China assembled the basic components of a market economy earlier, and on a much larger scale, than any other part of Eurasia.

European fascination with China – however ignorant and ill-informed – had no counterpart in Chinese intellectual circles, a measure perhaps of cultural self-confidence and the prestige of an unbroken classical tradition of exceptional range and subtlety.

China followed a fundamentally different path but with no less extraordinary results. It has been some seventy years since China’s Communists gained control, and in that time the country’s annual economic output has grown from under $100 million to more than $13 trillion. Under Mao Zedong, China was an economic basket case, having experienced the w

Two thousand years ago, the potential for multinational governance at a vast scale was already achieved. The European Union, one can say, seeks to govern Europe at the scale of the Pax Romana, but without the imperial wars and without the chauvinism of one people dominating the rest. The People’s Republic of China similarly aims for the internal pe

China grew quantitatively, not qualitatively. Part of the reason, Elvin argued, was the inward turn we have noticed already: the shrinking of China’s external contacts as the Ming abandoned the sea.

On the eve of the close encounter with the West, China’s distinctive political trajectory (still dominated by its symbiotic relationship with Inner Asia) propelled it not towards an all-powerful oriental despotism (imagined by Europeans) – which might have permitted drastic change in the face of external challenge – but instead still further toward

Before 1400, an observer who was able to survey the world would have had few accurate clues as to which of the main civilizations in Eurasia would eventually assert a worldwide pre-eminence. China, the Islamic realm in Middle Eurasia, and Europe had each attained a high degree of socio-political organization and material culture.