It is imperative to set out what ‘connections’ and ‘divergence’ imply in this context, before attempting to deduce the latter from the former. Connections here refer to the economic, political and intellectual interaction between the flourishing trading economies of Western Europe and Asia during the centuries that served as a pre-requisite to the Industrial Revolution in Europe since the late 18th century, and colonisation and servitude in Asia. To outline the main stages of the connection briefly, we can say that before C15 it amounted to European explorations, between C15 and C16 it consisted of a two way trading system with the balance of payments heavily in the red for Europe, between C16 and C18 we see European political authority on Asian soils starting to sprout and shaping trading policies likewise and after C18 we see an outright occupation of Asia with its economy being channelled to benefit that of the colonial metropolis.  To correctly define divergence, perhaps it is apt to begin by studying a set of figures. In 1750, the proportion of national manufacturing output to that produced globally for China, India and Europe were as follows- 32.8%, 24.5% and 23.2% respectively. The corresponding figures for 1860 were 19.7%, 8.6% and 53.2%.  Thus, this refers to the rift in material prosperity and economic development between Europe and Asia in the years following the Industrial Revolution.

The traditional Eurocentric opinion minimises the impact of global connections on Europe’s path to industrialisation. Economic historians like David Landes would prefer a Europe versus Asia approach, with the former the obvious winner driving the wheel of modernity for the past thousand years.  Similarly, Eric Jones has argued for ‘the European miracle’, whereby he sees the Industrial Revolution as merely the flowering of the accumulated superiority of Europe over many centuries.  Even among the Orientalists, however, the practice of emphasising features unique to each continent is common. For example, Kenneth Pomeranz focuses on abundant supply of coal as one of his two main reasons for the European lead in the late 18th century when it successfully transferred its economy from timber based to steam reliant. This approach too neglects the interactions between Europe and Asia that led to diverging features within their political economy during the period.

We have decided to focus on the ‘globological’ paradigm. By focusing on the ‘planetary economy’ , we can synthesise a new approach whereby connections will be seen as the fundamental reason for the rift. If we look at the world economy as one macro-economic whole, we can analyse the ups and downs of various countries as boom and bust in various sectors of an economy. The thrust of the argument rests on the notion of ‘punctuated equilibrium’  whereby we see that even minor interactions lead to sweeping and long lasting changes within the socio-political-economic structures of these two continents.

Diffusion of knowledge was a key feature in the Eurasian connections. One of the main reasons for the relative successes of the European mercantilism in the later decades of the early modern age was their predominance of the oceans as most of the great Asian empires like the Ming, the Mughals and the Ottomans did not maintain strong navies. Yet, this superiority needs to be seen in the light of their massive backwardness in the 14th-15th centuries when the fleet of Zhang He dominated the Asian seas. It was assumed that there were more vessels in China than the rest of the world put together. In spite of such disparity, the continuous trade between Western Europe and the Malabar coast of India contributed to close the gap. For instance, Indian ships were built with fibre ties and caulking which made them more durable than the European ships, made with iron nails and planks. Such impressive skills were carried by the ship builders of Europe back home and imitated, to the extent that a large part of the famous British merchant fleet was made up of ships imported from India.  This was the norm, not the exception. Maxine Berg has argued that the ‘link between East and West contributed to the wider expansion of consumption and industry in Europe which followed it’. She develops the case further by stating that during ‘the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…import trade in luxury goods from India and China to Europe was to transform the European economies themselves’.

