ABSTRACT
During the eighteenth century, China still displayed characteristics evident in c. 1500: it was a great power resting on a highly productive economy, managed by a centralised state, and was largely impervious to European influence. Agricultural developments had made tremendous population growth possible, and although precise figures for the rate of that eighteenth-century growth remain elusive, the estimate of 360 million Chinese in 1800 is widely accepted. By 1800, the world of Islam remained rich and culturally impressive, but had stopped expanding for some time. The creation of the Euro-Atlantic colonial world represented the first step towards 'globalization' by linking Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas in networks of commerce, settlement and government. The greatest change was the creation of a Euro-Atlantic world of trade and settlements which provided Europeans with the precious metals needed to break into Asian trading systems, new lands to farm, and a novel form of production in the slave-based plantation economies.
