British colonization of the world came in two phases. The first phase unfolded during the seventeenth century and the second—major one—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second phase coincided with the Industrial Revolution and gave rise to a completely new international order—a post-industrial new world order different from the ‘old’ and ‘pre-industrial new’ world orders.
The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain started in the mid-eighteenth century. Between 1760 and 1860, the British share of the world’s industrial output went up from 1.9% to 19.9%.1 This was due in large part to increased labour productivity caused by industrialization and was at a time when the world population was 1.2 billion,2 whereas the British comprised only 2%.
The growth of manufacturing capacity soon led to the quest for external markets, as the domestic market was quickly saturated. However, protective policies in fellow European nations and their sizes did not allow large amounts of exports of British industrial goods into continental Europe, which meant that the search had to be shifted to further afield.
In addition to markets, British industries needed raw materials. Some of them, such as the crucially important cotton , were simply not produced in Great Britain due to the unfavourable climate. For others, there were different reasons to import such as inadequate domestic production or ability to import at much cheaper, sub-market prices from other countries such as India , which Britain controlled anyway.
The plains of North America and Russia are our corn-fields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic are our timber-forests; Australasia contains our sheep-farms, and in South America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of California and Australia flows to London ; the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar, and spice plantations are in all the Indies. Spain and France are our vineyards, and the Mediterranean our fruit-garden; and our cotton-grounds, which formerly occupied the Southern United States, are now everywhere in the warm regions of the earth.4
Where possible in these markets, Britain monopolized the trade of raw materials and end-products—as, for example, through the East India Company in Asia —enabling Britain control prices of both. By time, as Britain became an industrialized country, it turned to free trade agreements on the back of a thriving need for territory from which raw materials could be exploited and to which finished goods were to be exported. Great Britain was then the factory of the world, as China is today—the major difference being that the international trade of today is much freer compared to the monopolized, hegemonic trading system of the nineteenth century.
3.1 Britain’s Trade Prior to the Industrial Revolution
To appreciate how trade helped the Industrial Revolution to move full steam ahead and led the British economy to dominate the global economy in the nineteenth century, one needs to first review the humble beginnings of British trade. The structure of British foreign trade until the first half of the seventeenth century—that is, before its major trade expansion and colonization—was quite dull in terms of composition and trade partners. Britain traded with a few partners and in a few categories of commodities. Trade—both exports and imports—was quite low in terms of values and volume. England did not have much to offer the outside world. Wool—and woollen textiles after Edward III —was the only major export item, accounting for 80–90% of all exports. The rest was primarily made up of fish, tin, and lead. Imports, on the other hand, were textiles primarily from Flanders , and spices, fruits, and luxury foodstuff from the East Indies . Britain also imported wine and raw materials, including timber and metals, for construction and shipbuilding.
English foreign trade in the second half of the seventeenth century (thousand pounds sterling)
1663–1969 | 1699–1701 | |
|---|---|---|
Exports | 4100 | 6419 |
London | 2039 | 2773 |
Other ports | 1200 | 1660 |
Re-exports | 900 | 1986 |
Imports | 4400 | 5849 |
London | 3495 | 4667 |
Other ports | 900 | 1182 |
British exports and destinations, 1699–1701 (thousand pounds sterling unless otherwise specified)
Europe, Ottoman Empire, and North Africa | West Africa, America, and the East | Total | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Exports | 3772 | 661 | 4433 | 69.1% |
Manufacturing | 2997 | 586 | 3583 | 55.8% |
Manufacturing (% of total exports) | 79.5 | 88.7 | 80.8 | |
Textiles | 2815 | 310 | 3125 | |
Re-exports | 1660 | 326 | 1986 | 30.9% |
Total exports and re-exports | 5432 | 987 | 6419 | 100.0% |
84.6% | 15.4% | 100.0% | ||
Although the first phase of trade expansion was still limited in size, it was also useful in terms of the increasing wealth and capital as well as increasing purchasing power in Britain (and Europe) due to the fall in commodity prices. Three main commodities accounted for one-third of British imports and one-third of British re-exports: tobacco , sugar, and calicoes. They and other imports such as Indian silks, pepper, and non-calico textiles led to the drastic fall in merchandise prices in England and a corresponding increase in purchasing power. For example, when imports from Virginia and the British West Indies soared, the price of tobacco (which was a luxury) fell from 20 to 4 shillings a pound before 1619, and fell to 1 shilling or less by 1670. Sugar imports from the British East Indies also increased rapidly, with one-third of these imports typically re-exported.5
During the second half of the seventeenth century—before the generally accepted start of the Industrial Revolution—non-textile (i.e. non-woollen) manufactured goods constituted less than 10% of British exports. Their growth, however, which was predominantly fed by British exports to its colonies, was impressive, as they almost tripled in less than 40 years.
The colonies provided market in which English manufactures were protected, in which they had little native competition, and which had an absorptive capacity rapidly extending as colonial [raw material]6 exports grew. … Thus, in the seventeenth century, the English brass-, copper-, iron-ware, silk and linen, hat-making and tailoring, glass-, earthen-ware, paper, cordage and leather industries, and others, were being fostered by their protected market across the Atlantic, gaining strength with which they would later emerge into competition with Europe and further modify the structure of English trade.
In short, the expansion of Britain’s international trade started before the Industrial Revolution, spurred by the first phase of British colonization. It is noteworthy that manufactured goods constituted the lion’s share of British exports even before the Industrial Revolution.
3.2 The Industrial Revolution and the Expansion of Trade in the Eighteenth Century
Great Britain is considered to be the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, the timing of which is debated. In the second half of the sixteenth century, England’s exports of manufactured goods to colonies had already started to rise, but the generally accepted notional time for the start of the Industrial Revolution is the mid-to-late seventeenth century. The genesis of the revolution was the textile industry in Lancashire. Inventions of new technologies led to mechanization of textiles , which, in turn made Lancastrian workers the most productive textile workers in the world. The same number of workers was now able to manufacture much larger quantities of output in money and quantity terms.
