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’.

Chapter 2 is the first of five chapters that highlights the interconnections between Western and non-Western agency in the making of the first global economy (FGE), which existed between roughly 1500 and 1850. This chapter re-introduces China as an agent of the FGE, adopting a via media between the Sinocentrism of key parts of the California School on the one hand and Eurocentrism/Eurofetishism on the other (i.e., China's role in the FGE was more important than Eurocentrism allows for but was less pronounced than Sinocentrism presumes). Overall, it reveals how China was open to global trade and was an important (though not the key) driver of it. It critiques all of the standard Eurocentric claims concerning China's isolation from foreign trade, revealing as myths: the realisation of the state's official bans on foreign trade (section 1); the dominance of the Europeans in Chinese trade and the dominance of China over Britain (section 2); the Chinese tribute system (section 3); the Canton System (section 4); and China's heavily protectionist trade regime (section 5). The chapter closes with a detailed analysis as to why Qing China moved to freer trade after 1684 while Britain moved in the opposite direction to extreme protectionism.