ABSTRACT
East-West relations over the past 500 years present two main puzzles. The first concerns the extraordinary geographical expansion of the European system of states. By 1850 or shortly thereafter, that system had come to encompass the entire globe, thereby reducing the China-centered tributetrade system to a regional subsystem of a now European-centered global economy. What is most puzzling about this tendency – which is what we shall understand by “the rise of the West” – are its modest origins. On the eve of its first major expansion across the Atlantic and around the Cape in the late fifteenth century, the European system of states was a peripheral and chaotic component of a global economy that had long been centered on Asia. In spite of this first expansion, two centuries later no European or American state had managed to create within its domains a national economy that could match the size, complexity and prosperity of the Chinese economy. And yet, within the short span of another century, tiny “Great” Britain was poised to incorporate within its domains the entire Indian subcontinent, and then, in cooperation and competition with other Western powers, to turn China from the center into a peripheral component of the global economy. How can we explain this turnaround?