What, however, was to be done with the exploding productivity and production when a small island’s population got saturated with new products and growth of demand faded? After all, a population of about 10.5 million at the end of the eighteenth century—which was not too significantly different from the island’s population in the thirteenth century—could only create demand for a fraction of the rapidly increasing output. The population of Great Britain grew rapidly to 42 million by 1901, quadrupling in one century through the riches obtained from colonization and industrialization. But even that was very small compared to the increase in the industrial productivity.
The answer to the limits of the small domestic market was simple: exports. Britain needed export markets to keep its factories running and excess production had to be marketed in the wider world. Consequently, as Manchester became a flourishing town of cotton textile mills, Liverpool became a major port for exports of cotton textiles and imports of raw cotton . In the process, British exporters penetrated markets around the world by incorporating new territories into the Commonwealth or forcing them to sign free trade agreements.
Given competition, protection, or at least impediments in other countries in Europe, the UK’s colonies were the most important ingredient for the expansion of its exports. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain had truly become the empire where the sun would seemingly never set. Its territorial control or influence extended from the West Indies and North America and from Egypt and Cyprus to the Indian subcontinent and China . The motherland wanted to extract as much economic value as possible from the territories it ruled officially or had de facto control over. It thus capitalized on its vast territorial and trade network on which it could enjoy monopoly powers. The objective was to export manufactured products for the highest possible profits and import raw materials at the lowest possible prices.
Geographical composition of British international trade (pounds sterling)
1700–1701 (England) | 1797–1798 (Great Britain) | Increase (times) | |
|---|---|---|---|
Imports from | 5,820,000 | 23,900,000 | 4.1 |
Ireland | 291,000 | 3,107,000 | 10.7 |
Europe | 3,608,400 | 6,931,000 | 1.9 |
North America | 349,200 | 1,673,000 | 4.8 |
West Indies | 814,800 | 5,975,000 | 7.3 |
East Indies and elsewhere | 814,800 | 6,214,000 | 7.6 |
Exports to | 4,460,000 | 18,300,000 | 4.1 |
Ireland | 133,800 | 1,647,000 | 12.3 |
Europe | 3,657,200 | 3,843,000 | 1.1 |
North America | 267,600 | 5,856,000 | 21.9 |
West Indies | 223,000 | 4,575,000 | 20.5 |
East Indies and elsewhere | 178,400 | 2,196,000 | 12.3 |
Re-exports to | 2,140,000 | 11,800,000 | 5.5 |
Ireland | 149,800 | 1,298,000 | 8.7 |
Europe | 1,647,800 | 9,204,000 | 5.6 |
North America | 107,000 | 354,000 | 3.3 |
West Indies | 128,400 | 472,000 | 3.7 |
East Indies and elsewhere | 85,600 | 472,000 | 5.5 |
Economic research has also confirmed that growth in trade, which was made possible by the colonization process, had a significant positive effect on the British economy’s industrialization and overall growth. Growing exports of manufactured goods and imports of raw materials led to an increase in the share of manufacturing (and an ensuing fall in the share of agriculture) in total output, and Britain thus became an industrialized nation. As with the shifting importance of manufacturing and agriculture, the share of landowners in total income decreased, while that of workers increased.7
3.3 British Industrial Policies as the Driver of British Industrialization
It was not pure luck that the Industrial Revolution first occurred in Great Britain. There had been English attempts to develop the economy since at least the thirteenth century, in particular by supporting manufacturers and their exports. These policies can be classified as early versions of what today is called industrial policy consisting of technology transfer and trade policy measures. They especially targeted two industries—textiles and shipbuilding—which formed the basis of British economic supremacy after the seventeenth century.
Obviously, British industrial policy did not emerge as something coherent and well planned. Instead, it was an amalgam of policy decisions taken by different governments at different times with some reversals. When the effects are combined, however, they cleared the way for (if not deterministically caused) the UK to give birth to the first Industrial Revolution the world had seen.
British industrial policy
Inviting Textile Masters to Britain: Learning and Technology Transfer Before the Industrial Revolution
England was at best an underdeveloped country by the thirteenth century. Its economy was based on the production of wool and extraction of some minerals such as lead and tin. Raw wool comprised its main export item and it imported manufactured textiles.
Rather than by accident, the development of English woollen textiles industry in the following centuries owes a lot to early versions of an industrial policy consisting of inward technology transfer made possible by invitation of Flemish weavers. It started during the reign of Henry III (1216–1272) and gained a stimulus during that of Edward III (1327–1377).8
In the reign of Edward III , it was evident that there was something wrong with the English cloth trade, and it was fortunate that the king’s foreign policy gave the key to the solution of the industrial difficulties. Edward wished to damage the trade of Flanders and to that end did his best to hinder the export of wool and to revivify the English cloth trade so as to be independent of Flanders . Either in order to remedy the defects of the native cloth or with the deliberate intention of building up a cloth-making industry to compete with Flanders , he now adopted the policy of encouraging foreign experts to settle in the country. The conditions of the time were exceedingly favourable, for conditions in the Low Countries were very disturbed; the craftsmen in the Flemish towns were oppressed by the merchant companies, and, moreover, there was hostility between the weavers of the towns and those of the country districts, so that the latter were frequently deprived of their wool supply. Emigration to England would entirely solve this difficulty.11
A beginning can be traced to the immigration of 406 persons, driven out of Flanders in 1561, some of whom settled at Sandwich and Canterbury, while 30 families settled at Norwich, a town which was still suffering from the consequences of Kett’s rebellion. The most important centre, however, was Colchester; for this was an industrially organized colony manufacturing the fine cloth known as bays, sackcloth, needles, and parchment. This Flemish colony appears to have flourished on the whole; James I continued their privileges and they were protected in the exercise and the regulation of their trades, so that the manufacture of bays continued to be important and the cloth which they produced an important article of export. Their trade began to decline in the 18th century under the competition of imported cotton fabrics.
