For much of its history, Europe lagged behind older and more sophisticated civilizations in China and the Middle East. There was little reason to predict that the West would one day achieve world dominance. And yet by 1800 Europe had broken ahead of the other regions of the world in terms of wealth and power, a process historians have termed “the Great Divergence.”13

One important prerequisite for the rise of Europe was its growing control over world trade, first in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Acquisition of New World colonies — itself the accidental result of explorers seeking direct access to the rich Afroeurasian trade world — brought Europeans new sources of wealth and raw materials as well as guaranteed markets for their finished goods. A second crucial factor in the rise of Europe was the Industrial Revolution, which dramatically increased the pace of production and distribution while reducing their cost, thereby allowing Europeans to control other countries first economically and then politically. Britain dominated this process at first, but was soon followed by other European nations. By the middle of the nineteenth century the gap between Western industrial production and standards of living and those of the non-West had grown dramatically, bringing with it the economic dependence of non-Western nations, meager wages for their largely impoverished populations, and increasingly aggressive Western imperial ambitions (see Chapter 25). In the late nineteenth century non-Western countries began to experience their own processes of industrialization. Today’s world is witnessing a surge in productivity in China, India, and other non-Western nations, with uncertain consequences for the global balance of power.