By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, the Americas had been invaded, slavery had been introduced on an industrial scale and the eradication of the native populations was well underway. Africa was being denuded of its young people and the process of impoverishing India had started. The balance of the world’s power and wealth had shifted and reversed. The wealth of China, India and the rest of Asia would be radically diminished, all on a historically unprecedented scale.

The Protestant Reformation and the subsequent religious wars had secular consequences far beyond the improvement of weapons, which is dealt with in future blogs. The early invaders, from the 1490s, were from Catholic Spain and Portugal. The second phase of invasions carried out by the English, French and Dutch began as trading but soon turned into colonial invasions from the early 1600s.

Before 1453, which was when the Ottomans captured Constantinople, the major route of world trade had been from Asia westwards through to the Middle East and Europe. This dynamic of trade had arisen from the east and Europe at the time was a relative backwater compared to the continents of India or China.

Around the year 1500, China, India, Indonesia, and Japan were among the richest parts of the world. Asian development had been on the move for several thousand years; the peoples and societies of Asia had been more “developed” in terms of technology, production, and governance than almost any other part of the globe that we now know in some detail.