It is highly probable that cotton weaving was also started by these refugees. This had been a flourishing industry at Antwerp, a port where the necessary materials were easily procurable from Egypt. The beginnings in England are very obscure; but it is significant that it began to attract attention as an important trade in Manchester in the early part of the 17th century and that the rise of the manufacture in Lancashire appears to follow very closely on its decline at Antwerp. There is at least the considerable possibility of ascribing the development to the immigration of refugees. After the sack of Antwerp in 1585 we know that many of the inhabitants fled to England, and the same period marks a great growth in the population of Manchester.13
There were many attempts in the 17th century to improve the art of dyeing in England; in 1643, a dye house was started at Bow by a Dutchman, Kepler, whose scarlet dye soon had a high reputation; in 1667 it was further improved by Bauer, a man of Flemish origin, and thenceforward there was no real necessity to export undyed cloth. There was still room for improvement in West Country weaving, and Paul Methuen and Willem Brewer brought over Dutch families to Dutch Barton, near Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire.14
England was not alone in trying to attract Flemish textilers; Scotland encouraged and received them at least from the twelfth century. In 1587, even the Scottish Parliament took a role and passed a law to attract Flemish weavers to Scotland.
Import Substitution and Infant Industry in the Fourteenth Century: Shifting England’s Exports from Raw Wool to Textiles
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries , clothmaking flourished in Florence and Flanders (in towns like Bruges ). British aristocracy active in agriculture turned their attention to sheep production. Encouraged by the Dukes of Burgundy, Flemish luxury clothmaking industry reached its “golden age ” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Florentine and Burgundian textile products spread to Europe, helping the Flemish textile industry to flourish.
As clothmaking was of primitive quality in Britain, the country was a raw material exporter. In turn, Florentines and the Flemings manufactured and exported fine woollen cloth made from British raw wool. Consequently, British raw wool made livelihoods for not only the British aristocracy but also the Florentine and Flemish textile manufacturers. Britain imported some of the luxury Flemish and Florentine textiles. Thus, the raw wool was recycled to Britain, with Flemings and Italians earning significant value added for themselves.
Soon after the start of his personal rule, in 1330, the English king Edward III reinvigorated his father’s campaign for the promotion of a native textile industry. Every man or woman in the realm was allowed to produce cloth, no foreign textiles were to be imported except for the royal family, the nobility or the rich, and suitable franchises would be conceded to all alien cloth-workers wishing to establish themselves in England.16
England at the end of the thirteenth century was the greatest wool-growing country in the world. We die not yet know how to weave fine cloth, so our wool was exported to Flanders . The Parliament said that every sack sent there should pay the King 6.8. The “Flemings” (men of Flanders ) wove the cloth and sent it all over Europe. This trade made it more important than ever for our kings to keep the sea clear if pirates, and Edward worked hard at this task.
English cloth-makers could now benefit from their artificially lower prices of wool in England, coupled with the artificially high prices of wool abroad. Once again, the market managed to get a leg up in its unending, zigzag struggle with power. By the mid-15th century, fine, expensive broadcloth ‘woollen’ were being produced abundantly in England, centring in the West Country, where swift rivers made water plentiful for fulling the woven cloth, and where Bristol could serve as the major port of export and entry.18
In this context, Edward’s move seems a strategic one, combining trade policy with industrial policy in aiming to develop a local textile industry. There is no doubt that it was effective and bore fruits in the centuries to come; Britain gained strength in the textile industry before the Industrial Revolution by turning away from a raw-material-producing economy to a manufacturing one. The ban on export of raw wool and import of textiles was also effective in persuading Flemish weavers to move to England. Thus, the simultaneous policy of trade restrictions and attracting Flemish technical skills and investment turned out to be well-coordinated one.
The government’s grip on the wool sector further strengthened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 1552, customs duties on cloth imports were raised, thereby further strengthening the domestic clothmakers. Henry VII further increased taxes on exports of raw wool and even temporarily banned its export. His son Henry VIII continued the same policies of penalizing the exports of raw and semi-finished fabrics.19 In 1564, Queen Elizabeth strengthened the government’s grip on the trading firms. Manufacturers of linen, gunpowder, and non-woollen textiles in Britain were also supported by the policies to allow them to compete with foreign manufacturers.20
British Navigation Acts: Development of British Shipping and Shipbuilding Industries
[N]one of the King’s liege people should ship any merchandise out of or into the realm except in the ships of the King’s liegeance, on pain of forfeiture.22
What shall we do to defend ourselves? Shall we confine the exportation of the produce of the United States to the ships and mariners of the United States? To increase the English navy, the statute of the Richard II. enacted that “none of the King’s liege people should ship any merchandise out of, or into the realm, but only in the ships of the King’s liegeance, on pain of forfeiture.” If the United States were able and willing to imitate this statute, and confine all our exports and imports to ships built in the United States, and navigated with American seamen, or three quarters American seamen, or one half, or even one third American seamen, what would be the consequence? We should not have at first enough either of ships or seamen to export the produce, and import what would be wanted from abroad; but we should see multitudes of people instantly employed in building ships, and multitudes of others immediately becoming sailors, and the time would not be long before we should have enough of both. The people of the United States have shown themselves capable of great exertions, and possessed of patience, courage, and perseverance, and willing to make large sacrifices to the general interest.23
Similar laws were also enacted under Edward IV in 1463 and under Henry V, who “devoted himself to the improvement of English ships in imitation of the large vessels of the Genoese.”24 During his time shipbuilders were encouraged and supported.25 Three large British ships were built in the Southampton docks.26 Cunningham (1892: 414) remarks that “these improvements in shipbuilding enabled Englishmen to send out fleets that were fit to be employed in voyages of discovery” in the sixteenth century.
Similar Navigation Acts were also enacted during the reigns of Henry VII (1485–1509), Henry VIII (1509–1547), and Elizabeth I (1558–1603).27 But the most forceful ones came during the years 1651–1663 and remained in force until 1849. These last rounds of acts aimed at shaping Britain’s colonial trade in order to increase the benefits from Britain’s growing colonies and to strengthen British manufacturing. Imports to Britain and the colonies from Asia and Africa had to be carried by British ships.
