When China Rules the World полностью

Although European nations spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy fighting each other, the European passage to modernity from the mid sixteenth century onwards was achieved without, for the most part, a persistent threat from outside, with the exception of the Ottoman Empire in the south-east. By the seventeenth century, however, the latter was progressively being rolled back, though it was not until the nineteenth century that it was finally excluded from the Balkans. [89] Europe was the only continent to enjoy this privilege. Every subsequent aspirant for modernity – Asia, Africa, Latin America – had to confront and deal with an outside predator in the form of the modern European nations. Even the European settlers in North America had to fight the British in the American War of Independence to establish their sovereignty and thereby create the conditions for economic take-off. A consequence of this is that Europe has been little concerned in recent centuries with dealing with the Other, or seeking to understand the Other, except on very much its own, frequently colonial, terms. Only relatively recently did this begin to change.

Europe ’s colonial history, in fact, is a further distinguishing characteristic. From the sixteenth century to the 1930s European nations, in a remarkable display of expansion and conquest, almost uniquely (the only other instance being Japan) built seaborne empires that stretched around the world. The colonies, especially those in the New World and, in the case of Britain, India and the Malay Peninsula, [90] were to be the source of huge resources and riches for the imperial powers. Without them, as we have seen, Europe could not have achieved its economic take-off in the way that it did. No non-European country, bar Japan after 1868, was to achieve take-off in the nineteenth century: as a result, a majority found themselves colonized by the European powers.

Although the passage through modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to a service-based society via an industrial one, here we find another instance of European exceptionalism. European countries (sixteen in all) – with Britain, Belgium and Germany (in that order) at the head – are the only ones in the world that have been through a phase in which the relative size of industrial employment was larger than either agrarian or service employment. [91] In Britain, industrial employment reached its peak in 1911, when it accounted for 52.2 per cent of the total labour force: by way of contrast, the peak figure for the United States was 35.8 per cent in 1967 and for Japan 37.1 per cent in 1973. It was the sheer weight of industrial society that was to lend modern Europe many of its most distinctive characteristics, notably the centrality of class conflict and importance of trade unions. From a global perspective, a different and far more common path has been to move directly, in terms of employment, from a largely agrarian to a mainly service society, without a predominantly industrial phase, a route that has been followed by the United States, Canada, Japan and South Korea. [92]

Although the pace of European industrialization was extremely rapid by the standards of previous economic change, it was slow compared with subsequent take-offs, the United States included, but especially East Asia. [93] The transformation of Western Europe was a long and protracted affair: it took Britain, after all, over two centuries to get where it is now. One consequence has been that the conflict between modernity and tradition has been relatively muted. The European city neatly illustrates this point: it is like a geological formation, one era of architecture existing cheek by jowl with another, a living museum embracing centuries of history, in contrast to North America, where cities were newly created, and East Asia, where little survives from the past in places like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong.