The three largest economies in Asia had very different experiences in the world economy from 1850 to 1945. India, an imperial subject of Britain throughout this period, was forced to abandon the production of textiles and most other goods when Britain elected to manufacture these goods and export them instead to its continent-sized colony. As a result, India became primarily an exporter of primary products and made only minimal progress toward industrialization. China, though it was no one's colony, was beset by weak governments and periods of extreme political instability. But China suffered a much worse fate than India's because it was subject to the demands of powerful, competing industrialized nations seeking raw materials and markets for their manufactured goods. Japan, however, became one of the industrialized nations and, in addition to exerting immense influence over China's economy, became a world industrial power. All three nations were major traders with the industrialized nations of the West and traded heavily among themselves. When compared with each other the differing performances of the three nations in the emergent global economy, demonstrate how the world system developed as a system of relationships between the newly industrialized world and the less-developed, primarily agricultural, nations that relied on the export of raw materials and food.
Japan's development demonstrates the fact that any country that could create the proper circumstances could industrialize. China and India, however, offer different scenarios in which development was deliberately stunted by outsiders in order to avoid competition, create markets, and maintain access to materials. Thus the performance of these nations in the world economy in the period 1850-1945 depended largely on the industrialized nations--either imitating them or being exploited by them.
In 1850 Britain was the only nation whose agricultural population had...