Monopolizing the International Trade of Colonies: Running Current Account Surpluses by Prohibiting Manufacturing in the Colonies
the ordinary means therefore to increase our wealth and treasure is by Foreign Trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value.28
That was British mercantilism. But it was also what the Portuguese, in effect, had been trying to do from the fifteenth century, although with a significantly higher rate of pillaging than trade. Trade (and current account) deficit has proved to be a time-independent driver of policies and economic decisions in a resource-poor economy. But all that was prior to the Industrial Revolution, which changed the whole game. The basic principle of running a trade surplus in the Industrial Revolution required policies to develop manufactured goods.
If the British colonial (‘mercantile’) system is one evidence of that, others can be seen elsewhere. In the nineteenth-century Meiji Japan or twenty-first-century China , maintaining the current account in surplus continues to be as relevant to the shaping of policies as in the fifteenth-century Portugal or seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century England . Likewise, the orientation of Colbert’s seventeenth-century policies in France or Alexander Hamilton’s in the eighteenth century in the USA was not much different.
Colonial laws reflected Britain’s desire that the colonies did not establish manufacturing industries and had to import manufactured goods from Britain .29 The well-known ones were the Woollens Act (1699), the Hat Act (1732), and the Iron Act (1750).30 The Woollens Act restricted the export of wool and production of woollen textiles in the colonies to support their production in Britain . The Hat Act ̶ which Thomas Jefferson later characterized as a ‘despotic’ restricted the manufacturing and exports of hats in the colonies. The Iron Act abolished the duties on exports of pig iron (an intermediate product) to Britain from the colonies but prohibited the colonies from manufacturing finished iron products. There were other laws to impede the development of important manufactured goods such as rum, which at one point was done in 20 distilleries in New Port alone; the distillation of rum in the colonies from sugar molasses obtained from West Indies was penalized heavily by an act in 1733.31 All this effectively aimed at keeping the colonies as providers of raw materials and the motherland as the manufacturing basis.
Effectively, the navigation and colonial acts created a restrictive trade system in which the colonies were to export raw materials only to motherland Britain , which, lying at the centre of the system, was to process the inputs and export the manufactured goods back to the colonies. This was made possible by the companies which were granted monopoly trading rights by virtue of their royal charters—the British East India Company stood as the prime example. From the colonies, the raw materials were thus procured at sub-market prices and end-products sold at dictated prices, imposing a wealth transfer from the colony to Britain . Likewise, sales of manufactured goods also benefited from the monopoly power of the British.
In the process, Britain’s manufacturing industry and international trade flourished. Its West Indies and North American colonies also prospered as colonizers tapped the virtually unlimited agricultural and natural resources of the new territories. Post-industrial Britain was a nation importing raw and semi-finished goods and exporting manufactured goods.32 The trend accelerated further in the nineteenth century when the free trade ideology peaked and became a tool of British international policy once the country’s industrialization progressed. In the first half of 1840, after Britain made a decision to shift to a unilateral freeing of trade,33 it forced other nations to open up uncolonized countries to trade through free trade agreements forced by wars or gunboat diplomacy. While wars and conflict caused intermittent falls and stagnation, between 1800 and 1880 British exports increased by more than 20-fold34 on the back of manufactured goods and global control of trade routes and the colonial system.
The Triangular Trade
A simple exposition of British triangular trade
In the second half of the seventeenth century, England’s move to become an international commercial and military power gained impetus. Now the situation was different in that England possessed a critical mass of colonial territories in the West Indies and North America and, to some degree, in East Asia . To strengthen its economic grasp on the colonies, England (and subsequently Britain ) forcefully regulated its commercial relations, starting in 1645.
As all roads opened to Rome in the Roman Empire, the so-called Navigation Acts ultimately aimed at making Britain the centre of all foreign trade with Britain’s colonies and extracted as much economic value as possible from Britain’s colonies. This was made possible by requiring that all the important products of the colonies could only be exported to the motherland Britain , and that non-British products could also only be imported to the colonies through England . Secondly, as in the earlier acts under the reign of Richard II , Henry VII , and Elizabeth, the laws required that all export trade was to be carried on British ships.
3.4 India Before and After British Invasion
During the initial phases of British trade with India, the Indian economy was more sophisticated than the British. There was British demand for Indian products, but on the Indian side, demand for British goods such as wool, tin, lead, or quicksilver was mostly non-existent.36 Before Plassey, Britain ran a trade deficit with India37; Alexander Dow (1773) saw no hope that the Bengali gold and silver would flow back. The East India Company had been increasingly shipping Indian calico fabrics and Bengali muslins from Calcutta to London and this led to the British Parliament’s ‘Calico Laws,’ which imposed duties on imports from the Indian subcontinent.
Bengal could claim confidently that the demand for its textile manufactures could never lessen because no other nation on the globe could either equal or rival their quality.
massive imports of cheap textiles from England after the Napoleonic wars. In the period 1896–1913, imported piece goods supplied about 60 per cent of Indian cloth consumption and the proportion was probably higher for most of the nineteenth century.
For at least two centuries the handloom weavers of Bengal produced some of the world’s most desirable fabrics, especially the fine muslins , light as “woven air”, that were in such demand for dressmaking and so cheap that Britain’s own cloth manufacturers conspired to cut off the fingers of Bengali weavers and break their looms. Their import was ended, however, by the imposition of duties and a flood of cheap fabric – cheaper even than poorly paid Bengali artisans could provide – from the new steam mills of northern England and lowland Scotland that conquered the Indian as well the British market. India still grew cotton , but Bengal no longer spun or wove much of it. Weavers became beggars, while the population of Dhaka, which was once the great centre of muslin production, fell from several hundred thousand in 1760 to about 50,000 by the 1820s. … Subsequently, India became the exporter of raw materials and foodstuffs – raw cotton and jute, coal, opium, rice, spice and tea – rather than manufactured goods.
