marianas, Mar-shall Islands and Caroline Islands administered as a United Nations trust territory. Australia controlled Papua and New Guinea (PNG), as well as islands in the Torres Strait and Norfolk Island; New Zealand had Western Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau. No island group in Oceania, other than New Zealand, was independent.

In his speech of throne of October 17, 1825, the Dutch king William I expressed his concerns on the extremely loss-making Dutch colonial enterprise of that moment. The aftermath of the closing down of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in the 1790s and the transfer of the company's indebtedness to the state, threatened to bring about the loss of the Dutch first-rate position on the international colonial forum. Moreover, the fiasco of the so-called liberal interlude of the enlightened Governor-General G. van der Capellen and his often frivolous politics in Java during the period 1816–1826, deeply disillusioned the king. Therefore, William officially announced the appointment of a commissioner-general, a representative provided with extraordinary power and authority who was only supposed to give account direcdy to the king himself. He also informed the States General of the appointment of the governor of the province of SouthBrabant in the Southern Netherlands Leonard du Bus de Gisignies as his commissioner-general on August 10 of the same year.