ABSTRACT

This chapter speaks about the economic advance of East Asia as a process of re-establishing global power. The shift to the modern world is usually taken to have its initial centre in Europe where a network of trading cities linked northern parts of Italy, through parts of Germany, on into the Low Countries and thence into northern France and southern England. In the middle period of the twentieth century there was a series of wars which helped to shape modern East Asia: these wars involved different peoples, they took place in different places, they lasted different times and they are remembered today in different ways. It was the impact of European state-empires that began the process of the shift to the modern world in East Asia; traders, soldiers, missionaries and assorted adventurers rode the wave of natural science-based industrial capitalism and overwhelmed extant long-established sophisticated civilizations in East Asia.