After the British invasion, life in India was never like the same. Perhaps the main economic casualty was the Indian textile industry. As Britain industrialized, the Jewel in the Crown de-industrialized and was relegated to being a supplier of raw materials produced at slave wages. India’s agricultural production pattern changed to its detriment. It lost its profitable exports by free merchants. Instead it turned to controlled exports of what the British preferred and extracted profits, with little or no profit to locals. Controls meant that the types of goods and their prices were commanded by the British East India Company.
The city of men had become a city of animals. Weavers’ dwellings were overgrown, the thatch alive with birds, snakes and insects, while roussettes – bats small and multi-coloured as butterflies – flew in and out of earth-mounds that had been homes; hunched vultures surveyed tracts of land in which the human voice was stilled. People lost the skill of their fingers, and only the roughest-made country cloth still found a market among the poorest.40
After the invasion of Bengal and subsequently the Indian subcontinent, Chinese tea (as well as that produced in the East India Company plantations of Bengal in the nineteenth century) became a prime commodity of trade for the East India Company. In the five years following 1768, the East India Company’s tea shipments tripled.41 By mid-nineteenth century per capita tea consumption in Great Britain reached two pounds per annum.
The British Treasury aimed at maximizing proceeds from India. The British Parliament imposed taxes even on animal manure, which was used by farmers as fertilizer. The existing agricultural production patterns were quickly transformed into export crops (primarily cotton ) and some railways were built in order to carry the products to the ports.
This change in agricultural patterns brought a far worse outcome to the Indian continent. As exports of the cash crops and grain continued, famines killed millions locally.42 Over 60 million deaths were caused by famines followed by infectious diseases (such as bubonic plague and influenza), whose spread was helped by the railway infrastructure.43 All this led to a significant slowdown of the population growth.44 This was in addition to massacres—especially following rebellions to British rule such as the Great Mutiny in 1857. Well-known famines in the continent started with the Bengal Famine in 1870, in which one-third of Bengal’s population died.45 Other major famines occurred in 1783–1784 (the Chalisa Famine), 1791–1792 (Doji Bara Famine), 1860–1861 (Upper Doab Famine), 1866 (Orissa Famine), 1869 (Rajputana Famine), 1868–1870 (“Central Indian Famine”), 1876–1878 (the Great Famine), 1896–1902, and 1943–1944.46
Britain’s role in famines in India lasted until the end of its rule. During the Second World War, Prime Minister Winston Churchill caused a major famine, leading to 5–7 million deaths (under different estimations) in what was later to be called the Bengali Famine or Holocaust.47 Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s research showed clearly that this was a man-made famine caused by the British government’s policy. Churchill later defended the decision; the food materials that were carried from India to Britain were strategic to the latter, although it caused so many deaths in India. He is quoted to have said that the Indians were a “foul race protected by their mere pullulation [rapid breeding] from the doom that is their due.”48
Manufacturing ‘Good’ Indians
It is scarcely possible to calculate the benefits which we might derive from the diffusion of European civilisation among the vast population of the East. It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well-governed and independent of us, than ill-governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it a useless and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves.49
The whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing? I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. … I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.
It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England . In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.
Whoever knows [the English] language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said, that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all. In India , English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia; communities which are every year becoming more important, and more closely connected with our Indian empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.50
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.51
In short, British rule was devastating to the Indian continent. India lost much of its economy, its lives in millions, and its dignity under the British rule.
3.5 The Story of Cotton: Slaves, India, and British Industrial Revolution
Without cotton, you have no modern industry…Without slavery, you have no cotton. (Karl Marx)
For North and South America and India , whose fates were closely linked to British colonial expansion and the Industrial Revolution, cotton became one of the most important commodities as the Industrial Revolution proceeded.52 It may not be an exaggeration to say that cotton played a similar, albeit smaller, role to oil in the twentieth century in the shaping of commercial and political geography.
Consumption of cotton textiles in Europe has been a relatively recent phenomenon. In the Iberian Peninsula, in addition to the development of a high civilization, Muslim conquest in the eighth century led to what could be called the first versions of the concept of fashion and both the production and usage of cotton textiles . But it had not spread further into Europe53 except for some penetration into Italy.
Unlike wool, cotton could not be produced in Britain for climatic reasons. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, British textile production was mostly based on wool and, to some extent, on linen. In pre-industrialized Britain , manufacturing of cotton textiles was miniscule, while consumption of cotton textiles was considered somewhat of a luxury, although its price could be lower than certain woollen and linen products. In the sixteenth century cotton textiles imported from India started to make inroads into the British market. The East India Company lobbied for permission to import ‘Calicoes’ (dyed or printed cotton fabrics that could be used for clothing and home textiles ). The name came from the Indian city of Calicut. The Company allegedly contributed £325,000 to the crown to assist the decision process between 1660 and 1683.
Massive cotton agriculture was introduced in the late eighteenth century first in the West Indies and then North America. That led to a second wave of slave importation to the land-rich and labour-scarce country. In the nineteenth century, from being a country which would have become a major importer (by the East India Company) of cotton fabrics from India, Great Britain had turned itself into the largest manufacturer and exporter of cotton fabrics globally following the Industrial Revolution. In the process, the USA became the main exporter of raw cotton to Great Britain.
Banning Imports of Efficient Indian Cotton Textiles
The consumption of cotton textiles in the island grew slowly but surely. Resistance to cotton also mounted. On the one side was the objection of the ‘moralists,’ who advocated that imports from India would corrupt the moral values of English society. But more importantly, there was increasing pressure on British lawmakers from wool, linen, and silk fabric manufacturers, who were against the imports of Calicoes; cotton stole from their market share. The ‘pamphleteers’ argued that there was no way the British textile manufacturers could compete with the Indian textiles. That gave way to the ‘Calico Laws’ in 1702, which prohibited imports of Indian textiles into Britain .
