fallen below 50 percent and at this date "even the oldest of the industrialized countries were only in the early stages of structural transformation." World trade at this point represented only a very small portion of the economy of most nations and the direction and nature of trade depended on geographic factors. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, India was the world's leading exporter of cotton fabrics. But, under British pressure, India "was gradually transformed from being an exporter of manufactured products into a supplier of primary commodities," who then, in turn, imported consumer goods manufacture in Britain.
This sequence in India provides an excellent example of the manner in which the world trade system developed. The basic change that took place, and constituted this development, was that while "the large scale production of commodities remained confined to a few points on the globe, their circulation became generalised throughout the world." The opportunity for this expanded trade is usually attributed to the development of the railway, the steamship and the telegraph, but the unequal nature of the system is related to other economic and political factors.
The ability to exploit these new opportunities, for example, depended on the prior development of an agricultural revolution. As Lewis points out, it is only when a country is capable of producing the surplus that will be consumed by its industrial sector, and thereby creating a prosperous agricultural sector as a market for the industrial goods, that an industrial revolution can take place. Thus, even though industrialization was relatively easy and not terribly expensive, there were few nations outside Western Europe who were in a position to undertake extensive modernization. The industrial revolutions in the West, therefore, offered two choices to the rest of the world's economies--either imitate the industrialization or tr...