However, far more important is the direction of this flow of knowledge. Essentially, it was from Asia to Europe and not the other way round. Some have attributed Asia’s cultural stagnation and arrogance for the same whereby China, the Middle Kingdom, or Mughal India was inert, even hostile to European rationality and technology.  In so far as some of the argument bears weight, it was essentially down to the nature of the encounters between Europe and Asia that determined the directional features of the knowledge flow. Firstly, Asia was far ahead in technology and techniques pertaining to agriculture, irrigation systems and organisation of farm labour. Thus, it was natural for Europe to put the ‘Asiatic mode of production’  to good use to increase its agricultural productivity. Secondly, although Eurocentrics have continuously focused on pre-late 18th century European lead in manufacturing technology, much of the recent research by Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz has proved beyond reasonable doubt that Asian economies were equal, if not ahead of Europe, sustaining great manufacturing clusters in the Yangzi valley, Guandong, Bengal and Gujarat.  Indeed, as figures given above  display, Asia produced and sold much more in the world market in manufactured goods than Europe. There were two types of connections at play here- one, the incentive to mechanise further arose from the Scientific Revolution, yet that did not arise in a void. It was due to Europe’s failure to compete with Asia, as evident through the connections that led to the urge for innovating further; two, once Europe did modernise its production techniques to match Asia’s, the diffusion of that knowledge itself to Asia was successfully prevented by colonisation and de-industrialisation, whereby Asian economies were systematically ripped apart of all their great manufacturing hubs.  Thus, the nature of connections was altered after Europe managed to gain knowledge of markets, techniques and weaknesses of Asia and this alteration contributed heavily to the divergence between East and West from the later half of the 18th century.

Inter-continental encounters also altered the intra-continental economies of Europe and Asia. It is estimated that nearly half of the world’s silver ended up in China by the 18th century due to the lucrative trading network it had established with Western Europe.   However, it also led to China adopting a silver-based economy, which led to massive socio-economic unrests within the country and also led to a severe economic glut when the supply of silver from the Spanish mines dried up. It was the principle reason for the collapse of the Ming empire and caused tremendous disruptions in China’s economy from which the Qing could never turn it around. In India, it led to commercialisation of agriculture. For instance, farmers in the Bengal and the Malabar coast of India produced cotton over other crops for exporting through the ports of Surat and Calicut on to the international market. However, this led to shrinking of the product portfolio of the Indian manufacturing clusters and they became susceptible to the boom and bust of the global market. More importantly, however, it led to the development of ‘Proto-Industrialisation’  in both Europe and Asia, the most suitable pre-condition to an industrialising process.  This situation could be conveniently described as a ‘dead end’  and to explain the disparities occurring from the late 18th century from this base, we need to return to the arguments about encounters, mostly violent, between Europe and Asian empires that prevented the former from taking the plunge into industrialisation.

With the Age of Empire, the connections became increasingly determined according to European demands. Even before the 19th century usage of the term came into being, small but strategic European clusters in the heart of Asia played an important role in setting the terms for international commerce. For example, as early as 1498, the Portuguese under Vasco da Gamma and later under Albuquerque had monopolised the Indian ocean trade network by preventing other Asian ships to trade independently with the Indian west coast.  A more obvious example is 18th century Bengal, which the English East India Company occupied in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey and turned the most thriving manufacturing sector in India to a mere cotton farmland, supplying raw materials for Lancashire firms. Furthermore, through the Calcutta port the English controlled the whole trading network from India to South East Asia and through South China Sea into the Chinese east coast. Apart from this monopolisation of oceanic trade, European colonies in the 18th century were also a haven for ruinously high taxes and forcible plantations of cash crops, both of which resulted in the wrecking of the domestic economy and supply of surplus and raw materials to the metropolis’ economy. As Karl Marx put it, ‘the homeland of cotton was inundated with cotton’ as European manufacturers, now free from Asian competition, flooded markets with produce from Lancashire mills. Political control entailed that the Europeans could uproot domestic entrepreneurs at will. Thus, the development of connections between Europe and its overseas colonies were strikingly different than those Europe had with the former independent Asian nations. This contributed significantly, perhaps most importantly, towards the increasing material and developmental gap between the East and the West from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

As Prasannan Parthasarathi has argued, global connections resulted in the development and nurturing of very similar types of capitalism in both Europe and Asia.  It was not merely a ‘horse race’  between two detached continents, as many from both the Eurocentric as well as the Orientalist side have pointed out. However, what led to the development has primarily to do with the alteration of the nature of these connections, whereby peaceful trade was replaced with violent mercantilism and ultimately imperialism, that paved the way for the material and technological disparity on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, from where these inequalities became further conspicuous.

Aruni Mukherjee