As the first law was inadequate in stopping the inflow of Calicoes, a second act was passed in 1721. Calicoes were not the only textile product banned in Britain ; imports of French silk products had been banned earlier, in 1688. Nor was Britain alone in the protection of the local textile industry; the French had banned Calico imports earlier in 1686 just after the death of Colbert .
The opposition against cotton was fierce. Women were attacked, had acid thrown on their clothes, or they were stripped naked as they wore the ‘forbidden cloth.’54 However, the British view (of consumers, important businessmen, and the government) of cotton and cotton textiles changed drastically in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Turning Britain into a Cotton Textiles Manufacturer
Nevertheless, the demand of the population for the consumption of cotton textiles grew rapidly55 given the advantages of cotton over wool, silk, and linen. A large pent-up demand occurred, leading to booming sales and cotton textiles became a fad for quite a while. Physical characteristics of cotton also played a role; though wool was more durable, cotton fabrics could carry a wide set of fashionable and exotic colours (unlike linen) and could be washed easier and many times more before the colours faded away.56
More importantly, a series of technological advances by British inventors and textile manufacturers made Britain the possessor of the most efficient cotton textile production technology . British authorities tried to guard the technology jealously by prohibiting the workers, masters, and industrialists of the sector to leave the country.
By the new proprietary textile technologies and increasing demand for cotton, Britain achieved something that even Edward III would have envied. Instead of importing cotton fabrics from India (which was banned anyway), it would import raw cotton from India and elsewhere and manufacture and export dyed cotton fabrics and apparel. This expansion of the cotton textile industry played a key role in Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Soon, in the nineteenth century, Britain became the largest procurer of cotton and producer of cotton textiles in the world.
USA Becomes the Source of Raw Cotton
Earlier, the smaller British cotton industry largely depended on imported Ottoman cotton dispatched from the Aegean ports of Thessaloniki and Izmir. In the 50 years between 1784 and 1834, Britain’s cotton imports increased eight times from £1.8 million to £14.5 million.57 Rapidly growing demand soon required much bigger quantities of cotton than the Ottoman Empire could meet due to shortages of suitable agricultural land as well as labour even after the emigration of thousands of Greek labourers to Anatolia .58 This gave way to a severe quest for raw cotton imports by British industry.
The first respondents were the West Indies, where production and shipment to Britain exploded in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Soon, however, the inelastic supply was evident when imports from Portuguese South American suppliers took over and met the excess demand.59 Together, the two shortly became the main cotton suppliers to the growing British textile industry. The share of Ottoman cotton in British imports reduced to around 1% in 1810 from 20% in 1790.60
Shortly thereafter, the USA, which gained its independence in 1776, overtook South America and West Indies as the main exporter of cotton to Britain . Although there had been some colonial cotton production since the foundation of Jamestown, its amount was very small (much the same as was the situation for sugar production) and it was used for domestic textile production until the late eighteenth century61 and no exports of cotton existed. That was why, in 1785, customs officials in Liverpool impounded a few bags of cotton that was unloaded from a ship from England’s American colonies (at the time, already United States of America). To the customs officials, those bags were contraband West Indies products, as North America was believed to be unable to produce cotton.62
Those years were the outset of a major breakthrough for American agriculture. Founding fathers such as George Washington and James Madison as well as some businessmen were trying to attract the attention of American farmers to cotton, predicting that cotton production could help America prosper.63 Another founding father, Alexander Hamilton , crusading for ‘manufactures’ advocated that America’s future was not in agriculture but in the manufacturing industry.
Production of raw cotton in the USA (thousand bales)
Cotton becomes the main export item of USA. (Source: North 1961)
Cotton: The Critical Commodity
“No industry,” Eric Hobsbawm writes, “could compare in importance with cotton in the first phase of British industrialization.”
The British were rightfully alarmed about their precarious dependency. Blackwood’s Magazine in 1853 bemoaned the fate of “millions in every manufacturing country in Europe within the power of an oligarchy of planters.”
British cotton textile innovations around the 1760s—by Kay, Arkwright, Hargreave, and others— and the reorganization of textile production around ‘factories’ made the island an efficient cotton textiles manufacturer. Consequently, the textile industry, exports, investments, and employment started to grow. The Calico Laws, which had been enacted to protect the local wool industry, were repealed in 1774. By then, the British, but more importantly the French and the Dutch , had also learned the technology of dyeing the cotton textiles , shaking the Indian (and Turkish) monopoly in the art through imitation and innovation .
There can be no doubt that it would be most harmful to the State were we to neglect our own production of light silken and woollen materials in favour of Persian and Indian cottons. It can, however, only be a good thing to know how these people set about applying the colours to their cotton cloths, which not only do not run or fade when washed but emerge more beautiful than before. Everyone can see for himself how useful this would be when he envisages what the possibilities could be for our cotton, linen and hemp cloth.
Cotton and Slavery
The deck of a slave ship. (Source: Ludlow 1918: 139)
The men on a slaver were ironed in pairs by the ankles, and men and women were compelled to lie down in their backs on the deck with their feet outward, the iron on men usually fastened to the deck. The space ‘between decks’ where they were confined was about 3 feet 10 inches high, and packed so close that a space of only 6 feet long and 10 inches high was allotted to each slave. In these quarters they remained while the human cargo was being collected (3–6 months) and during the passage across the Atlantic (6–10 weeks). In a tropical climate and under these conditions the mortality was frightful.70
3.6 Free Trade Agreements, Free Trade of Opium, and the Collapse of China
China was the next bountiful target of the British expansion after India ; the weakened Chinese Empire’s population at the time was more than 17 times that of Great Britain . At the end of the process, the Chinese political system and economy collapsed, and China became a state under chaos, controlled by Britain and other great forces of the time.
During its relatively peaceful eighteenth century, the Chinese economy flourished. The Chinese population reached 300 million at the end of the eighteenth century71 from 150 million when the Qing dynasty took over in 1650. However, as population growth continued rapidly, reaching 430 million by mid-nineteenth century, the possibilities of the expansion of agricultural land was exhausted. The nineteenth century, consequently, was long and painful for China, marked by famines and rebellions. More importantly, the Middle Kingdom administratively weakened. That made China an easy target for British control.
