![]() Easy access to coal and Caribbean sugar fuelled the steam-power and workforces of the industrial revolution. Early in the 19th century, however, Britain began to nose ahead, through sheer good fortune. A newer, postcolonial school places the "great divergence" rather later, arguing that until 1800, the Chinese empire largely kept up with Britain, the most prosperous and vigorous of the European economies. ![]() ![]() To condense two extremes of a now venerable argument, the old school contended that somewhere in the early modern period a progressive and free-trading Europe surged ahead through innate superiority of character and government, while ancient superpowers such as China turned complacently in on themselves. It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve." ![]() It is the story at the very heart of modern history. "The rise of the west," he argued, "is the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. Last year, Niall Ferguson – in his pugnaciously titled Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest – brought the subject back into sharp media focus. Such oppositional historiography – the idea of a head-on clash of civilisations, with a clear winner and loser – seems to hold a perennial appeal in terms of both its simplicity and its drama of antagonism. ![]() D ebates about the rise of the modern west (and corresponding decline of the east) remain a fertile source of historical polemic. ![]()
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