Britain Extends Beyond India
At the beginning of the nineteenth century , Great Britain completed the incorporation of India as the jewel in its crown. But by the same time, it had lost its North American colonies and China appeared as another major market to expand to. India was located on the way to China. However, Britain had only one trading post on the sea routes from India to China, which was Bencoolen. In order to secure the route to China, British forces in India secured three trading posts in the Malay Archipelago, where the trade was dominated by the Dutch .
Earlier in 1786, the establishment of a British station in Penang was negotiated with the Sultan of Kedah. It would serve as a stopover for ships sailing from India to China. In fact, back in 1592, James Lancaster used Penang as a centre for his looting activities in the region for a few months.72
In 1795, Malacca was taken from the Dutch . Realizing that the Dutch domination in the Archipelago could not be broken without a strong trading post in the south, in 1819 Sir Stamford Raffles, who was the British Lieutenant-Governor in Bencoolen, picked out Singapore. The same year, he negotiated with the local rulers who were still under Dutch domination to set up a trading post on the island against payments to the rulers. That formed a formidable basis for the British takeover of the Archipelago’s control and secured the route from India to China.
China and Britain
Trade between Western European countries and China started in 1684 when Emperor Kangxi abolished the earlier ban. However, under the ‘Canton System’ foreign merchants were allowed to use only four ports—including Canton (Guangzhou), a town located in South China, about 2000 kilometres from Beijing—and transactions in those ports were heavily regulated by the Chinese.
The British had been trying to trade with the Chinese Empire since the late sixteenth century, generally with failure. After the British East India Company had started to trade with China in 1684 (after securing a trading post in what is today Taiwan in 1672), two things became clear. Firstly, the Chinese found British goods inferior73 and not interesting, while the British consumers’ demand for Chinese goods (porcelains, silk textiles , and tea ) grew. That is, Britain ran a trade deficit with China.
Secondly, their trading activity was under strict regulation and supervision by the powerful Chinese administration. The British were allowed to trade only through Canton. What, when, and where in Canton the hongs (foreign merchants) could buy, sell, and reside was closely monitored. The Chinese did not see significant benefit from trade with the British and were concerned that “the foreign traders, who were not always engaged in peaceful trading activities, would threaten domestic stability by inciting unrest, disorder, and promoting piracy.”74
The British found this quite restrictive but could not resist it as long as the Chinese Empire was powerful. That is, until the first half of the nineteenth century. In response to a request for trade privileges by Lord Macartney, the representative of British King George III, Emperor Chiang Lung wrote him in 1793 refusing to remove the restrictions and grant permanent residence rights to British merchants in Beijing and elsewhere.75
As to your entreaty to send one of your nationals to be accredited to my Celestial Court and to be in control of your country’s trade with China, this request is contrary to all usage of my dynasty and cannot possibly be entertained. It is true that Europeans, in the service of the dynasty, have been permitted to live at Peking, but they are compelled to adopt Chinese dress, they are strictly confined to their own precincts and are never permitted to return home. You are presumably familiar with our dynastic regulations. Your proposed Envoy to my Court could not be placed in a position similar to that of European officials in Peking who are forbidden to leave China, nor could he, on the other hand, be allowed liberty of movement and the privilege of corresponding with his own country; so that you would gain nothing by his residence in our midst.
Moreover, our Celestial dynasty possesses vast territories, and tribute missions from the dependencies are provided for by the Department for Tributary States, which ministers to their wants and exercises strict control over their movements. It would be quite impossible to leave them to their own devices. Supposing that your Envoy should come to our Court, his language and national dress differ from that of our people, and there would be no place in which to bestow him. It may be suggested that he might imitate the Europeans permanently resident in Peking and adopt the dress and customs of China, but, it has never been our dynasty’s wish to force people to do things unseemly and inconvenient. …
The thing is utterly impracticable. How can our dynasty alter its whole procedure and system of etiquette, established for more than a century, in order to meet your individual views? …
If you assert that your reverence for Our Celestial dynasty fills you with a desire to acquire our civilisation, our ceremonies and code of laws differ so completely from your own that, even if your Envoy were able to acquire the rudiments of our civilisation, you could not possibly transplant our manners and customs to your alien soil. Therefore, however adept the Envoy might become, nothing would be gained thereby.
Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfil the duties of the State: strange and costly objects do not interest me. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.
Yesterday your Ambassador petitioned my Ministers to memorialise me regarding your trade with China, but his proposal is not consistent with our dynastic usage and cannot be entertained. Hitherto, all European nations, including your own country’s barbarian merchants, have carried on their trade with our Celestial Empire at Canton. Such has been the procedure for many years, although our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce. But as the tea , silk and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces, are absolute necessities to European nations and to yourselves, we have permitted, as a signal mark of favour, that foreign hongs [merchants] should be established at Canton, so that your wants might be supplied and your country thus participate in our beneficence.
Nevertheless, I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea, nor do I overlook your excusable ignorance of the usages of our Celestial Empire. I have consequently commanded my Ministers to enlighten your Ambassador on the subject, and have ordered the departure of the mission. But I have doubts that, after your Envoy’s return he may fail to acquaint you with my view in detail or that he may be lacking in lucidity, so that I shall now proceed … to issue my mandate on each question separately. In this way you will, I trust, comprehend my meaning….
Your request for a small island near Chusan, where your merchants may reside and goods be warehoused, arises from your desire to develop trade. As there are neither foreign hongs nor interpreters in or near Chusan, where none of your ships have ever called, such an island would be utterly useless for your purposes. Every inch of the territory of our Empire is marked on the map and the strictest vigilance is exercised over it all: even tiny islets and far lying sandbanks are clearly defined as part of the provinces to which they belong. Consider, moreover, that England is not the only barbarian land which wishes to establish … trade with our Empire: supposing that other nations were all to imitate your evil example and beseech me to present them each and all with a site for trading purposes, how could I possibly comply? This also is a flagrant infringement of the usage of my Empire and cannot possibly be entertained. …
The next request, for a small site in the vicinity of Canton city, where your barbarian merchants may lodge or, alternatively, that there be no longer any restrictions over their movements at Aomen, has arisen from the following causes. Hitherto, the barbarian merchants of Europe have had a definite locality assigned to them at Aomen for residence and trade, and have been forbidden to encroach an inch beyond the limits assigned to that locality…. If these restrictions were withdrawn, friction would inevitably occur between the Chinese and your barbarian subjects, and the results would militate against the benevolent regard that I feel towards you. From every point of view, therefore, it is best that the regulations now in force should continue unchanged….
…
Regarding your nation’s worship of the Lord of Heaven, it is the same religion as that of other European nations. Ever since the beginning of history, sage Emperors and wise rulers have bestowed on China a moral system and inculcated a code, which from time immemorial has been religiously observed by the myriads of my subjects. There has been no hankering after heterodox doctrines. Even the European (missionary) officials in my capital are forbidden to hold intercourse with Chinese subjects; they are restricted within the limits of their appointed residences, and may not go about propagating their religion. The distinction between Chinese and barbarian is most strict, and your Ambassador’s request that barbarians shall be given full liberty to disseminate their religion is utterly unreasonable. …
It may be, O King, that the above proposals have been wantonly made by your Ambassador on his own responsibility, or peradventure you yourself are ignorant of our dynastic regulations and had no intention of transgressing them when you expressed these wild ideas and hopes…. If, after the receipt of this explicit decree, you lightly give ear to the representations of your subordinates and allow your barbarian merchants to proceed to Chêkiang and Tientsin, with the object of landing and trading there, the ordinances of my Celestial Empire are strict in the extreme, and the local officials, both civil and military, are bound reverently to obey the law of the land. Should your vessels touch the shore, your merchants will assuredly never be permitted to land or to reside there, but will be subject to instant expulsion. In that event your barbarian merchants will have had a long journey for nothing.
Britain thus could not penetrate and expand its trade with China, against which it was running a trade deficit. Tea imports alone reached 7000 tons per annum by the end of the eighteenth century. That was why the British exchequer did not care about free trade and imposed a duty of 100% on tea imports.
A solution to Britain’s trade deficit problem with China was soon suggested; the East India Company would plant and sell increasing amounts of opium to China. In fact, seeing the increasing drug addiction, Chinese administrators had earlier outlawed the imports of opium. Sale of opium was forbidden by Emperor Yung-cheng in 1729 and Emperor Chia-ch’ing outlawed opium importation and cultivation in 1776. However, smuggling (by the Portuguese) and illicit sales continued to grow after the early eighteenth century. The East India Company took over the trade by the end of the century and dominated the market with its cheaply produced opium in Bengal under a newly developed method. According to some estimates, smuggling grew by 200 times between 1729 and 1838, only to double again between 1839 and 1884.77
Noticing increasing opium smuggling and illicit consumption, the Chinese administration reacted by strengthening border controls. Chinese Commissioners sent letters to Queen Victoria to stop her ‘bad merchants’ poisoning the Chinese. The letter went unnoticed; Britain wanted ‘free trade’ and argued that the Chinese administration had to stop closing the country to international trade.
A small incident of the Chinese customs officials’ decision to destroy a party of opium became the much-sought casus belli for Britain to declare war against the Chinese Empire in 1839. The First Opium War lasted three years and ended with the clear victory of Britain, which devastated the Chinese army and cities.
Defeated, the Chinese had to sign the Nanking Treaty, which they later named the ‘unequal treaty.’ Under the treaty, Hong Kong was ceded to Britain and additional war reparations were paid by the Chinese. The Chinese also had to verify the ‘free trade’ rights of British opium exports. The First Opium War later was considered by the Chinese as the beginning of the ‘century of humiliation.’
In 1856, the Second Opium War came after a new (and again minor) casus belli; the Chinese had pulled down the British flag and arrested the crew of an alleged pirate ship and did not release the crew upon the protest of the British Consul. The British side still referred to the free trade argument; the Chinese side, by trying to impede Britain’s opium exports, was rebutting the sacred concept of free trade and preventing the British trade balance with China to be positive.
The second war proved a major physical and psychological destruction for the Chinese, as the French and American navy joined the British. Cities were bombarded and emblems of the Chinese Empire and its dignity burned down. The ultimate treaties with Britain, France , the USA, and Russia legalized the exports of opium to China, enlarged the powers and control of foreign merchants in China, and seceded Chinese land to them.
Does Macaulay [UK Secretary for War] know that the opium smuggled into China comes exclusively from British ports, that is, from Bengal and through Bombay? That we require no preventive services to put down this illegal traffic? We have only to stop the sailing of the smuggling vessels…it is a matter of certainty that if we stopped the exportation of opium from Bengal and broke up the depot at Lintin [near Guangzhou] and checked the cultivation of it in Malwa and put a moral stigma on it, we should greatly cripple if not extinguish trade in it. [The Chinese government] gave you notice to abandon your contraband trade. When they found you would not do so they had the right to drive you from their coasts on account of your obstinacy in persisting with this infamous and atrocious traffic.…justice, in my opinion, is with [the Chinese]; and whilst they, the Pagans, the semi-civilized barbarians have it on their side, we, the enlightened and civilized Christians, are pursuing objects at variance both with justice and with religion…a war more unjust in its origin, a war calculated in its progress to cover this country with a permanent disgrace, I do not know and have not read of. Now, under the auspices of the noble Lord Macaulay, that flag is become a pirate flag, to protect an infamous traffic.78
China could regain sovereign control of its land and people only by the mid-twentieth century. The Communist Party is still in power today. The country remained isolated from the external world until 1978 when the liberalization process introduced a dual economy, one communist and another capitalist. By that it soon regained the ‘workshop of the world’ title from Britain. By 2015, China became officially the second largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. In fact, had the PPP calculations been correct, it could have been considered the largest economy of the world in the same year as it was until the end of the eighteenth century.